Young Woman with a Display of Fruit and Vegetables

This is the only surviving picture in which we can be sure Frans Hals worked with another painter. The stall belongs to his Haarlem colleague Claes van Heussen, who signed the canvas and painted the produce: apples and peaches on the table, plums in a tipped basket, grapes in a dish below, a cut melon with a knife stuck in it, pumpkins and a cabbage piled up behind. Hals painted the young woman. She holds a pair of scales at her waist, reaches across the table and turns to catch our eye, as if we had just walked up. The two hands are easy to tell apart. Van Heussen lays his paint on smoothly, while Hals works in quick, open strokes. The canvas is dated 1630 and is on loan from a private collection.