The Traveller

By the time Hals set down this small portrait, in the mid-1650s, he was past 70 and his best-paying years were behind him. Haarlem had cooled as a boom town, and before long the city would be paying the old painter a small pension to keep him afloat. You can almost see that speed and economy in the handling. The face is worked up with care, while the collar, the hat and the coat are laid in with quick, open strokes that a younger, tidier painter would have smoothed away. It is barely 35 centimetres tall, closer to a study of a head than a grand commission. Two centuries later that loose, unfinished-looking brush is exactly what painters like Manet came to Haarlem to study.