Five men hold a meeting, seated around a table. Hals painted them using his distinctive loose brushwork. The men are not paying any attention to the artist or to us, which is unusual, as there is almost always someone in Hals’s portraits who catches the viewer’s eye. These men are the governors (‘regents’) of St Elisabeth’s Hospital, a charity that cared for the poorest in the city. The hospital also had four female governors (‘regentesses’). They had their portrait painted by Hals’s biggest competitor as a portraitist in Haarlem: Johannes Verspronck.