Retrato de um homem

Most portraits by Frans Hals are life size and made for a wall. This one is 20 centimetres tall, painted on a sheet of copper, and belongs to a different trade. In Haarlem in the 1620s a small, tightly finished portrait on copper was often a model for an engraver, who copied it onto a plate so the sitter's likeness could be printed and sold. The unnamed man turns in three-quarter view with a hand on his hip, a pose scaled down from the full-length portraits of those years. A date in the upper right has worn away until only the middle digits are legible, and Wilhelm von Bode read it as 1627 in 1883. Recent technical study of Hals's workshop argues that the ear, the collar and the hand are drawn too uncertainly for the master himself and gives the panel to an assistant. Berlin still catalogues it under his name.