Portrait of Jacobus Zaffius

When Frans Hals signed this in 1611, the northern Netherlands were two years into an uneasy truce with Catholic Spain, and Haarlem had already turned Protestant. The old man in the picture belonged to the side that had lost. Jacobus Zaffius was the last Catholic provost and archdeacon of Haarlem's great church of Saint Bavo, by then in Protestant hands, and he was about 77 when he sat for a painter at the very start of his career. This is the earliest dated work we have from Hals, though a few scholars have doubted the attribution on the way the paint is handled. What survives today is only a fragment. A 1630 engraving after it, made by Jan van de Velde, shows the whole picture Hals first painted: Zaffius seated, one hand resting on a skull.