Frans Hals
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1582/1584–Haarlem 1666) was one of the most famous and innovative Dutch painters of the 17th century. He used his unique painting style to bring the subjects of his portraits to life on the canvas. The artist’s boldly visible brushstrokes enabled him to evoke a real sense of movement in his portraits. While his Dutch contemporaries had their subjects adopt rigid poses and stare out at the viewer with a stern expression, the people in Frans Hals’s paintings look as if they might leap into action at any moment.
The 17th-century paintings by Hals now fetch very high prices. In 2012, for example, two of his portraits went under the hammer for more than €11 million at Christie’s auction house in London.
Biography
Despite his star status as a painter, much is unknown about the life of Frans Hals. We know for certain, however, that he was born in Antwerp, in the then Southern Netherlands. Wedding bells chimed for his father Franchoys Fransz Hals and mother Ariaentje van Geertenrijck in Antwerp in 1582, and their son Frans was probably born either that year or the next.
Frans Hals was born in the midst of the Dutch rebellion against Spain, which is also known as the 80 Years’ War (1568-1648). When Antwerp fell into Spanish hands in 1585, the Hals family packed their bags and moved to the city of Haarlem in the Northern Netherlands. Many artists and textile workers from Flanders and the southern Dutch province of Brabant trod a similar path.
In Haarlem, Hals became an apprentice with another former citizen of Antwerp: the painter, biographer and art theorist Karel van Mander (1548-1606). Once he had completed his training, in 1610 Hals registered as a painter’s assistant with the Sint Lucas Guild in Haarlem and started his own studio soon afterwards. Hals was meanwhile increasingly becoming a loyal citizen of his new home city, because from 1612 onwards he served in Haarlem’s Sint Jorisdoelen civil militia.
Sometime around 1610, Frans Hals married Anneke Harmens, the daughter of a Haarlem linen bleacher. They had three children together, but Harmens herself died at a young age, in 1615. Hals remarried two years later with Lysbeth Reyniers, and as far as we know this new couple had another 11 children.
Frans Hals specialised in portrait painting, a genre in which he excelled. He continued to be flooded with commissions well into the 1640s, and there are no records of anyone ever complaining about their likeness in his portraits.
He lived to a ripe old age, and continued to paint all his life – it was just a year or two before his death that he completed Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House and Regentesses of the Old Men's Alms House. The artist eventually died around 1665 or 1666 at the age of 84, an exceptional age for this period. Hals was buried at Sint Bavokerk in Haarlem.
Civil militia group portraits
As well as being a member of the militia himself, Hals made several portraits of civil militia groups. These militias were made up of armed citizens who maintained order in the city in peacetime and defended it in wartime.
Hals broke with the prevailing popular style of civil militia portraits in this period, in which the subjects were generally depicted standing lifelessly, and smiling stiffly. Hals chose to portray his subjects in a dynamic way. He would instruct them to adopt different poses to one another, which contributed to an overall sense of movement. He presented the militiamen in both nonchalant and active poses: talking, laughing or even singing.
The artist painted six civil militia group portraits in total, and all but one were of Haarlem militias. The exception was a portrait of an Amsterdam militia. This painting titled The Meagre Company is in the Rijksmuseum collection. Hals is the only known painter to have completed six commissions for civil militia group portraits.
Great Dutch masters
Art critics place Hals among the very select group of the greatest Dutch painters of the 17th century. He belongs to what are known as the ‘big three’ male painters of the period, alongside Rembrandt (1606-1669) and Vermeer (1632-1675).
Although Hals’s loose painting style did go out of fashion for a short while in the 18th century, with the rise in popularity of slicker and more detailed styles, he maintained his status as one of the most important male painters in the history of the Netherlands.
Masterpieces
Hals continued painting until the 83rd year of his life. It will come as no surprise, then, that this Dutch master has a great many masterpieces to his name.
The precise number of paintings Hals made is still a matter for discussion among the experts: while one says he painted some 160 works, another estimates there are 220 paintings by the artist.
The Rijksmuseum collection contains no fewer than nine works by this master painter of Haarlem, including the previously mentioned group portrait of an Amsterdam militia, The Meagre Company. The Rijksmuseum also holds the phenomenal work Portrait of a Couple. This marriage portrait shows two lovers in a manner that was all-but inconceivable in this period, because it was considered unseemly even for a man and wife to appear in the same portrait, let alone in such a casual pose.
Another, equally famous, painting in our collection is The Merry Drinker, a portrait of a drunken militiaman, smiling cheerfully. Looking at him we feel his contagious good humour – Hals knew exactly how to affect the viewer with facial expressions like this one.
Painting style
Frans Hals is celebrated for his ‘rough’ brushwork style. There’s no mistaking the medium he used, because unlike his fellow painters in the period, his brushstrokes are clearly visible in the paint on the canvas. Hals was incomparable in the way he used complementary colours and broad brushstrokes to bring his paintings to life.
This fluid style makes for works that give the impression they were made quickly and in situ. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, because he applied carefully conceived layers to build up all his paintings, and rarely overpainted.
Hals was able to evoke an object or a face with just a few brushstrokes. His contemporaries, meanwhile, were doing the opposite: using fine brushwork to paint detailed images. Hals’s work has something of the appeal of a snapshot, as if he had frozen a moment for posterity.
Another, equally defining, characteristic of his style was his innovative approach to posing the subjects of his portraits. In many of his paintings the subject is seated at an angle and turning towards the viewer. His 1635 work Portrait of a Man is an example of this approach. But some poses were even more unusual: in the 1622 painting Portrait of a Man, we see the subject in what we can only describe as a prototype hip-hop pose.
Master of the smile
Frans Hals is also known as the ‘master of the smile’. He had the unparalleled knack of capturing his subjects smiling in a convincing way.
Hals was one of very few 17th-century artists who often depicted his subjects with a cheerful or jolly expression on their faces. This is particularly notable because wealthy patrons in this period generally preferred to be presented as solemn and serious. When it came to painting more informal paintings of people from poorer classes, Hals would even go a step further and show his subjects smiling broadly, even baring their teeth.
Hals painted children laughing on many occasions. This type of portrait, in which an artist explored the best way of rendering an emotional expression, is known as a tronie painting. With more than 10 children at home, Hals must surely have found it easy to find models for these works.
As well as from this practice with his own children, Hals would have been able to draw inspiration from his involvement with theatre. In 1616 he joined the Wijngaertrancken, a theatre company whose members gathered every Sunday to drink, talk, read poetry and perform. It was here that Hals could study the facial expressions and postures of the actors, and this is one of the reasons his subjects come across as so lifelike.
Subjects
Hals painted portraits of people of all ages and from all strata of 17th-century society: from eminent burgers to mischievous children and drunken adults, as well as prostitutes, crooks and even people with a mental impairment – one world-famous example being his portrait of the possibly mentally ill woman Malle Babbe. One of Hals’s own sons ended up in a ‘house of correction and work’, which means that he probably had a mental disorder of some sort. This would have brought the subject even closer to home, in Hals’s mind.
Techniques
Hals began his paintings with a rough sketch using grey contours. This would serve as the foundation for his building up of layers of paint. On a few occasions he painted alla prima, an Italian term meaning ‘at first attempt’ and involving painting directly onto still-wet paint . The artist used this technique for Portrait of Jasper Schade van Westrum. In Italy, the alla prima technique was regarded as a great challenge because any mistake had permanent consequences.
Art movement
Hals could be regarded as a progenitor of the 19th-century Impressionist art movement. The Impressionists themselves would certainly have taken that view, given that the 17th-century artist was their great inspiration. Towards the end of the 19th century, Haarlem became a place of pilgrimage for the international Impressionist movement.
Famous painters such as Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Max Liebermann (1847-1935) saw Hals as a kindred spirit and visited the city to see his work. They saw Hals as having painted portraits of people as they truly were, without embellishment or flattery.
In their letters, notes and lectures, Impressionists pointed to Hals’s impact on their own development as artists. It is quite plausible that without Hals the work of the Impressionists would have looked very different.
Apprentices
As a master painter with his own highly productive studio, Hals must have had many apprentices over the course of his long career. Only about ten of his apprentices have been identified with absolute certainty, however.
Hals’s most famous student was Judith Leyster (1609-1660). She used a loose brushstroke style that she must have learned from Hals. Compare for example Leyster’s The Jolly Drinker and Hals’ s own The Merry Drinker. Do you notice similarities in their painting styles?
Other notable apprentices include Frans’s brother Dirck Hals (1591-1656) and Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685). Most of Hals’ s apprentices came from Haarlem, and the painter would certainly have been a well-known figure in the city.
Debts
Although the ceaseless flow of commissions for his paintings must surely have made Hals quite wealthy, his financial situation remained precarious . He and his family moved home many times, and they lived in rental accommodation rather than their own property. Hals also frequently had to deal with creditors.
Hals’s finances were probably in excellent shape until the 1640s, but things changed from the mid-1650s onwards. He was aged around 70 by this time, and his production rate was on the decline.
It was for this reason that towards the end of his life, Hals applied to the Haarlem city authority for financial support. After all that Hals had meant for Haarlem, this was perhaps the least the city could do in return for its eminent citizen.
