Portrait of Johannes Acronius

Johannes Acronius was 62 when this was painted, and the inscription in the corner gives both his age and the year, 1627. He died that same year. He had come to Haarlem in 1619 to take the pulpit of the great church of St Bavo, arriving straight out of the national quarrel between strict and moderate Calvinists that had just been settled at the Synod of Dort, and he spent his Haarlem years arguing against the Mennonites. The panel is tiny, 19 centimetres by 17, and Hals almost certainly made it as a model for a print. Jan van de Velde engraved it, and that engraving is how the sitter was identified. In 1745 a later owner, the Haarlem printer Johannes Enschedé, wrote out Acronius's life on the back of the oak panel.