Un garçon lisant, probablement Nicolaes Hals

Haarlem in the late 1630s was a city of printers and readers. The Dutch Republic had one of the highest literacy rates in Europe, schoolbooks were cheap, and a child with a book was an ordinary sight rather than a mark of privilege. Hals painted this one at close range, a single figure caught in the middle of doing something, the kind of informal head he made alongside the huge civic-guard portraits that paid the bills. The boy has often been identified, tentatively, as Nicolaes Hals, one of the painter's own sons, born in 1628, who grew up to paint landscapes and genre scenes himself. Nothing in the picture proves it. It hangs in Winterthur, in the collection the Swiss textile merchant Oskar Reinhart left to the public and which opened as a museum in 1951.