[2][5][6][7] Seymour Slive remarked that Girl Singing exhibits the same sparkling technique and blond tonality seen in the commissioned portraits on the same small scale that Hals painted in the second half of the 1620s.

The artist's low viewpoint together with the young woman's turning gesture and downward look focus our attention on the relationship between her and her music.

[2] The young woman in Girl Singing wears no lace, embroidery, or other finery to signal elevated social class.

(Compare, for example, the seven daughters in Hals's group portrait of Gijsbert Claeszoon van Campen's family, who are all dressed to the nines.)

(For these reasons, the Girl Singing and La Bohémienne have adjacent entries in Cornelis Hofstede de Groot's 1910 Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century.

)[4] The conventions applying to girls' and women's clothes, hairstyles, and headwear were stern in the Dutch Republic in Hals's time—and particularly so in Haarlem, where Mennonite and Reformed influences were strong.

For instance, the model for Hals's Smiling Fishergirl wears a chemise closed tight up to the throat and a big black bonnet concealing nearly all her hair.

The Girl Singing model has her hair tied back loosely in what the early 21st century would call a 'low messy bun'.

For example, there were commissioned group portraits of the governors of charitable institutions, volunteer officers of city guards, and the like.

There were also individual likenesses or portraits (conterfeytsels in the Dutch of the 17th century), which showed a specific person (or sometimes a couple or family) and were typically painted to order for a paying client.

[18][19] Unless Hals meant it to be kept in the family (which we do not know), we could think of the Girl Singing as more like a 'tronie', the term for another category, in which the subject is an expressive, interesting, or funny generic face (so, not a named individual person).

Painter and art theoretician Karel van Mander, the master under whom Hals learnt his trade, taught a distinction between the rough ('rouw') and the smooth or neat ('net') styles of painting.

[2][23][24]However, Bart Cornelis has commented: "I'm not sure Hals was interested in people sitting still; he wanted to capture what they were like when they were talking, drinking, or smiling.

[9][2] Hals constructed the face of the Girl Singing from broad patches of colour and then made it 'vibrate' in the light with the short parallel strokes visible, for example, in the young woman's forehead.

According to Houbraken, Hals called such added liveliness "het kennelyke van den meester"—the master's distinctive touch.

Nonetheless, the singer in the Ter Brugghen painting appears posed and static alongside the active young woman pictured in the Hals work.

As reported by Houbraken, Anthony van Dyck rather condescendingly judged that if only he had blended his colours a little more delicately or thinly, Hals "could have been" one of the greatest masters.

"[28] In painting, movement (activity, vitality) can be imparted through imprecision and with "springy" brushstrokes—and these effects are evident in the emphatically unblended, non-delicate brushwork of Hals's Girl Singing.

The up-and-down movement of the young woman's right hand as she beats the rhythm of her song is captured in Hals's flickeringly indistinct handling of her fingers.

The roll of her upper body comes across in the jagged, unfinished outline of her shoulders and especially in the shifting pleats of her chemise, which are executed as broad, angular, unblended brushstrokes.

[2][29] Joshua Reynolds, who admired Hals's work, noted that imprecision can actually enhance the "likeness" of a portrait, which "consists more in preserving the general effect of the countenance than in the most minute finishing of the features or any of the particular parts".

At the time Hofstede de Groot compiled his 1910 Catalogue Raisonné of the Dutch masters, it was owned by American railway financier Charles T. Yerkes,[4] who developed what would become the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines of the London Underground.