(1) Lynton may, to take one example, have been thinking of what Berger had to say about the analysis of Frans Hals’s two last paintings by the scholar of Netherlands art Seymour Slive.
(2) Slive closely shows how the paintings work technically as group portraits of the governors and governesses of the Haarlem almshouses where the impoverished Hals himself received charity; but Berger says of Slive’s analysis, “It’s as though the author wants to mask the images, as though he fears their directness and accessibility.” However prone Slive may be to an art historian’s preference for painterly values over social discourse, his analysis is nevertheless closer to the heart of the matter than Berger’s fanciful account of a kind of class stand-off between the destitute artist and the governors, not least because on another and more likely reading, given Hals’s approach to portraiture even of men and women in their prime, these two groups are painted with compassion but above all with a sharp eye for laying down what was before him.