Portrait of Jacob Pietersz Olycan (1596-1638)

Haarlem in the 1620s ran on beer. The town had dozens of breweries working its clean water, and the families that owned them largely governed the place. Jacob Olycan was 29 here, already running the Hoefijzer brewery on the Donkere Spaarne, which his parents had handed him after he trained in it. He went on to sit as a magistrate and then as one of Haarlem's burgomasters, and he died in 1638, at 42. The picture was painted to mark a marriage. He married Aletta Hanemans at Zwolle in 1624, and back in Haarlem the following year Hals painted the two of them as a pair, leaning slightly towards each other, one arm bent and the other hanging, in a pose portraitists had been using since the previous century. Her canvas still hangs beside his in The Hague.