The Smoker, or Three Heads

Frans Hals painted The Smoker, or Three Heads around 1626, a multi-figure tronie depicting heads in close proximity, one of them engaged in smoking — a recent introduction to Dutch social life from the Americas that was both fashionable and controversial in this period. Smoking subjects were a genre of Dutch painting that combined the pleasures of genre observation with the mild moralizing of vanitas association: the smoke as a metaphor for the transience of earthly pleasures was a well-established symbolic trope. Hals's treatment is characteristically direct, the three faces individually characterized and rendered with the confident, rapid brushwork of his mature style.

The central figure's smoke-wreathed face is rendered with broad, rapid brushstrokes that capture the momentary quality of the scene, with the warm, reddish palette creating an intimate tavern atmosphere.