Portrait of Frans Post

Frans Hals's Portrait of Frans Post of around 1655 depicts the Dutch landscape painter who had spent years in Brazil as court painter to Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, documenting the Brazilian landscape and its inhabitants in works that were the first systematic visual documentation of South America by a trained European painter. Post's extraordinary biography — from Haarlem to Brazil and back — gave Hals a subject whose experience of a completely different world was unique among his sitters.

Hals renders his fellow artist with the mutual respect of one painter for another, the face painted with bold, sympathetic strokes. The late date shows Hals's increasingly austere manner, the palette darkened and the brushwork broad, creating a portrait of concentrated psychological presence.