A Civic Guardsman Holding a Berkemeier, known as ‘The Merry Drinker’

Frans Hals, the great portraitist of Haarlem, painted A Civic Guardsman Holding a Berkemeier around 1628–30, early in the series of half-length figures with which he revitalized Dutch portraiture. Known as The Merry Drinker, the picture shows Hals at his most virtuosic, and its loose, energetic brushwork was studied by painters from the Impressionists to the avant-garde as the beginning of modern painting.