Portrait of a man, probably Jan Miense Molenaer

Berlin's catalogue hedges about who this is. The name attached to the picture is Jan Miense Molenaer, a Haarlem painter who would have been about 20 in 1630, when Hals made it, though nobody has proved the identification and the museum keeps the word probably in the title. The setting is not in doubt. Haarlem then held some 40,000 people, roughly twice what it had held a generation earlier, filled out by weavers and linen bleachers who had come north from the Spanish-held provinces, and Hals was the busiest portrait painter in the town. If the sitter really is Molenaer, he was at the start of things. Six years later he married the painter Judith Leyster, and the two of them moved to Amsterdam and worked out of one studio.