Portrait of Isaak Abrahamsz. Massa

Frans Hals painted Portrait of Isaak Abrahamsz. Massa around 1626, one of several portraits he made of this prosperous Dutch merchant and cartographer who had spent years in Russia as a trade representative. Massa appears in multiple Hals portraits across nearly twenty years — an unusual sustained relationship between portraitist and sitter that gives us an unusually complete record of a single individual's changing appearance across the decades. This portrait shows Massa at the peak of his commercial success, rendered with Hals's confident directness: the face specific, the pose relaxed, the brushwork assured in its ability to suggest the living person within the formal conventions of the bourgeois portrait.

Hals captures Massa's robust personality with energetic brushwork, the broad face and knowing smile rendered with the vivid characterization that distinguishes Hals's most sympathetic portraits.