Sara Andriesdr is depicted on this canvas. (lit. daughter of Andries) Hessix, wife of Michiel Jansz. van Middelhoven, a pastor from the city of Voorschoten, near Leiden, who also sat for Frans Hals for a painting whose current location is unknown. Both works were part of a pair and are thought to have been produced to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his wedding in 1586.

This composition came to be used as a formula for similar portraits executed later on, as it was the painter’s first representation of a natural-sized female figure in sitting position. The work relates to a phase in which Frans Hals’ style still reveals a rigorous attention to the drawing, something the painter later abandoned when he adopted a more spontaneous brush style. The composition is redolent of the finest Dutch genre painting and suggests the austerity that characterises the bourgeois portraits of that period.