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The painting represents the portrait of Elisabeth Mertens, seated three-quarter length wearing black with a white ruff and cape, and a posthumous portrait of her late husband, the painter Frans Francken the Elder, standing next to her.
The portrait shows Elisabeth Mertens at an advanced age, probably in her eighties, but alert and very much painted from life, accompanied by her husband, the painter Frans Francken the Elder, who had died about fourteen years earlier, in 1616. He was born in 1542, and he married Elisabeth Mertens in 1567. She lived until 1639.
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