Portrait of a standing man

A standing man, dated 1644, is depicted in the full-length or three-quarter-length format that Hals employed for his most ambitious single-figure portraits. The standing pose conveys confidence and social standing, the sitter occupying space with the assured presence of a man of position. Hals's revolutionary loose brushwork, capturing the immediacy of fleeting expression with a boldness that seemed impossibly spontaneous to his contemporaries, was rediscovered by the Realists and Impressionists in the nineteenth century as an anticipation of their own aims.

The standing format demands a more complex compositional arrangement than Hals's standard bust-length portraits. The figure is planted with convincing weight and presence, the dark costume silhouetted against the background with characteristic economy while the face receives Hals's most careful attention.