Portrait of Pieter van Son, three-quarter-length, in a black doublet and cloak with a white ruff, holding a pair of gloves, his hat on a table beside him; and Portrait of his wife, Johanna Le Maire, three-quarter-length, in a black dress with gold buttons, with a white lace headdress, holding a pair of elaborately embroidered gloves

Pieter van Son of Breda married Johanna, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the rich merchant, Isäac Le Maire, in the Nieuwe Kerk at Amsterdam on 14 June 1622, and it is probable that the present pictures were executed in that year. As du Mortier points out, marriage portraits and wedding gloves tended to be kept together as symbols of the union and have occasionally remained together to this day (as is the case with Elisabeth Wolff's portrait by Mierevelt and her gloves, both preserved in the Six Collection, Amsterdam). The wedding gloves that Johanna Le Maire is depicted holding remained with the present pictures until after 1926, and three months after the public appearance of the portraits, in these Rooms in April 1978, the gloves were purchased on the London market by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (du Mortier, op. cit., illustrated p. 339). They are of white chamois leather, with lobed edges and richly embroided, the patterns worked with threads of many different colours, gold thread and pearls; the motifs symbolise aspects of the marriage contract - clasped hands, on the upper edges (trust), pierced and burning hearts (love) and birds and fruit baskets (fertility).

A copy of the portrait of Johanna le Maire was sold at Bonhams, London, 1 December 1994, lot 239.