Bildnis der Louise Hollandine, Prinzessin von der Pfalz

The portrait of Louise Hollandine, Princess of the Palatinate (1622–1709), painted by Honthorst in 1643 and held in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, depicts the fourth child of Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart — who became a painter herself. Louise Hollandine studied art under Honthorst and later under Gerrit van Honthorst's follower, and her surviving works show genuine competence. This creates an unusual portrait dynamic: a painter painting his own student, who is also a princess. Louise Hollandine eventually converted to Catholicism, like her brother Edward, and became Abbess of Maubuisson in France in 1664, spending the rest of her long life there. In 1643 she was twenty-one and at the height of her activity as an artist. The Alte Pinakothek holding places this among the greatest German collections of seventeenth-century painting.

The portrait of a fellow painter by her teacher creates a subject attuned to visual observation in both directions — Louise Hollandine was herself trained to notice how a portrait is constructed. Honthorst's daylight technique would render her face with his characteristic clarity, but the knowledge that the sitter understood his method might have inflected the handling toward a slightly more searching quality than routine court portraiture.