The painting shows a tastefully dressed young man in a floppy hat with his hand on his hip in a characteristic Hals pose. The dress of the man fits his occupation, that of a Haarlem brewer, but unlike other Haarlem brewers that Hals portrayed, his name is not found in the archives of the local militias. The occasion for which it was painted is unknown, but the painting is probably not a wedding pendant, because Hals was quite consistent with his pendant portraits; positioning the man on the left and the woman on the right. This allowed the light which always shines from the left in his paintings, to shine directly on the woman's face and not the man's. Possibly this portrait was made to decorate a hofje or his brewery, so that people who worked for him or visited the premises could know what the owner Claes Duyst van Voorhout looked like. For the same reason it is also possible that this painting was a pendant to the portrait of a business partner, rather than a wife. For example, the shape, size, period, and position matches that of Portrait of a Young man holding a glove:
The MET lists various sale entries from Lord Egremont's time up to their acquisition date. In his 1989 catalog of the international Frans Hals exhibition, Slive included discussion of an old label on the back which listed the portrayed man as Claes Duyst van Voorhout, brewer in "De Zwaanschel".[1] 20th-century archival research revealed that a Nicolaes Pietersz Duyst van Voorhout indeed was owner of the brewery called the "Swaenshals" (Swan's neck), who testified in Haarlem in 1629 that he was 29 years old, which fits the date for this portrait that was painted about 10 years later.
^Frans Hals, by Seymour Slive as editor, with contributions by Pieter Biesboer, Martin Bijl, Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks, Michael Hoyle, Frances S. Jowell, Koos Levy-van Halm and Liesbeth Abraham, Bianca M. Du Mortier, Irene van Thiel-Stroman, page 280, Prestel-Verlag, Munich & Mercatorfonds, Antwerp, 1989, ISBN3791310321
