Portrait of a Woman holding a Fan

Portrait of a Woman Holding a Fan, painted around 1670, belongs to the final productive decade of ter Borch's career and reflects his fully mature approach to female portraiture. The fan — an expensive fashion accessory introduced into European upper-class circles from Asian trade routes — had become a standard accessory in Dutch portraits of prosperous women by the mid-seventeenth century, serving simultaneously as a marker of wealth, a prop for the hands, and a vehicle for the display of the artist's ability to render delicate, complex objects with precision. Ter Borch's female portraits of this period consistently deploy the fan as both a compositional device and a social signifier, anchoring the lower half of the composition while the face claims the upper register's primary attention. The work's current location is unrecorded, suggesting it may be in a private collection or has passed through the art market in recent decades.

Oil on canvas, the fan is rendered with the same layered precision ter Borch applied to satin fabric, capturing its folded structure and any decorated surface through thin, considered brushwork. The woman's dress is built through his characteristic glazing technique, with the fan's lighter tone providing visual counterpoint to the darker costume. Composition is vertically organized, the fan's diagonal creating gentle movement in the lower register.