When we meet, he wears a china-blue double-breasted Van Noten suit and white distressed Church's loafers that match the slightly cartoonish white round-frame sunglasses he puts on later as we walk over to Van Noten's Antwerp store, where he often shows up unannounced.

WSJ: Inside the Eclectic Studio of Gert Voorjans

Born in Antwerp, Hals was apprenticed to Karel van Mander.

NEWYORKER: Haarlem Shuffle

In 2011, an article in the same journal from a team led by the University of Antwerp's Koen Janssens reported that a pigment Van Gogh favoured called chrome yellow degraded when other, chromium-containing pigments were present.

BBC: Van Gogh's Flowers In A Blue Vase damage seen in X-rays