A Cigana

The title is a nineteenth-century invention. When the Louvre catalogued this around 1628 work as La Bohemienne, the gypsy girl, there was no evidence the laughing young woman was Romani at all. She is a tronie, not a portrait, a study Frans Hals painted to show off a face caught mid-expression and a costume worth looking at, the loose red bodice open over a white chemise. Hals worked fast and let it show. The brushwork is rough and quick, the smile half-formed, and X-rays reveal he first sketched a more modest, buttoned-up woman before opening the collar. Centuries later she was still catching people's eye. A 1962 Hals exhibition put her back in front of crowds, and a Dutch songwriter wrote a cheeky hit about her in 1975.