The Minneapolis Institute of Art has acquired two seventeenth-century Dutch portraits, one by Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy and another by Dirck Dircksz. van Santvoort. The two paintings depict the wealthy Amsterdam merchant Frederik Alewijn and his young son. The portraits enter the collection together, reunited after nearly 140 years apart.

Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy was the city’s preeminent society portraitist, succeeding his teacher as Amsterdam’s leading painter of civic guards, guild regents, and wealthy citizens. His portrait of Frederik Alewijn, a wealthy merchant and alderman, presents the sitter in sumptuous black, his confident pose and the dazzling, light-catching rendering of starched lace displaying a technical brilliance that remains vivid for viewers today. Santvoort, the leading painter of children in Amsterdam during his brief career, portrays Frederik’s son Dirck at about age two, in an immaculate white silk dress with a gold rattle and a pink ostrich-feather cap, beside an obedient deerhound that signals the Dutch ideal of discipline.

Both works remained with descendants of the family until they were split apart in 1885 with the sale of the Alewijn collection. Newly reunited, they tell a far richer story together—of both art history and seventeenth-century Dutch social history—and meaningfully elevate Mia’s holdings of Dutch portraiture.