Malle Babbe

Barbara Claes was a real woman, an inmate of the Haarlem 'work-house' for the mad and infirm. She was nicknamed Malle Babbe — 'crazy Babbe.' Hals painted her holding a beer stein, laughing, with a small owl perched on her shoulder. Owls in Dutch folklore symbolised madness; every viewer would have read it that way. Hals had a personal reason to visit the workhouse — his own son Pieter was confined there as mentally handicapped. The painting is one of the roughest, freest, most modern-looking of Hals's late works — brush marks visible, colour applied wet on wet. Manet later copied it in Berlin. Now at Gemäldegalerie, Berlin @gemaeldegalerie_smb