Cornelis Hofstede de Groot notes its "broad and vigorous" style, while Katja Kleinert (curator of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) observes that it makes a remarkably dynamic impression for a portrait from its time.

[1][2][3][4][5] In the period when the portrait was painted, black attire was popular among male professionals, ecclesiastics, and magistrates in the Netherlands (where commerce, the sciences, and the arts were flourishing).

[7] The black cloak in particular is finished in the "rough" or "loose" style characteristic of Hals, seemingly dashed off at speed in broad, unblended brushstrokes.

[8] Like this sitter, some men wore a falling collar in the Netherlands in the late 1620s and early 1630s as an alternative to the physically and metaphorically stiff "millstone" ruff.

[10] In 1879, Heinrich Justus Schneider [de], the director of paintings and engravings at Gotha, made a watercolour of the picture gallery at the Herzogliches Museum.

However, following a change of policy after the GDR had become established as an ally of the Soviet Union, the Portrait of a Man in a Wide-Brimmed Hat was returned to Gotha in 1958.

The police feared at the time that the paintings were damaged, because they found a trail of broken picture-frame parts on the escape route through the palace gardens.

In 2008, the mayor of Gotha, Knut Kreuch [de], launched a media campaign in an effort to find and recover the stolen works, to no avail.

[13] Conservator Fuhyi Kuo restored the Portrait of a Man in a Wide-Brimmed Hat in Gotha, and the five returned works were exhibited together at the Herzogliches Museum in 2021–2022.

[20] When the painting was recovered in 2019, the Herzogliches Museum had it examined for authenticity at the Rathgen Research Laboratory in Berlin, which conducted infra-red reflectographic, radiographic, and macro analyses.

Jan Miense Molenaar (the identity of the sitter is not certain) was painted by Frans Hals at about the same time as the similarly attired and posed Portrait of a Man in a Wide-Brimmed Hat.