The late Renaissance Dutch painter Frans Hals (1582–1666) was a master of revealing his subjects' peculiarities. However, in the Regentesses (figure), he shows a neurologic condition—the blurred shoulder margin of the woman in the middle suggests trembling in a standing figure.1
Courtesy of Frans Hals Museum, oil on canvas, Haarlem. Photograph: Margareta Svensson. For the painter to have seen the shoulders at 2 levels steadily, the frequency of oscillation should have been about human flicker fusion threshold (16 Hz), characteristic of orthostatic tremor.
Is it possible that Hals, who once amazed Van Gogh2 by his 27 “blacks,” borrowed a technique from double exposure photography1 centuries in advance to depict a fairly common (e.g., parkinsonian or essential) tremor? Or the alternative: he painted what he saw—very fast trembling, producing illusion of double shoulders—perhaps the earliest depiction of orthostatic tremor.
Footnotes
Study funding: No targeted funding reported.
Disclosure: The author reports no disclosures relevant to the manuscript. Go to Neurology.org for full disclosures.
- © 2013 American Academy of Neurology
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