Ragazza che canta

This small panel has a companion, a boy playing a violin. Frans Hals painted the pair in Haarlem around 1628, both set in a diamond shape and both on musical themes, here a girl singing from the songbook open in her hands. They are little pictures, painted fast, with the loose flicked brushwork Hals was known for, the kind that looks careless up close and pulls into life when you step back. It was long suspected the two children were his own, since a Haarlem neighbour once told an early biographer that all the Hals children were keen on music. The pair were separated for centuries and only reunited when two Dutch museums, the Mauritshuis and the Frans Hals Museum, bought them together at a New York auction.