Portrait of a man

In March 1938, just after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the Viennese collectors Leon and Antonie Lilienfeld fled to Italy. Eight of their paintings were refused export, and this late portrait by Hals was one of them. It stayed in Vienna with their lawyer, Emmerich Hunna, who in 1941 pawned it at the Dorotheum auction house to keep it safe, while Hitler's art advisers sought to buy it for the museum he planned in Linz. In 1944 it was taken down into the salt mines at Altaussee, out of reach of the bombing, and Allied forces found it there in 1945. Antonie Lilienfeld, by then living in Massachusetts, got it back in 1948 and gave it to the museum in 1966. Nobody knows who the sitter was. He wears his hair long in the French fashion and a silk gown cut in the Japanese manner, a luxury open to Dutch buyers because from 1641 the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan.