Frans Hals, 'Portrait of Jean de la Chambre at the Age of 33', about 1638

Holding a quill in his right hand, the man in this portrait has turned his head towards us, creating the feeling that we have just interrupted his work. He gives us – the source of the disturbance – a questioning look. His left eye is in the light even though half of his face appears in shadow, emphasising his expectant gaze as he waits for an explanation for the interruption.

The composition is extremely simple, showing the sitter in half-length silhouetted against a plain brown-beige background. His black and white costume – a narrow-sleeved doublet and falling ruff dating from the 1620s and early 1630s – was considered old-fashioned by the time this portrait was painted. Frans Hals has used the sitter’s pose and his characteristic loose brushwork to give the portrait an air of movement and spontaneity.

An inscription in the background next to the sitter’s head informs us that this portrait was painted in 1638 when the sitter was 33 years old. It shows Jean de la Chambre (1605/6–1668), a distinguished calligrapher and master of the French School in Haarlem. We know that he was member of the French Protestant Church, and that he married twice in Haarlem and had five children. His son Jean de la Chambre the Younger succeeded him as master of the French School. When the school was offered for sale after this son’s death in 1686, it was described as new and solidly built, with a schoolroom and dining hall big enough to hold 60 to 70 children, with several rooms for boarders.

Compared to the ambitious large-scale portraits of members of the ruling classes for which Hals is known, this is a relatively unassuming – but nonetheless powerful – work. It was painted as a modello for an engraving executed by the Haarlem printmaker Jonas Suyderhoef. The engraving was used as the frontispiece for a book published by Jean de la Chambre in the same year, which contained six engraved plates of examples of his calligraphy. Suyderhoef’s print gives the title of the book as well as the date 1638 (Various writings, written and engraved on copper, by Jean de la Chambre, lover and devotee of the pen, at Haarlem. 1638) and records that it was engraved after a painting by Hals. The print is one of the few by Hals’s contemporary engravers that does not reverse the painting it copies. In his frontispiece, de la Chambre, proud of his calligraphy, probably wanted to be shown with his pen in his writing hand. Hals made two more portraits of calligraphers that are lost today but known from contemporary engravings – both show the sitter with a quill in their right hand.