Ritratto di donna

Frans Hals is remembered for a loose, flashing brushstroke that looks almost modern, but this portrait shows him in a quieter mood. In the mid-1630s in Haarlem he tried out a smoother, more careful manner, and here every detail is set down with restraint, the stiff white ruff, the black jacket, a little flower embroidery on her cap, fine lace at the wrists. This was the sober uniform of a well-off Dutch townswoman. Up in the corner he inscribed her age and the year: she was 34 in 1634. Her name is lost, but her face is not. She meets you with a faint, skeptical smile and a spark in her dark eyes.