Now housed at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., this Flemish painting is one of the artist’s many expressive genre paintings focusing on peasants & lower-class individuals, giving them a wide range of emotions. His works went on to influence an entire genre called “tronie”, which specifically investigated a wide & unconventional, yet natural range of facial expressions. Depicted here is a young man making an immature, mocking gesture to the viewer and though confrontational with his ragged appearance and the knife through his hat, the underlying innocence in the youth ends up humanizing him.