René Descartes (1596-1650)

It is the smallest painting in this catalogue and one of the largest subjects: René Descartes, in his fifty-second year, seen at Haarlem in 1647 or 1648 — the philosopher who had moved to the Dutch Republic in 1628, where he wrote the Discourse on the Method and the Meditations. The picture is an oil sketch on oak, most likely a study for the print Jonas Suyderhoef engraved after it, and it is painted the way Hals sketched: the head and the quick, looping moustache built from loaded strokes, the collar and hands summarised, the sitter turning to look out of the frame. The museum’s account notes the panel has had hard treatment — someone scored zigzag lines across it with a sharp point, perhaps in protest at the newness of Descartes’s thinking — and that Hals most likely painted it before the philosopher left Haarlem in 1649 for Queen Christina’s Sweden, where he died in 1650. Frans Hals (c. 1582–1666) was Haarlem’s own painter, the master of the laughing burgher portrait; this is one of the rare occasions the sittings are documented by date and by the sitter’s fame at the moment of sitting. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).