Saint Matthieu

Frans Hals is remembered for his lively portraits of prosperous Haarlem citizens, which makes this quiet saint a rarity: one of a set of four Evangelists he painted around 1625. The panels were split up and scattered, and for a long time no one knew where any of them had gone. This one owes its rediscovery to a single sharp eye. In 1958 the art historian Irina Linnik was working through the storerooms of the museum in Odesa when she stopped at two unlabelled half-length old men, looked hard, and recognised the hand of Frans Hals in two long-lost evangelists, Matthew and Luke, that had sat unidentified in the collection for generations.