Portrait of Jasper Schade

One of the main works in the National Gallery collections is an impressive portrait of the 22-year-old Jasper Schade, who came from a noble patrician family settled in Utrecht. This is also where he later held a high post of a deputy of the Estates-General. Schade had himself represented by an important portraitist Frans Hals, who was sixty-three at the time. The painter was born in Antwerp, but after the city was occupied by the army of the Spanish Habsburgs, the family decided to move to Haarlem, where Hals worked predominantly as a portraitist. This portrait was designed for the sitter’s newly built summer residence Zandberg, where it was hung above the entrance to a drawing room. In a brilliant manner, Hals captured the confident patrician dressed in the latest French fashion. The brushstrokes are very quick, dynamic, the painter used the technique called alla prima – executed in one layer.