Portrait of Frans Post

Frans Hals painted this small panel around 1655, in Haarlem, where both he and the sitter lived. The man is Frans Post, and a few years earlier he had done something no trained European painter had done before: he sailed to Dutch Brazil and spent seven years, from 1637 to 1644, painting the landscape, plants and animals of the New World from life. By the time Hals set him down here, that colony was gone. The Dutch had just surrendered their last foothold at Recife, in 1654, so the world Post had recorded now survived mainly in his own canvases. None of that shows directly. Hals gives him an easy, informal pose, one arm over the back of a chair, and catches the face in the quick, open brushwork he was known for. Hals was in his 70s by then, near the end of a long career that would close in real poverty.