Portrait of Jean de la Chambre

Jean de la Chambre earned his living by the pen. In 1630s Haarlem he was a calligrapher and the master of a French school, one of the private schools where Dutch children were taught French along with writing and arithmetic. Hals shows him with the quill still raised, turned toward us as if we had interrupted him. The date and his age, 1638 and 33, are written in the upper corner. The panel is tiny, about 20 centimetres tall, and that size has a reason. It was painted as a model for an engraver, Jonas Suyderhoef, whose print of it became the frontispiece of a book of de la Chambre's specimen scripts. His black and white clothes were already a little old-fashioned by 1638, cut in the style of the previous decade.