Hals, Frans
He
was born in Antwerp, the son of Flemish parents who moved to Holland after the
city fell to the Spaniards in 1585. His parents had settled in Haarlem by 1591
and he spent his long life there. He was twice married, had at least ten
childred, and was constantly in financial trouble. Houbraken says he was
`filled to the girls every evening', but there is no real foundation for the
popular image of him as a drunken wife-beater. His second wife, however, was
more than once in trouble for brawling. During his last years he was destitute
and the municipal authorities of Haarlem awarded him a small annuan stipend
four years before his death.
Hals
was the first great artist of the 17th-century Dutch school and is regarded as
one of the most brilliant of all portraitists. Almost all his works are
portraits and even those that are not (some genre scenes, and an occasional
religious picture) are portrait-like in character. He is said to have been
taught in Haarlem by Karel van Mander, but there is no discernible influence
from him in Hals's early works, which are not numerous or well documented.
The
earliest extant picture is the fragment of a portrait Jacobus Zaffius
(Hals Museum, Haarlem, 1611), and upon the basis of stylistic evidence one or
two paintings can be dated a year or so earlier. Nothing he did before 1616
suggested that he would shatter well-established traditions with his life-size
group portrait The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia
Company (Hals Museum) painted during that year. There is no precedent in
either his own work or that of his predecessors for the vigorous composition
and characterization of this picture, which has become a symbol of the strength
and healthy optimism of the men who established the new Dutch Republic. It
demonstrates to the full his remarkable ability -- his greatest gift as a
portraitist -- to capture a sense of fleeting movement and expression and
thereby convey a compelling feeling of vivacity.
From
1616 onwards there is no shortage of dated or documented works and his artistic
development is clear. He was at the height of his popularity in the 1620s and
1630s. During these decades he made five large group portraits of civil guards;
one is in the Rijksmuseum and the others are in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem,
the only place where one can get a comprehensive view of his range and power.
In
the 1630s his compositions became simpler and monochromatic effects took the
place of the bright colors of the earlier paintings (Lucas de Clercq
and Feyntje van Steenkiste, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1635). The
group portrait of the Regents of the St Elizabeth Hospital (Hals
Museum, 1641) sets the key for the sober restraint of the late period, when his
pictures became darker and his brush-strokes more economical. The culmination
of this phase -- indeed of his entire career -- are his group portraits of the Regents
and the Regentesses of the Old Men's Alms House (Hals Museum, c.
1664), which rank among the most moving portraits ever painted. By this time
Hals was using in his commissioned portraits the bold brushwork and the alla
prima technique which early in his career he reserved for genre
pictures. No drawings by him are known and he presumably worked straight on to
the canvas.
Hals
had two painter brothers and five painter sons, but the only artist of
substance among them was his brother Dirk (1591-1656), who
painted charming small interior scenes. Apart from his sons, Hals taught
numerous pupils, including (with varying degrees of certainty) Judith Leyster,
Jan Miense Molenaer, Adriaen van Ostade, Adriaen Brouwer, and Philips
Wouwerman.
His
reputation did not long outlive him, however, and with rare exceptions --
Reynolds was one of them -- few critics before 1850 praised him. It was only in
the second half of the 19th century that there was a renewed appreciation of
his genius. The spontaneity of his work appealed to the generation of the
Impressionists, and from about 1870 to about 1920 he was one of the most
popular of the Old Masters, becoming a model for society portraitists. Lord
Hertford's purchase of his most famous work, The Laughing Cavalier
(Wallace Collection, London, 1624), for the then enormous sum of 51,000 francs
in 1865, was a milestone in the revival of his fortunes, and the buoyant
confidence of his paintings later made him a particular favorite with the new
generation of fabulously rich American collectors -- self-made men -- who were
beginning to dominate the picture market. This explains why so many works by
him are in American collections.
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