Oh God.” Scott tried to bury his face in his hands. Tried being important, because Wallace had a pretty firm grip on one of his wrists, so he could only cover his face with the other. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), who is known for the confident, wet-on-wet brushwork pioneered by Hals 300 years earlier, was another ardent fan, stating "it's hard to find anyone who knows more about oil painting than Frans Hals", and reviving in his portraits of men and women a version of the classic "renaissance elbow" pose that we see in The Laughing Cavalier. So he felt like a high schooler at a school dance again, dragging Scott out onto the dancefloor by his wrist and trying to get him to do general gay bar things. Many of our greatest artists not only created work inspired by Hals, but learnt from him by attempting to replicate some of his most ambitious works. Édouard Manet, Antoine Vollon, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, William Merrit Chase and Max Liebermann all made pilgrimages to Haarlem to make painstaking copies of Hals's paintings.

You gotta hear us. We’re, like, the best band ever.” Scott looked pretty damn confident. Wallace remained skeptical. Before practice began, Scott pulled Stephen to the side. Wallace just so happened to be eavesdropping on their conversation. In recent years, the art historian Pieter Biesboer presented substantial evidence that the man in the portrait is Tieleman Roosterman, a wealthy Haarlem merchant. The identity of the sitter was narrowed through the year of birth and the assumption that he resided in Haarlem.I have The Land Before Time on DVD somewhere…” Scott laid his bass on the bed and shuffled around the room until he found the case.

However, this fervour for Frans Hals, who died in relative poverty, has been mostly posthumous. The Laughing Cavalier's popularity is widely attributed to the praise lavished on it in 1868 by renowned critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger, but a dramatic bidding war for The Laughing Cavalier two years earlier saw it fetch more than six times the estimate, placing it the hands of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, one of the founders of the Wallace Collection, where it has resided ever since. Wallace wasn’t a stranger to drinking, and he wasn’t a stranger to drinking until the world spun when he thought too hard (or at all). He wasn’t in that state yet, but even thinking about it made his head pound. Scott covered his face with his hands before running them over his face with a loud, overdramatic sigh. “I can’t believe you’ve liked me since we met.” Wallace made himself a strong drink and made Scott a less-strong one. He handed the less-strong one to Scott before drinking his own. Wallace was completely engrossed in his conversation until he heard Scott say, very loudly, “I have a Wallace” and cling to the arm that had slipped away from Scott’s waist to hand in the air next to his side. “Hi, Wallace.”Wallace smiled warmly at his newspaper. “Finally find something you like?” He peered over the top of the paper subtly. Wallace adjusted his arm to wrap around Scott’s waist tightly, saying “he’s mine” to a nonexistent audience. Everything.” Wallace threw Scott a shirt from the closet. “This is going to be big on you,” Wallace said, “but you don’t mind wearing my clothes.” Scott glared at Wallace, receiving a drunken little smile in return that made his breath hitch. “I- I don’t know.”