Les Régentes de l'hospice des vieillards

By 1664 Frans Hals was past 80 and poor. A few years earlier the town of Haarlem had granted him a small pension and some peat for his fire, so when he painted these four regentesses and the housekeeper who ran the old men's almshouse, he knew from close up what an institution like this meant in old age. He worked here almost without finish, in quick grey and black strokes that barely settle into faces and hands, the loosest manner of his long life. The women look out with a plain, tired authority. Hals painted a companion picture of the male regents at the same time, and both still hang in the building they were made for, now the museum that carries his name.