The last 5 commandeurs of the order of St John in Haarlem

The group portrait of the last five commanders of the Order of Saint John in Haarlem, painted by Cornelis van Haarlem in 1615 and now in the Frans Hals Museum, documents the end of an institution — the Hospitaller order's presence in Haarlem — and commemorates its final officers as witnesses to their own dissolution. The Order of Saint John had operated in the northern Netherlands before the Reformation and the transformation of the Dutch Republic into a predominantly Calvinist state made the continuation of Catholic military-religious institutions progressively untenable. Group portraiture of civic and institutional figures was a well-established Haarlem tradition — Frans Hals would later make the genre his own — and Cornelis contributes to this tradition with a work that combines the commemorative function of group portraiture with the specific pathos of recording an organisation at its end.

Large canvas with the standard Dutch civic group portrait arrangement — sitters distributed across a horizontal composition, each given individual portraiture attention while collectively arranged to suggest group identity and shared membership. Cornelis's figure handling at this relatively late date is more restrained than his dynamic mythological works.