Frans Hals
(1582 - 1666) |
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Portraiture, Art Work
| Name: |
Frans Hals |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Antwerp |
| Nationality: |
Dutch |
| Birth: |
1582 |
| Death: |
1666 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Portraiture, |
| Medium: |
oil on canvas |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
Dutch Golden Age |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| Surely one of seventeenth-century Holland's most original artists, Frans Hals ranks as the unrivaled master of the group portrait. His gift for capturing the momentary and fleeting aspects of life shines in his portrayals of children, laughing revelers, and boisterous musicians, and has indelibly tinged our perception of Dutch seventeenth-century life. Although he was plagued by debt his entire life and had gone out of fashion by his maturity, Hals unwaveringly followed the individual path he had charted, concentrating mainly on portraits, producing increasingly insightful characterizations to the end of his life. His work was neglected, and then forgotten during the eighteenth century. A great deal probably has been lost. His reputation was revived in the ninteenth century when the impressionists and realists, particularly in France but later in America, regarded him as a model and source of inspiration. A genius with a special gift for painting directly from his source, Hals is second only to Rembrandt* as an observer of humanity, his work remains the freshest, most informal portrayal of an instant in time that has been bequeathed to us in paint. Though now greatly celebrated, Hals worked in relative obscurity. Today the facts of his life, career, and character continue to emerge; he is still surrounded more by myth than truth. He was born to a family of Flemish origin, but the date and place of his birth has recently been established as Antwerp in ca. 1582/3. His brother Dirck was baptized in Haarlem in 1591, but the time and circumstances of the family's move to Haarlem, which became Frans's lifelong residence, are unknown. The fall of Antwerp to the Duke of Parma in August 1585 is the probable motive for the move. Hals's teacher is unknown, but a contemporary reference to Karel van Mander suggests Frans was a pupil of van Mander's before 1603. In 1610 Hals joined the Haarlem guild. Little is known about his early career. If the Banquet in the Park (formerly in Berlin, now destroyed) is by Hals, then he worked in a vein related to van Mander and David Vinckboons. But this banquet scene is Frans's only known excursion into such subjects, which were developed more extensively by his brother Dirck. Instead, Frans soon concentrated on portraits and on genre themes closely related to portraits, such as the merry revelers and musicians portrayed halflength and popularized during the 1620s by the Utrecht Caravaggisti. Hals married twice. His first wife, Annctje Harmansdr, died in 1615, leaving him with two children. In 1617 he married Lysbeth Reyniers (known for her boisterous personality), who bore him eight more children, including three sons who became painters: Frans the Younger (1618-69), Reynier (1627-71), and Nicolas (1628-86). Lysbeth outlived her husband and a number of her children. Some contemporary reports suggest that Hals was a merry sort, and Houbraken* reports that he liked to drink, but the picture often drawn of "Frans Hals the drunken wife-beater" must be discounted as a wrongful fiction based on a misinterpretation of documents describing the actions of a weaver living in Haarlem at that time who had the same name. Hals himself had respectable positions – he belonged to the St. George Militia Company (which he painted three times); he was a member of the Society of Rhetoricians (1616-25); and he was an officer in the Haarlem Guild (1644). In 1628 the poet Samuel Ampzing enthusiastically praised Hals's portraits. Most of the documents which survive, however, also show Frans as chronically unable to pay his bills; he was called into court for pathetically small debts – bills owed to bakers, butchers, and so on. Such problems plagued Frans throughout his life, though the story of him ending his life in the Haarlem alms house is now discounted as romantic fantasy. Frans must have been highly regarded by his fellow artists (some of whom collected his works), and in 1661 the guild waived his membership fees out of respect for his talent and age. Belatedly, in 1662, the city itself awarded him a gift and a small pension. In his last years Frans received two important commissions for group portraits, which earned him sufficient income to underwrite a loan to his son. Upon his death he was buried in St. Bavo*s Cathedral. Though most heavily commissioned as a portrait artist during the 1630s, Frans enjoyed fairly steady patronage for almost fifty years (1616-64), during which time he produced nine life-sized group portraits, more than any leading artist of his time. Today 250 portraits survive, of which about 200 were commissioned. Certainly during his lifetime he must have produced a great many more. Very likely a good portion have been lost through ignorance, disinterest, and neglect. Remarkably, for an artist whose orientation was direct observation from nature, no drawings by Hals are known. Some scholars have supposed that Frans worked his portraits up from small oil sketches, but these have also not been identified; others have suggested that he may have painted much of what he saw directly on his canvases. Most scholars conclude that the hundreds of sketches he must have made from his sitters are simply lost. Hals's earliest dated work, the bust-length Portrait of Jacobus Zaffms (dated 1611, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum), reflects the lessons Hals learned from the great Venetian portraitists, notably Titian and Veronese. Already apparent here is his forceful presentation of a person, directly observed and conveyed vividly through the medium of paint. A number of traditional three-quarter family portraits also survive from this decade. Though conventional in their format, these pictures already show Hals the observer, using bold strokes of paint to describe interior volumes and build the faces and characters of his sitters, endowing them with an immediacy and presence far exceeding the conventions of his period. Hals's most dramatic and revolutionary contribution to portraiture came in his first Banquet of the St. George Civic-Guard Company (dated 1616, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum). Here his ability to convey spontaneity through an overall design and composition is unprecedented. Hals's gift for generalization or summation enabled him to exploit such secondary features as sashes, ruffs, flags, and gestures to organize and unify the image; yet he gave each individual his due, painting with an immediacy of characterization and directness of approach that enlivens the whole portrait with an impulsive and impromptu effect. Hals's fusion of genre and portraiture from this decade can be found in his marvelous Shrovetide Revelers (dated ca. 1615, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Its highly keyed colors and the flurry of details that convey exuberance as much as do the faces and gestures of the merrymakers place this among his earliest works, but it, too, already exhibits the direct and personal use of paint to build forms, a technique that departs from previously established formulas for painting. In the 1670s Hals's originality and daring inventiveness found new expression in nearly every portrait and genre theme he treated. He used many difficult devices, such as asymmetry and unusual juxtapositions of large versus small, deep and shallow space, to give his images impact and even greater immediacy. Of his family portraits, the Married Couple in a Garden (dated ca. 1622, Amsterdam, Rtjksmuseum) stands out for its daring exploitation of polarities – the transitory to the stationary, the deep to the shallow – as well as its balancing of asymmetry. None of the English eighteenth-century landscape portraits can be fully understood without having seen this seminal work by Hals. Hals's individual portraits of the period are marked with equal unconventionalty, as can be demonstrated in his Portrait of a Man (dated 1622, Chatsworth), where the subject's mixture of resignation and determination can be read both in his facial expression and in his pose. With arms determinedly folded across his chest, his sitter seems to brace himself for the rigors of posing, while at the same time unselfconsciously taking a pose so personal, so specific to himself as an individual that his character is poignantly revealed. Hals's genre-portrait themes are further developed in a number of examples, of which his Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart (also known as the Prodigal Son, dated 1623, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) employs the same devices just discussed, but with such originality that the adaptability of his formal devices reveals his genius. Here, too, we see Hals concentrating on essentials, beginning to reduce and eliminate extraneous details, building his faces and forms out of fewer yet more expert moves from his brush, and employing a more sparing palette of gray-greens, blacks, whites, and flesh tones. Hals's Laughing Cavalier (dated 1624, London, Wallace Collection), perhaps his best-known work, was also produced during this decade. A compelling portrayal of sensuality, confidence, and bravura, this portrait exudes energy, not only through the characterization of the sitter and the bold use of paint, but through many deftly employed formal devices (the jauntily angled sash, the quickly read slashes in the costume, the alternating dashes of dark and light at the ruff, the cocked hat). It ranks among the most celebrated portraits of all time. Hals probably tried his hand at a fulllength standing figure the following year, since his Portrait of Willem van Heythuyzen (Munich, Alte Pinakothek) is generally dated to 1625. Although it is a brilliant accomplishment, Hals was evidently rarely asked to undertake another one. The van Heythuyzen portrait is the only known example that survives. The artist's next important civic commission is the signed Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard (dated 1627, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum), which shows Hals's maturing gifts in this challenging format. Here the organizing principle is at once more forceful and emphatic than before and at the same time developed through less obvious devices. His figures are more individually posed and described with more vigorous brushmarks. The effect of immediacy and individuality is heightened, while the sense of a uniformly posed group is loosened, though not lost. In the same year Hals produced his other group portrait commission of the decade, the Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic-Guard Company (dated 1627, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum), where many of the same devices are used (the division of the image into two halves, for example) – but here the arrangement is more asymmetrical and therefore more cohesive overall. This work contains Hals's brilliant solution to the portrayal of one member, Captain Nicolaes Le Febure, who by being placed in the foreground is given the prominence necessary to obscure the fact that he was a dwarf. Throughout the decade, Hals explored various genre themes suitable to his primary interest in portraiture, such as his Two Laughing Boys (also called an allegory of the senses, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen), which show his ripening powers of observation, his development toward emphasis on the essential, and an increased interest in and sympathy for people from lower levels of society. In this last vein, one cannot help but mention his warmly sympathetic and also sensual portrayal of the Gypsy Girl (Paris, Louvre). Hals's development of such subject matter finds its culmination in the great low-life genre "portraits" of the early 1630s, such as the Fisherboy (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland) and his most famous of all genre works, the so-called Malle Babbe (Crazy Babette) (Berlin, Dahlem Museum, Gemaldegalerie). More portraits of well-to-do patrons survive from the 1630s, indicating that Hals must have reached the peak of his popularity as a portrait artist during that decade. His development toward greater simplification, a more monochromatic palette, a more unified overall effect, and a greater concentration on a psychological penetration of his sitters can be found in the paintings from this period. Hals also developed greater subtlety in his use of paint – he juxtaposed more smoothly defined facial features with succinctly applied accents to give depth to a mouth, to describe the eyes, or to underscore the volume of a chin or cheek. His exploitation of lighting reached new levels of sophistication, as demonstrated by one of the greatest masterpieces of the period, Portrait of a Seated Woman (dated 1633, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art). Hals produced three important group portraits in this decade. Changing his treatment by placing his subjects out-of-doors, and by less emphatically stating his organizing principle, he created a calmer, less exuberant overall portrayal. His ability to blend diverse poses, colors, and costumes into a unified whole is brilliantly demonstrated in his Officers and Sergeants of St. Hadrian Company (dated ca. 1633, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum). That same year Hals was engaged in the commission for a militia group portrait in Amsterdam (now known as the "Meagre Company") entitled Corporalship of Captain Reynier Reael and Lieutenant Cornells Michielsz Blaeuw (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). The fact that Hals received this commission over such possible rivals in Amsterdam as Nicolaes Eliasz, Thomas de Keyser,* and Rembrandt* indicates his standing at that time. However, Hals failed to complete the picture; he refused to travel to Amsterdam a second time and asked the sitters to travel to Haarlem. The officers refused and the commission was ultimately completed by the Amsterdamer Pieter Codde.* Toward the end of the decade Hals produced a second group portrait of the Officers and Sergeants of the St. George Civic-Guard Company (dated ca. 1639, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum), which again placed his subjects outdoors. A seemingly simple arrangement of standing men, the portrait avoids monotony and repetitiveness by its vivid poses, its punctuation with the spears held by various officers, and the insightful portrayal of the assembled individuals. As the influence of van Dyck* and court portraiture filtered down from The Hague to various other centers, the demand for Hals as a portrait artist declined during the 1640s. He nevertheless continued to receive commissions. These became increasingly stark, concentrated, and powerful psychological portrayals of his sitters – as, for example, his Portrait of a Woman (dated 1640, Ghent, Musee des Beaux Arts). In contrast to this remarkable portrait are the three-quarter-length pendants (dated 1640, in Cologne) which reflect van Dyck's more studied poses but show Hals's far more independent and pragmatic portrayal of his sitters' appearance. A masterpiece of group portraiture is Hals's depiction of the Regents of St. Elizabeth Hospital (dated ca. 1641, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum), which is composed of five remarkably reflective and self-absorbed individuals who communicate neither with us nor with one another as they seem to ponder the harsher, more profound realities of life. Hals's vision of his subjects encompasses, in a succinct and economical fashion, not only their strengths but also their inner flaws. For example, his Portrait of a Woman (dated 1643, New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery) conveys to us a shrewd, practical, unsentimental personality who is clearly powerful and capable of ruling her more reticently portrayed spouse (whose portrait is also preserved at Yale). By the 1640s Hals has turned to a nearly monochromatic palette, and his earlier spontaneity is replaced by a deepening reflectiveness and a projection (through the portrayal of his sitters' attitudes) of his increasing awareness of life's ironies. Around the mid-1640s, he occasionally returned to his earlier devices of confronting the viewer through the sitter and displayed the bravura painterly manner we know from his earlier work (note the Portrait of a Member of the Caymans Family, dated 1645, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, and his even more remarkably painted Portrait of Jasper Schade van Westrum, dated 1645, Prague, Narodni Galeri). The mood conveyed by these sitters is thoughtful, serious, and tinged with tragedy. No dramatic changes take place in the last decades of Hals's activity from 1650 to 1666, yet we can detect an increased seriousness and a diversity of approaches. On occasion he turned to earlier treatments of portraiture to create a spontaneous and relaxed mood; see, for example, his Portrait of Isabella Caymans (dated 1650/52, Paris, Rothschild Collection). Most often we find a final summing up of the human condition with a wisdom and insight combined with a grasp of his medium only the years can develop. A masterpiece from this late phase is his Portrait of a Man (dated 1650/2, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Starkly simple, this work is testimony not only to Hals's ever-ripening powers of characterization and insight, but also to his daring exploitation of asymmetry in his startling injection of whites in unexpected places within the dark costume. His ability to vivify the dark fabric through an increasingly idiosyncratic language of paint marks is nowhere better evident, except perhaps in the remarkable Portrait of a Man (dated ca. 1660, New York, Frick Collection). Though less often commissioned for portraits of the bourgeoise than he was in the 1630s, Hals seems to have been supported and revered among his fellow artists. Identification of his sitters has remained a matter of dispute, but the names of a number of portraits surviving from the last decades of his career involve other artists–among them, Adriaen van Ostade (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Mellon Collection). Clearly responding to Rembrandt in some of his portrayals of the universal human elements in each individual, Hals retained his own language of brushmarks and his own vision to the end. Like his great counterpart to whom he has so often been held up as a lesser talent, Hals produced perhaps his greatest and most profound works at the end of his life. His portraits of the Regents of the Old Men's Alms House (dated ca. 1664, Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum) and the Regentesses of the Old Men's Alms House (of roughly the same date and in the same location) are his most eloquent discourses on the concepts that time gives people the faces they earn and that character is primarily expressed by faces and hands – the bodies of these dour ladies and gentlemen are hardly emphasized, nor are they necessary. Here Hals has distilled the essence of humanity from his subject and has portrayed for us a memorable array of characters who bear witness to stolid determination and stoic endurance of life's vicissitudes. Tragic, these images are also fundamentally heroic, and they are testimony to Hals's own battle for survival and growth as an artist to the end of his life. Like very few masters, he developed a great late style – and, nearing death, produced eloquent essays on mortality. An innovative creator throughout his career, Hals was able to develop ever richer and more concentrated images, continuously paring away nonessentials and finally yielding these last.compelling visions. Never as diverse as other masters, Hals remains the supreme master of the course he charted, which began by capturing a momentary instant and ended by meditating on time itself. Though not the leader of a vast and active atelier, Hals had a far-reaching influence that found its highest expression in the nineteenth century, with Manet, among others. Hals' mastery of spontaneous and direct observation set down in paint laid the groundwork for and inspired generations of impressionists and deeply affected the American school as well. One cannot understand the art of The Eight (which includes Robert Henri and George Bellows) without knowing Hals. His own pupils were few in number. Among them were Adriaen Brouwer, Adriaen van Ostade, Philips Wouwerman, and Frans's brother Dirck; Judith Leyster and Jan Miense Molenaer may also have been his pupils. |
Samples of Work
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