Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse

Frans Hals was over eighty when he painted this in 1664, near the end of a long career and, by then, poor himself. Two years earlier the Haarlem council had granted him a small pension and some peat for his fire. The five men here are the regents who ran the city's almshouse for old men, with their servant standing behind. Hals paints them fast and rough, the hands barely more than smears, the black coats laid in with a few loaded strokes. That loose handling, which struck many at the time as unfinished, is exactly what nineteenth-century painters would later prize. The picture has a companion beside it, a matching group of the almshouse's regentesses, painted the same year in the same broad, hurried touch.