Portrait of a man with his hand on his heart

A man with his hand on his heart, dated 1632 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, makes the sincerity gesture common in Dutch portraiture. The painting's presence in a French museum reflects the extensive collecting of Dutch art by French connoisseurs from the eighteenth century onward. 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.

Hals renders the gesture with natural ease, the hand on the chest painted with his characteristic combination of bold brushwork and convincing anatomy. The face above is modelled with the warm, vivid tones of his early 1630s manner, the white ruff providing brilliant contrast.