This portrait was painted when the Antwerp-born artist Frans Hals was in his seventies. His clients were mainly prosperous burghers from Haarlem, where he worked for most of his career.  

The portrait of this unidentified man is painted with extraordinary directness. Great bursts of white fabric dramatically come through the fashionably slashed sleeves. Hals ingeniously plays with the triangles of white and gray. The glove the man is holding is sketched in with just a few strokes.  This self-confident, abbreviated way of representing forms would be greatly admired in the nineteenth century by artists such as Édouard Manet.