Maerten Ruychaver was a gunpowder merchant, and he served five terms as burgomaster of Haarlem between 1602 and 1614. He was Haarlem’s representative on the regional water board for the Rijnland in 1606, and councillor for the province of Holland. In 1570, he married Alid van der Laen, the third child of Anna Boelens and Nicolaes van der Laen, a burgomaster of Haarlem in the 1560s, 70s and 80s. The Rijksmuseum’s Portrait of Maerten Ruychaver (see SK-C-520) is a slightly reduced copy of Van Mierevelt’s 1618 portrait, now in the collection of the Van Loon family in Amsterdam.4 The copyist shows Ruychaver’s right arm and hand instead of the left arm and hand in the original. In the 1618 portrait Ruychaver wears a sash around his waist and petits oies, or ribbons, on the front of his breeches. These costume details have been omitted in the copy. The pendant (shown here) is a copy of Van Mierevelt’s 1616 portrait of Alid van der Laen, now also in the collection of the Van Loon family in Amsterdam.5 It is not known why Van Mierevelt’s portrait of her was executed two years before that of her husband, which was unquestionably conceived as its pendant. As with the Portrait of Maerten Ruychaver, the copyist changed the position of the sitter’s arms; in the original portrait only Alid van der Laen’s right arm and hand are shown. She is also seated in a chair in the original painting. The copyist perhaps chose to show her standing so that she would have the same pose as her husband. Probably for the same reason of unity, the copyist chose to show Maerten Ruychaver’s right arm and hand instead of the left ones, as in Van Mierevelt’s original composition. Dendrochronological examination of the Rijksmuseum companion pieces indicated that they were most probably executed in or after 1653. In addition to the anonymous copyist of the Rijksmuseum portraits of Maerten Ruychaver and Alid van der Laen, Van Mierevelt’s portraits served Jan Miense Molenaer when he painted his Portrait of the Ruychaver van der Laen Family around 1629-30.6 Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 210.