Frans Hals clearly had an eye for faces, but he doesn’t seem to have been very interested in turning it on himself. Unlike his great contemporary Rembrandt van Rijn, whose some eighty self-portraits comprise a richly inventive visual memoir extending from his young manhood to the year of his death, Hals is generally credited with just two, one of which survives only in copies. The lost original, probably painted in the 1640s when he was in his mid-sixties, appears to be the single occasion on which he devoted a canvas solely to his own features. The other self-portrait is a small image in a work with ostensibly more ambitious aims in view: Officers and Sergeants of the St. George Civic Guard (1639), the last of the grand civic guard paintings with which Hals had first established his reputation more than two decades earlier. Peering over the shoulder of an ensign in the upper-left-hand corner of the canvas, this Hals is simply one member of the company, his marginal placement and muted coloring affirming his subordination to the whole (see illustration below).
