Portrait of Gerard Abrahamsz van der Schalcke (1609-67), Haarlem cloth merchant

Ter Borch's portrait of Gerard Abrahamsz van der Schalcke, a Haarlem cloth merchant, from 1644 belongs to his early independent career, painted when he was in his late twenties and beginning to establish his reputation as a portraitist of the Dutch merchant class. Van der Schalcke's cloth trade connected him to the textile economy that was central to Dutch prosperity and in which ter Borch himself had a kind of professional relationship—his greatest technical achievement was the rendering of luxury fabrics, and cloth merchants would have been particularly attentive to the accuracy with which he depicted the materials of their trade. The direct, solid characterization of the sitter and the confident rendering of his dark civic costume demonstrate the mastery of Dutch portrait convention that ter Borch had achieved through his extensive European travels and study.

The portrait combines dignified formality with ter Borch's characteristic psychological acuity. The sitter's costume—presumably featuring fine cloth from his own trade—is rendered with the meticulous attention to textile surfaces that makes ter Borch the supreme painter of fabric in Dutch art.