Machtelt Bas was a daughter of the city’s influential regent Dirck Jacobsz Bas.6 On 13 July 1632 she married Abraham de Visscher, a merchant dealing mainly in cloth from Cambrai, and one of the directors of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). Both spouses are included in Dirck van Santvoort’s likeness of Dirck Jacobsz Bas and his second family of around 1635,7 which confirms the identity of the woman in this canvas and the man’s in another one in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-589; also fig. a). In addition, an old label on the back of the latter work states the marital status of the couple.8 The two paintings belong to a collection of 23 family portraits bequeathed to the museum in 1823 by Johanna Balguerie-van Rijswijck.9 As happened with other pictures in the group, the sitters’ coats of arms were added in the eighteenth century.10 Both portraits have been assigned to Abraham van den Tempel in the museum’s catalogues since 1880,11 but were in the recent past transferred to Jacob Backer on convincing stylistic grounds by Van den Brink.12 The lighting, the background with the red curtain and the virtuoso imitation of textures in De Visscher’s likeness have distinct parallels in Backer’s monogrammed Portrait of a Man in Kassel.13 They are among the artist’s very last output. The clothing points to a date around 1650,14 and the unfinished state of Bas’s picture, in particular, could be due to Backer’s sudden death in 1651. An old label on the present portrait states that it was completed after Machtelt Bas discovered her husband dead beside her in bed.15 The meaning of that annotation is ambiguous, though, because it is patently obvious that it is a painting in process. The suggestion was raised that only Bas’s face was accomplished in 1667, possibly by Van den Tempel,16 but leaving aside the initial stages of the hands and dress, her physiognomy, too, is not finalized yet, as can be seen from the minimal modelling and the absence of a standard detail like a catchlight in the right eye.17 De Visscher’s portrait, on the other hand, is in a far more advanced state. Van den Brink suggested that a vista of a landscape still had to be added to the background to match the one in Bas’s likeness, which he regarded as completed.18 However, the artist took great care over the subtle lighting around the man’s contours which, like Backer’s aforementioned picture in Kassel, is remarkable in its contribution to the spatial effect, which does indicate that the work is finished. Furthermore, Backer is known to have given pendant pairs different backgrounds.19 The descriptions of both portraits in the museum’s collection catalogues suggest that there was a considerable change in their sizes between 1887 and 1897, and that the painting of Machtelt Bas was even given a different support.20 Since the two works display not a trace of such drastic alterations, the data must have been wrong from the outset. It is also remarkable that they were listed as pendants only in 1880, having been catalogued separately before then. This may have been due to the striking difference in the state of finish and in the size of the sitters, for De Visscher takes up more of the picture space than Bas does. Gerbrand Korevaar, 2023 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements