However, he finished off his best decade with a remarkable little snapshot portrait, a fisher-lad of Katwyk. "De Strandlooper" he has called it; it hangs in Antwerp Museum. He saw the boy running up and down the dunes; he was an odd-looking bit of humanity.
"Sit down just where you are," said Hals, "fold your arms, and don't take your eyes off me." A rough drawing was soon knocked off, just to fix values, and then the master added, "Come along with me now to Haarlem, and half a Carolus guelder for you." Then he fixed the oddest of odd smiles, and the "Beach urchin" remains to prove that the old man, vigorous, had lost very little of his cunning after all.
The last twenty-five years of Hals' life were marked by experiences wholly unlike the circumstances of the preceding decade.
If between 1630-1640 he approached Velazquez and painted dignified magnates and others, with a brush dipped in gold and a palette of luminous colours, in the end of his days he was near Rembrandt with no less characteristic groups and individuals, and his hues are silvery and his shadows impressive.
The Regenten Stuken, the "Five Governors of the St. Elizabeth Almshouse" or Oudemaanenhuis, exposed in the Haarlem Stadhuis in 1641, might, for all the world, be the work of the great Amsterdam master, just as the latter's "Staalmeester's" of 1661 might be his.
The Group in question consists of five most serious and reverent city fathers, seated comfortably at their Board table. Not a bit of worldly conceit, not a decorative adjunct of any kind, adorns the composition, but it is a perfect achievement. The sombre black garments and steeple-crown hats have a lustre of their own, and, standing well out of the greyish-green wall behind, they throw up wonderfully facial expression and manual dexterity. The plain linen collars and well-starched cuffs tone down the ashen-red shadows upon the skin, and the clustering locks of long black hair, tinged with grey, form halos around the wrinkles.
