Laughing Cavalier

Frans Hals painted this young man in 1624 in Haarlem, and the famous name is almost entirely wrong. He is not laughing, only wearing a faint upturned smile lifted by that magnificent moustache, and he is no cavalier either, since cavaliers were soldiers on horseback, not a wealthy man posing in an embroidered doublet. The title was pinned on much later, by the Victorian public when the picture arrived in London in the 1870s. What is real is up in the corner, where an inscription records that the sitter was 26 in the year 1624. His identity was never written down and remains unknown. Look at the sleeve. The bees, arrows and flaming knots stitched into it are emblems of love and its pains, which has led many to guess this was painted for a betrothal.