Meagre Company

A company of civic-guard officers gathers in their sashes and broad hats, captured in mid-gesture as if pausing between conversation. Frans Hals began this militia group portrait but left it unfinished, and a second painter, Pieter Codde, completed the figures on the right - a join visible to careful eyes. Nicknamed the Meagre Company and now in the Rijksmuseum, it shows Hals wrestling with the hardest civic genre: how to make a row of paying sitters feel like living men caught in a single animated moment rather than a stiff lineup.