Portrait of a man

Hals was in his seventies when he painted this, around 1660, and nearly broke; in his last years the Haarlem authorities granted him a small pension and some peat for his fire. None of that hardship shows here. The unnamed man fills the whole canvas, one hand on his hip, fine white linen spilling from a slashed black sleeve, painted in fast open strokes of black, white and grey that barely resolve up close and then snap into a living person a few steps back. For a long time people wanted the sitter to be the naval hero Michiel de Ruyter, but there is no evidence for it; he was more likely a well-off cloth merchant. That loose late brushwork is exactly what the Impressionists came back to study two centuries later.