Portrait of a Young Man with Gloves

This portrait is only about 25 centimetres tall, painted on a wooden panel, and its maker is still disputed. Several scholars over the last century linked it to Willem Buytewech, a Haarlem painter of fashionable young men, and the American Hals expert Seymour Slive, in his 1974 catalogue, put it among the doubtful pictures. It was sold into the van Otterloo collection as a Frans Hals. In 2022 it was published as an early Hals of about 1618 to 1620, and it hung under his name at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and then in the big Hals exhibition of 2023 and 2024 in London and Amsterdam.

The German Hals specialist Claus Grimm disagrees. In his catalogue of Hals and his workshop for the RKD, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, he finds the face, the long flat fingers and the collar too schematic for Hals. Tree-ring analysis by Peter Klein found that the youngest ring in the panel dates from 1624, and allowing time for the wood to dry, that points to a painting made around 1630, several years after Buytewech's death. Grimm lists it as the work of a follower whose name is still unknown, and the panel remains in a private collection.