Portrait of an old woman

An old woman, dated 1633, is rendered with the unflinching honesty that characterizes Hals's treatment of elderly sitters. Where many portrait painters smoothed away the evidence of age, Hals embraced it, finding in wrinkled skin and weary eyes a depth of character that youth could not offer. 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 aged face is painted with bold, sympathetic strokes that capture every line and hollow without cruelty. Hals treats old age as a subject worthy of his finest technique, the brushwork simultaneously honest about physical decline and respectful of the accumulated experience it represents.