Haarlem - Frans Hals Museum Collection

The first groups to commission portraits of this kind seem to have been the marksmen's guilds - companies of volunteers, elected every three years from among the more prosperous citizens to form a kind of civic militia or town guard. The first group portraits (doelenstukken), painted in Amsterdam in the early 16th century, were merely an assemblage of individual portraits. Frans Hals contrived to combine the individual members of the group in a dynamic scene of action with something of the effect of a snapshot, as in his pictures of the farewell banquets of the marksmen's guilds of St George (1616) and St Adrian (1627).

Frans Hals also painted group portraits of regents (the governors of merchants' guilds and charitable