The most significant features of the portrait of the regents are the completed, as it were, final expression in the portrait of the regent, the wealthy warders of the almshouse. The magnificently preserved painting is executed more carefully and finely, the composition traditional for such paintings is unshakable in its perfection. Except for the benign and pathetic, helplessly smiling old coquette, all the regents are deep old women.
Each of them is a bright and definite individuality: a morbid, comparatively mild treasurer to the left, an evil and terrible old woman next to her, a young lady who is very young and finally sitting on the right Adriana Bredenhof is the embodiment of will, inner strength and icy detachment from human cares and passions. However, in it there is something from the physical and moral dying, the destruction of a man, which to a varying degree affected them all, but most noticeably affected the appearance of the second regent on the left. Fading flesh bared the bones of the skull, the fullness of natural human feelings gave way to petty malice, the old woman became a living reminder of death. Only an elderly, but healthy and good-natured maid is not subject to the sepulchral cold that fills the picture.
The uncertainty and emptiness characteristic of the portrait of the regents in the portrait of the regent turned into a tragic reflection on a near death. The idea that persecuted Khalsa was embodied in the depiction of women, as old as himself. However, the content of paintings is not at all exhausted by the personal experiences of the artist, no matter how significant they are. Nor is it exhausted by the ironic exposure of bourgeois charity, although in the canvas of Hales one can find such a connotation of content. His disappointments, bitterness and anxiety Khals can transform into an epiphany of the great truth, and not a doubtful assessment of human life and human society. Once he glorified this society and this life, now he brings them a merciless, bitter sentence. And the Dutch burghers and Hals himself changed so that the old illusions became impossible.
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