Portrait of Helena van der Schalcke

Gerard ter Borch painted Portrait of Helena van der Schalcke around 1648, depicting a small girl in the costume of Dutch bourgeois respectability with a delicacy and precision that demonstrates his particular skill in depicting children. Ter Borch's early portraits of children are among the finest in the Dutch tradition: the combination of specific child likeness with the dignity appropriate to a commissioned portrait, the small figure given a formal gravity that acknowledges both the child's reality and the family's aspirations for her. His meticulous rendering of the white dress, the child's posture, and the specific quality of her face — specific enough to be a genuine likeness — makes this one of the most charming portraits of childhood in seventeenth-century painting.

The child's silk dress and delicate features are rendered with ter Borch's signature precision, the lustrous fabric painted with subtle gradations of light that create an almost tactile sense of the material.