Two laughing boys with mug of beer

Hals painted these two grinning boys around 1626 in Haarlem, one of them lifting a large beer mug. Pictures like this were not portraits of particular children but studies of a lively expression, the kind of everyday cheerfulness Dutch buyers of the day liked on their walls. What still catches people is how quickly it seems to have been done, the loose, confident brushstrokes left visible rather than smoothed away, so the laughter feels caught in the moment. The painting hangs in a small almshouse museum in Leerdam, in the Netherlands, and it has had an unlucky recent life. It was stolen in 1988, and again in 2011, and both times recovered. Stolen a third time in 2020, it has not been seen since.