Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man in his Thirties

Several of Frans Hals’s portraits show his sitters leaning slightly backwards like this. It’s an unconventional pose, but one which gives a strong impression of immediacy and informality: the man here seems to have just pushed back his chair and turned towards us.

The sense of spontaneity is enhanced by the way Hals has manipulated our gaze. He didn't want viewers to get lost in the detail of the sitter’s costume, for example: his concern was to suggest rather than define. The billowing ruff is depicted not with polished precision but with a combination of short darts of the brush, with a few delicate touches to evoke its transparency as it rumples up around the sitter’s cheek and chin. The seams, tailoring and textures of the jacket or mantle are evoked with bold, broad strokes of black, white and grey paint. These effects help to trick our eye – we interpret the blurring as movement, and we can almost hear the rustle of the fabric as the sitter turns towards us. But Hals did use detail where it counts. The upward flick of the sitter’s moustache, the four precise white highlights that glisten on his lower lip, and the strands of flattened hair that seem to stick to his forehead – as though he has just taken off his hat – are all crucial touches that help to bring his face to life.

The sitter has not been identified but his age and the year he sat for Hals (1633) are inscribed beneath the artist’s monogram on the right-hand side of the painting. However, the canvas has been cut down slightly on the right edge, and the second digit of the sitter’s age has been lost – we know only that he was in his thirties. It is extremely likely that he was a citizen of Haarlem, where Hals lived and worked for most of his life. Apart from that his identity is not known.

It was once thought that this picture might be a pendant to Portrait of a Middle-Aged Woman with Hands Folded, with the suggestion that the two sitters were a married couple. But there is no concrete evidence for this and uncertainties over the original size of both paintings (the other may also have been cut down slightly) make it impossible to make a convincing argument.