Frans Hals, star of the Dutch Golden Age

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Frans Hals: Style and Substance

By Walter Liedtke

Museums in our straitened financial times have turned increasingly to in-house exhibitions, featuring aspects of their permanent collection for focused scrutiny.  Of course, the greater the treasure-house, the stronger the focus show, and the Metropolitan Museum holds one of the great collections of Dutch Golden Age paintings.  Such outstanding and lastingly valuable local exhibitions by Met curator Walter Liedtke have included: Rembrandt/non-Rembrandt (1995),Vermeer and the Delft School (2001), featuring the great Museum core collection; and a reinstalled history of the Met’s Dutch collection, mounted on the occasion of Liedtke’s own systematic catalogue of Dutch paintings in the Museum (2007).

This publication is a reprint of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Summer 2011), produced to accompany a re-examination of the marvellous, representative Hals holdings in New York.  While Frans Hals (1582/3–1666) can properly be termed one of the first professional artists dedicated to the art of portraiture, he also pioneered lively multi-figure scenes of festive behaviour in his native Haarlem, especially early in his career. 

Both contributions emerge vividly from the Met holdings, which span most of the artist’s development; additionally, Liedtke supplements his essay with well-chosen comparisons from European collections, making this one of the most accessible yet comprehensive introductions to the Hals oeuvre.

To a 21st-century viewer, much of the appeal of Hals lies in his lively detached brushwork, which animates each picture and identifies the artist’s hand beyond any representational purpose.  His distinctive bravura stroke (and emphatic lack of finish) was rediscovered in the Impressionist era, when homage to Hals flowed from such modern masters as Manet and Van Gogh, not to mention from prominent collectors of Impressionism in America, such as the Havemeyers, Altmans, and Baches of  late-19th-century ‘Gilded Age’ New York.

As the title suggests, Hals imbued his style with substance, which Liedtke explores in his consideration of both the portraits of Dutch burghers and the festive revellers depicted in the artist’s early genre works.  Beyond first visual impressions and stubborn legends (of drunkenness) or later harsh critical reputation in periods of different pictorial standards, lies Hals’ professional craftsmanship, used in the service of those solidly bourgeois values shared by the artist and his Haarlem sitters. 

Hals was a member of a local civic guard, which he portrayed in celebrated group portraits (figs. 8, 16 in the catalogue, still in Haarlem at the Frans Hals Museum), and remained a loyal local citizen, painting fellow-citizens.  Some portraits remain anonymous today, but some others on view also proudly celebrated Haarlem.  In one exquisite miniature on copper, he memorialized the author of a city description of 1628, Samuel Ampzing (1630; fig. 40, private collection).  In a pair of pendant portraits of the author and his wife, Hals presented learned Latinist Petrus Scriverius (1626; figs. 37-38).  That oval work, engraved with an inscription by Haarlem printmaker Jan van de Velde II (fig. 39) defined ‘porthole’ conventions of interior framing (with an emerging hand and glove) across Dutch 17th-century portraiture, even as it probingly characterized probity.

Liedtke, however, reserves his most telling analysis for the Met’s outstanding early genre pictures by Hals: Shrovetide Merrymakers (c. 1616; fig. 14, a work touched by the energy of Rubens’ Antwerp) and Couple at an Inn (1623; fig. 18).  These images present the inverse of Dutch sobriety and decorum in celebrating pleasure through portrait-like, half-length images of festivity thrust before the viewer.  So often in Dutch paintings, behaviour is defined through its opposite (as in the work of Jan Steen (1626–79)), a wellspring of antiheroic representation of prodigal sons.  (The collection also includes a fine example from an oft-imitated Hals series of humble-yet-happy youthful seaside fishermen; fig. 41.)

Combining dazzling surface technique with solid figural representation, freely ranging from portrait fact to genre fiction, Frans Hals needs to be viewed from a distance as well as savoured up close.  Walter Liedtke combines deep scholarly expertise with a light authorial touch to achieve an appropriate tribute to this great Haarlem painter.

Frans Hals: Style and Substanceby Walter Liedtke is published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and distributed by Yale University Press, 2011.  48 pp.  41 colour illus. ISBN 978-0-300-16982-9