Garçon au verre et au luth

In the 1620s the young painters of the Dutch Republic had discovered Caravaggio secondhand, through artists in Utrecht who had been to Rome, and Frans Hals in Haarlem caught the fashion for cheerful drinkers and musicians lit up close. This boy grins over a raised glass, a lute balanced against the table. The detail people miss is his thumb. By an old Dutch custom a drinker would tip the last drop of wine onto his thumbnail to show the glass was truly empty, a wordless call for another round. Hals painted it fast, with the loose, visible strokes that were his signature and that many of his contemporaries thought looked unfinished. The mood is a type as much as a person, one of a run of carefree players he turned out in those years.