The identity of this sitter is unknown, although she is fashionably attired in black satin, lace cap and cuffs, and expensive jewelry. By the middle of the 17th century, a taste for elegance and luxury dominated the portrait market, favored by a bourgeois and increasingly prosperous clientele. Patrons began to prefer portrait painters with a polished style, who could adequately communicate the sitter's wealth to the viewer with large-scale, three-quarter length likenesses, closely focused about the figure. Such an artist was Bartholomeus van der Helst. A native of Haarlem, Van der Helst was the most fashionable Dutch portrait painter of his time, specializing in guild and militia group portraits. Portraits were one of the more expensive specialties of Dutch artists, as these were commissioned; most Dutch paintings were painted for the open market, while portraits of individuals or groups required a special contract.

The unknown sitter for this portrait by Van Ravesteyn (pronunciation) is aristocratic and very wealthy, as indicated by the amount of lace edge on her ruff and the miniature portrait pinned to her dress. Even more than painters of other kinds of subject matter, portraitists were constrained to produce an exact likeness. Adhering to conventional styles and traditional formats, portraitists such as Van Ravesteyn from The Hague ran large studios that employed many assistants. Portrait workshops often became studios of mass production, in which an artist's assistants could execute numerous copies from a master portrait of a prominent citizen. Even the original portrait might contain areas that were finished by others in the workshop. Van Ravesteyn belonged to a large family of artists from The Hague especially favored by the court of the Stadhouder (literally "Citykeeper," the ruler in place of the king). His brothers Anthonis and Arnold were also portrait painters in The Hague during this time. Jan was one of the upper class' most prominent portraitists, learning his trade in Delft under Michiel van Mierevelt. He specialized in displaying his sitters' external signs of rank rather than their inner reflections.