Explore the Painting of this artwork, Portrait of a Man in a Yellowish-Gray Jacket.
The painting shows a tastefully dressed young man in a floppy hat seated in a chair facing right with his head at an angle looking at the viewer. We don't know the name of the man or the occasion for which it was painted, but the painting is probably a pendant to the portrait of a man in a black jacket, which it matches in shape, size, period, and position of the figures. If so, it was possibly once a pair of portraits of organisation owners, or two men who lived together, because Hals was quite consistent with his pendant wedding 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. In this case however, the portrait on the left is painted in lighter tones than the portrait on the right. Possibly these pendant portraits were made to decorate a building, so that people who worked for them or visited the premises could know what the owners looked like.