The earliest reports about the life of Frans Hals tell that his family moved from Antwerp to Harlem, in the Netherlands, in 1585, fleeing from the Spanish occupation and the fierce persecution of Protestants by Catholics. Hals entered the city’s artists guild in 1610 and quickly gained recognition and a large clientele among the well-heeled bourgeois. His naturalist bent was manifested in his depiction of everyday scenes and in individual and group portraits, his specialty, executed either on commission or because of his interest in the character and physiognomy of the models. Hal’s technique aims to convey the theme in a straightforward and lively way with quick, irregular brushstrokes that reflect the artist’s emotional state. This pictorial procedure was an important legacy for 19th-century modern realism. The portraits Captain Andries van Hoorn and Maria Pietersdochter Olycan, the captain’s second wife, were produced on the occasion of their marriage, in 1638. They were both members of the wealthy beer-producing families of Haarlem. In the portraits, there is precision in the details along with a certain informality in the presentation of the characters, which in no wise compromises the evidence of their social position. Captain Andries was also portrayed by Hals in the canvas representing the banquet of the officers of the St. Adrian Militia (1633), who were elected among the notables of the city of Harlem, and was the city’s mayor in 1655.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
The coat of arms on the upper right allowed Erasmus (1939, p. 236) to identify the subject as Andries van Hoorn (also Andries van der Horn), “one of the pillars of Haarlem’s society” as Slive briefly described him (1989, p. 184). According to the great researcher of Hals’s work, this portrait was inspired by the sitter’s marriage to Maria Pietersdr Olycan (Inventory 186) on July 25, 1638 – a hypothesis that corroborates the inscriptions, on the canvas, of his age and the date of the work, the last digits of which are hardly legible (Camesasca 1987, p. 96).
Biesboer (in Slive 1989, p. 39, n. 15) contributed a few biographical data through which to assess the extension of the urban prestige of Andries van Hoorn, son of Dammas and Christina Suyderhoeff, baptized on March 6, 1600 and buried on September 1st, 1677. As early as at age 27, Van Hoorn was appointed councilor and later alderman of the Haarlem parliament for the tenures 1631-1632, 1635-1636, 1639-1642, 1644-1645, 1648, and 1651-1652, besides having been three times the town’s burgomaster. From 1658 until his death in 1677, Van Hoorn headed the powerful Dutch West India Company after distinguishing himself as captain and colonel of the St. Adrian militia. In 1633, Hals included the Captain Van Hoorn in one of his most important group portraits, Banquet of Officers of the Saint-Adrien Militia at Haarlem, currently conserved in the Frans Hals Museum. Five years later, still ranking as a captain, Van Hoorn was depicted in the canvas The Captain Andries van Hoorn that presently integrates the Masp Collection.
— Unknown authorship, 1998