Barbara Claes (died 1663, called “Malle Babbe”)

In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, people with mental illness were often confined against their will in workhouses maintained by the civic authorities. Barbara Claes, the sitter of this portrait, was committed in 1646 to the Haarlem workhouse and remained there until her death in 1663. Frans Hals’s son Pieter was also an inmate in the facility, and the painter may have observed Claes, who was known by the nickname “Malle Babbe” (roughly meaning “Mad Barb”), during his visits there. The picture at The Met is a variation of another depiction of the sitter now in Berlin and was likely painted by a member of Hals's workshop under his supervision. Unlike commissioned portraits, these images would have circulated on the open market as depictions of “types” of people rather than individuals—indeed, Barbara Claes’s full name was only rediscovered in 2013.