Portrait of a Man

Frans Hals, foremost painter in the city of Haarlem, was one of the most original and penetrating portraitists of the 17th century. This work, painted when the artist was in his eighties, is striking for the freedom of its vigorous brushwork. At the time, an admirer described Hals’s late portraits as “very rough and bold, nimbly touched and well‑ordered. They are pleasing and ingenious and, seen from afar, they seem alive and appear to lack nothing.” The sitter wears a Japonse rok (Japanese housecoat), a fashionable article of clothing that Dutch merchants initially received as gifts from the Japanese shogun and later manufactured domestically to meet a growing demand.