Portrait of a Man

By 1634 Frans Hals was the portrait painter everyone in Haarlem wanted, the man who could make a sitter look caught mid-breath. This unknown gentleman, whose Latin inscription gives his age as 48, wears the sober black and stiff white ruff of a prosperous Dutch burgher, his face ruddy and his eyes fixed on us. He did not sit alone. Hals painted his wife as a matching companion piece, the two portraits meant to hang side by side for good. They were separated long ago. Her half now lives at the Detroit Institute of Arts, an ocean away, while he ended up here in San Diego.