ADRIAEN HANNEMAN | Double portrait of a man and a woman, called Van Bueren

Anonymous sale, Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 22–24 March 1983, lot 623, where acquired by the father of the present owners. 

By 1662 Hanneman was well established as a portrait painter in The Hague, where he had been introduced to Court circles by Constantijn Huygens. During his sixteen year sojourn in England from 1623, he thoroughly absorbed the portrait style of Anthony van Dyck, and remained for the rest of his life the most Van Dyckian Dutch portraitist, although he also absorbed the formal style of Honthorst and Mytens. Because of this, and perhaps due to his Catholic faith, he remained in favour with visiting and exiled members of the English aristocracy: his portrait of Henry, Duke of Gloucester, now in the National Gallery, Washington (inv. no. 1937.1.51),¹ for example, is a tour-de-force. The apogee of his career fell in the decade between 1653 and 1663 – thereafter his career slowly waned. The present picture is probably not a Court portrait, but a depiction of a wealthy merchant couple. 1 A.K. Wheelock, Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, pp. 92–95, cat. no. 1937.1.51, reproduced in colour.