Jester with lute

This is not a portrait of anyone in particular. In Haarlem in the 1620s Frans Hals turned out a run of these lively half-figures, actors and musicians caught grinning, singing, tuning up. The Dutch called them tronies, studies of a type or an expression rather than a named sitter. This man wears a fool's motley of red and yellow and looks up and to the side as if answering someone across a tavern. Hals painted him fast, in the loose open brushwork that was his trademark, so that up close the fingers on the strings dissolve into a few quick strokes. For much of the past century and a half the picture belonged to the Rothschild family, who bought it in 1873 and kept it until 1984.