Портрет Хермана Лангелиуса

Frans Hals was an old man near the end of his life when he painted this, around 1660, and his style had gone spare and severe. The sitter is Herman Langelius, a Calvinist preacher in Amsterdam known for waging war on atheism and loose morals in what was then one of Europe's most tolerant cities. Hals gives him a black coat, a plain white collar and a skullcap, and a finger keeping his place in a book, as if he has looked up in the middle of an argument. There is almost no colour and no flattery. The painter who had once dashed off laughing cavaliers now worked in greys and blacks with a rough, economical touch that some of his contemporaries found too crude. Within a few years both men were dead, Langelius in 1666 and Hals the same year.