Boy with a Lute

In the mid-1620s a group of Dutch painters came home from Rome carrying Caravaggio's taste for candlelit taverns, and half-length musicians and drinkers spread through the workshops of Utrecht and Haarlem. Hals joined in with pictures of cheerful young men like this lute player. There is a joke built into it. The boy tips the last drop of red wine onto his thumbnail, an old signal that the glass is empty and it is time for another round. The point is easy to miss now, because a later restorer added a lute string across the thumb that hides the gesture, and even the shirt collar is not the one Hals painted.