ABSTRACT
Contemporary artist Titus Kaphar, in a 2017 TED talk, asked audiences to recenter attention by acknowledging and interpreting the presence of Black figures in paintings such as Frans Hals's Family Group in a Landscape, now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. While scholars have taken up the challenge in the works of other early modern Dutch artists, especially Rembrandt, the diverse models in the art of Frans Hals remain unexamined. This paper examines three well-known paintings by Hals that depict a man with a dark complexion, reviews past interpretations of the man as biracial, and explores the likelihood that the model was an actor performing Peeckelhaering and other roles.
