Frans Hals (1582–1666) is often at the mercy of a value judgment that places him below Vermeer and Rembrandt. Yet he is an emblematic figure of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and its cultural flowering or “Golden Age.” Despite his current renown—and the celebrated status Hals achieved as a master painter during his lifetime—many details of his life remain obscure: his date of birth, his movements and those of his family, his artistic training, as well as the reasons for his protracted money woes.
That Hals was a man of Haarlem is, however, certain, and he remained closely associated with the city throughout his life. A consummate portraitist, he rarely signed his pictures, and it is not thought any works on paper or written documents in his own hand still exist. Hals’s commission records are also scarce: he continues to divide scholars on how many paintings he made and their dates, with the estimate of his works ranging from about a hundred to more than three hundred.
“Frans Hals,” the sweeping monographic exhibition now on view at London’s National Gallery, is the first of its scale in over thirty years, with subjects encompassing Haarlem’s elite and well-to-do, as well as anonymous drinkers and Caravaggesque boys. Of Hals’s known existing works, most are pure portraits, while the rest are group portraits and portrait-style genre works. Many of the faces here are mischievous, others pensive or severe.
Whatever the troubles within Hals’s personal life and the impact of contemporary Dutch society upon him, many of the pieces in this exhibition make clear that, in his art, humor often wins out. Hals was comfortable with weaving the comic into his subjects, whether or not he was indicating a moral lesson. In the first room hangs the portrait of Pieter Cornelisz van der Morsch (1616), who poses with a faint smile and an assortment of fish and straw. Words next to him read “wie begeert,” or “who desires?” Van der Morsch helped form an amateur dramatic and literary society and was known for playing “Piero,” the fool with acerbic wit. He is pictured here looking towards the viewer in the act of handing out a kipper; that is, he is here to reveal someone’s faults while setting him straight through ridicule.
Hals never visited Italy to see the major Renaissance works. He reputedly had little desire to travel, either to see the world or to study its art. Nonetheless, during a short stay in Antwerp, Hals seized the opportunity to familiarize himself with current Flemish painting, most obviously that of Rubens and perhaps the artist’s collection of Venetian treasures by Titian.
Maybe it was the nature of the Dutch art market at the time that determined Hals’s choices. The demand for his paintings at home remained consistent, with buyers from across the social spectrum. Formal portraiture remained the preserve of affluent patrons, while genre paintings, usually less dear, portrayed anonymous characters and lent themselves to spaces from the tavern to the home and business house.
There is a superb selection of genre portraits here hanging in the room titled “Invented Characters”: figures appear anonymously, casually dressed, or sometimes in costume. Often there is a drink in hand or the happy effects of tipsiness; amusement and frivolity reign. All the alcohol and instruments and even a jawbone gripped in a fist create something of a bacchanalian air. Just look at the Laughing Boy with a Wineglass (ca. 1630) and the beautifully unruly Malle Babbe (ca. 1640), probably Hals’s last genre piece. It seems that the commercial rather than the aesthetic imperative induced Hals to adopt this subject matter. Post-Reformation convulsions led to a decline in high-end works, and this coincided with Hals’s marked production of genre pieces. These desirable works were made at relatively high speed with coarser materials and more cheaply than formal commissioned portraiture.
The Laughing Cavalier (1624), who is not in fact laughing, has found his way out of the Wallace Collection and into this exhibition. Whether it’s the confidence, hubris, snobbery, or something else, the image has become Hals’s Mona Lisa. Bedecked in a luxuriously adorned doublet, the figure is thought to be the textile merchant Tieleman Roosterman, who appears again in a later portrait, only with a more somber palette and in three-quarter-length design, his hand again resting on a blade. The only known full-length portrait by Hals is of another prosperous textile merchant, Willem van Heythuysen, who chose Roosterman as the executor of his will. Their ties went further, as the cavalier’s youngest sister was engaged to Van Heythuysen before her premature death.
Many of the later works here are more austere: the lion’s share are of now-unknown sitters, and the props and joviality of earlier paintings are now absent. With changes in taste following his death, Hals was neglected, then “rediscovered” in the 1860s by the art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger, whose admiration is credited with bringing about a lasting esteem for the portraitist’s ouevre and who also reestablished the reputation of Vermeer.
If Hals’s work is in some sense “modern,” it is due to its divergence from academicism and its choice of subject matter. There was also vitality to his technique over a long career. Mallarmé secured for poetry a marked move away from regular speech, and something like the equivalent experimentation in painting developed in the work of Hals. His variety of admirers is telling: Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and James Ensor were drawn to him, while Vincent van Gogh placed Hals with the titans, likening his feats as a colorist to those of Eugène Delacroix, Diego Velázquez, and Paolo Veronese.
The display and selection of pictures in this show are well judged and representative of Hals’s career. Together with the more jaunty and civic-guard pictures, there is generous space allotted to subdued works one may not typically associate with the artist. It’s part of Hals’s achievement that one artist working solely in variations of painted portraiture found so much opportunity within this relatively narrow range. Subtle changes in technique are constant, culminating in one of the late works, Portrait of an Unknown Man (ca. 1660), where the paint handling has loosened to the degree that drips of paint are visible and apparently deliberate. Patches of this painting are not far from the effect of some of Franz Kline’s works. Hals’s depictions of the imaginary are few; he seemingly chose to paint only those whom he could face, and in this aspect he is our contemporary.