Der heilige Markus

In 1625 Frans Hals was the portrait painter of Haarlem, famous for catching local burghers mid-laugh with a loose, rapid brush. This is something calmer: Saint Mark as a grey old man leaning on the books of his gospel, the head of his lion just visible at his elbow. It belonged to a set of four Evangelists that then dropped out of sight for centuries. By the time this one resurfaced it had a collar painted over the beard and hung under the name of the Italian painter Luca Giordano. Only in the 1970s did the scholar Claus Grimm recognise the hand of Hals beneath the overpaint. It reached the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 2013, a gift from the collector Alisher Usmanov.