Portrait of a Man in a Slouch Hat

Frans Hals's Portrait of a Man in a Slouch Hat of around 1660, a very late work, depicts an unknown sitter in the soft, broad-brimmed hat that appears in several of his final portraits. The late period's extreme economy of means — the background barely differentiated from the dark costume, the face rendered in broad marks of grey and white — creates a figure of hallucinatory presence from minimal pictorial information. Such late works influenced Manet and the Impressionists who recognized in Hals's final period a prototype for their own approach to portraiture.

Hals's late technique reaches extraordinary expressive power, with the face emerging from deep darkness painted in broad, almost abstract strokes. The hat and costume dissolve into the background, leaving only the illuminated features to convey the sitter's entire personality. This radical reduction anticipates modern painting by two centuries.