Frans Hals

Flemish-Dutch painter

• Born: c. 1583
• Birthplace: Antwerp, Spanish Netherlands (now in Belgium)
• Died: September 1, 1666
• Place of death: Haarlem, United Provinces (now in the Netherlands)

Hals, and Rembrandt, were two of the most celebrated northern painters of their era. Hals specialized in painting group scenes and individual portraits in which his highly original use of grays provided his work with a chromatic unity that in the work of artists such as Leonardo da Vinci was achieved through chiaroscuro, the play of light and dark.

Early Life

The first record of the family of Frans Hals (frahns hahls) is dated March 19, 1591, the day on which Dirck Hals, Frans’s younger brother, who was also a painter, was baptized in Haarlem. It is thought that Hals’s parents, Franchoys and Adriaentgen van Geertenrijk Hals, came from Mechelen but settled in Antwerp before 1580. They are known to have fled Antwerp for the north during Frans’s early childhood to avoid religious persecution. By 1591, they had settled in Haarlem, where Hals spent most of his life.

Hals’s father was a weaver and maker of cloth; his wife probably assisted him in his work when she was able. Hals is thought to have begun studying art with Karel van Mander, cofounder of the Haarlem Academy, around 1600. By 1610, five years after van Mander’s death, Hals was a member of the Guild of St. Luke, part of whose charge was to regulate the duties and privileges of Haarlem’s painters.

Hals married Annetje Harmansdr in 1610. She died in 1615, leaving Hals with two children. One of them, Harmen, baptized in Haarlem on September 2, 1611, became a painter. Annetje was buried in land that Haarlem reserved for the burial of its poor, so it is clear that Hals was not prosperous at the time of his wife’s death. Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers on February 12, 1617, nine days before their first child, Sara, was baptized. Their union produced eight children, of whom his sons Frans, Nicolaes, and Jan became painters. Hals’s daughter Adriaentgen married Pieter Roestraten, a noted still-life painter.

Between the death of his first wife and his marriage to his second, Hals apparently visited Antwerp, where, it is speculated, he first encountered the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens . Shortly before he remarried, Hals was commissioned by members of the St. George Civic Guard Company to paint a picture of their banquet, a group portrait whose composition presented problems comparable to those Leonardo da Vinci faced in the composition of The Last Supper (1498) more than a century earlier. The general tone of the Hals painting, however, depicts revelry rather than the reflective contemplation of The Last Supper.

Hals, nevertheless, had to present reasonable likenesses of each of the twelve people in the picture, because each was paying for this recognition. Those who paid the most or who had important positions in the company had to be most prominently presented. Hals struck on the brilliant unifying technique of placing slightly left of the center of the picture a boy carrying the company’s standard over his shoulder, so that its horizontal axis forms about a twenty-degree angle. Hals coordinates the colors in the standard with the colors in each member’s sash and enhances the perspective and dimensionality by the placement of the figures and by placing immediately behind the standard a window opening onto an obscure cityscape. A vertical standard at the far right of the painting and highlighted drapery toward the top of the far left portion reinforce the dimensionality of the total work. Each figure is clad in black but wears a white ruff that ties in with the white damask tablecloth, intricately reproduced in all its detail, that covers the table at which the company has feasted.

Life’s Work

Hals was essentially a portrait painter. Flourishing two centuries before even the crudest cameras existed, Hals, like his contemporaries, was called upon to preserve the memories of people by painting them as accurately as he could, either singly or in groups. Because it was generally the subjects of his paintings who paid for them, he had to make them look as good as possible, a limitation he shared with his contemporaries.

That Hals, a fun-loving man given to free spending and serious drinking, was popular among the painters of Haarlem is attested by his having been given six separate commissions to paint the officers of the Civil Guard Company in slightly more than two decades, as well as by the number of paintings he produced during his lifetime, nearly all of them painted on commission.

Hals worked rapidly and painted with a sure hand. At a time when many artists worked in pairs, Hals preferred to work alone, although on rare occasions he collaborated with such fellow artists as Nicolaes van Heussen, Willem Buytewech, and Pieter de Molyn. Hals was particularly adept at reproducing exquisitely and intricately detail in cloth and jewelry. More important, he was able to produce recognizable likenesses of his subjects while simultaneously probing their inner beings and capturing, much as Rembrandt was able, what can best be called their “inner lights.”

Unlike many artists of his day, Hals seldom painted himself into his group portraits. He did, however, depict himself as a background figure in his Civic Group Company painting of 1639. He appears in the upper left of the painting and, judging from a close examination of this single self-portrait of him when he was at least fifty-five years old, he had long, dark hair, dark eyes, a mustache, and a goatee. At first glance, the picture, like that of his most celebrated portrait, The Laughing Cavalier (1624), seems to be of a happy-go-lucky, self-assured person. Closer examination of both pictures, however, reveals that the seemingly upturned lips are really not upturned. It is the mustache that gives the illusion that the figure in each case is laughing. In actuality, Hals’s cavalier has at best a Gioconda smile, a quizzical smirk. The self-portrait reveals a melancholy figure, one whose mustache is laughing but whose eyes and lips reveal someone quite the opposite.

It is at least in part Hals’s ability to have painted enigmatically that has helped to assure his position among the leading painters of the world. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, begun in 1503, and Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier each put a burr in the minds of those who see them, establishing them not only as unforgettable but also as intellectually provoking. It is unlikely that Hals was imitating Leonardo when he painted The Laughing Cavalier; rather, he was revealing the sardonic nature inherent in his own temperament.

Although one can point to pockets of prosperity in Hals’s life, it can generally be said that he almost constantly lived near the edge financially. As his children, four of them artists, grew older, they could contribute little to the household. Hals and his family moved from one rented dwelling to another, often being evicted when they could not pay their rent. In 1654, a Haarlem baker to whom Hals owed two hundred guilders seized his furniture and five of his paintings to satisfy the debt. Seven years later, the Guild of St. Luke’s waived the payment of Hals’s annual dues because of the artist’s poverty. The following year, the burgomasters of Haarlem granted Hals’s request for a subvention of fifty guilders, and they followed that gift shortly with one three times as large. In 1663, they agreed to pay him two hundred guilders a year for the rest of his life. Nine years after his death, the city fathers had to grant his widow a pittance on which to live. Hals continued to paint until the year of his death, completing some of his finest work in 1664, when he undertook a commission to paint the regents of the Haarlem Almshouse. This commission brought him a modicum of prosperity, so that when he died in 1666 he was in less dire straits than he had been during much of his life.

Among Hals’s greatest artistic inventions was that of controlling his work by infusing it with color values obtained by his use of grays. The chiaroscuro perfected by Leonardo and Masaccio in Italy in the early fifteenth century had been widely imitated. Hals, however, sought a new means of handling light and of bringing chromatic unity to his work. Like Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer , he experimented extensively with light and its sources, finally developing, through the use of grays, his unique way of solving the problem.

Significance

Despite his persistent penury, Frans Hals was recognized as a leading citizen of Haarlem. The two hundred guilder annual subvention the town fathers settled on him was a munificent sum in its day. In the Groot Heiligland, from which Hals and his family once had to move because they could not pay their rent, the Frans Hals Museum, a significant tourist attraction, now stands. The artist’s place in the history of art is secure. He ranks only slightly below Rembrandt, and his influence has been substantial.

Among those who imbibed directly of his artistic spirit are Hieronymous Bosch, Pieter Brueghel (the Elder), Pieter Brueghel (the Younger), and Jan Brueghel, all of whom painted in a popular style infused with wit. What was sardonic wit in Hals became a broader, puckish—sometimes outrageous and scatological—wit in Bosch. Paintings such as Hals’s The Lute Player (c. 1621) or Seated Man Holding a Branch (1645) could easily have been incorporated into any of Bosch’s or the Brueghels’ busy, crowded paintings.

On September 1, 1666, Hals’s body was placed in its grave in the choir of St. Bavo’s Church in Haarlem, an honor accorded only to those who had brought honor to the town. Perhaps the final irony in the Hals story is that despite the poverty in which he lived, Hals’s paintings, which seldom come on the market, have commanded prices in excess of ten million dollars.

Bibliography

Baard, H. P. Frans Hals. Translated by George Stuyck. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981. This oversize volume has excellent color plates of most of Hals’s major paintings. The text gives perceptive commentary on specific paintings and valuable biographical detail, dispelling the myth that Hals’s work was essentially humorous. Includes a chronology of Hals’s life.

Beeren, Willem A. Frans Hals. Translated by Albert J. Fransella. London: Blanford Press, 1962. While providing accurate information about Hals’s life and the lives of his artist children, this book is at its best in relating Hals to the artistic milieu of his day. Presents sensitive interpretations of Hals’s style and artistic method.

Gratama, Gerrit D. Frans Hals. 2d ed. The Hague, the Netherlands: Oceanus, 1946. Gratama understands Hals in relation to other artists such as Jan Steen, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt. Hals’s paintings are discussed from a technical viewpoint, indicating how he captured intricate details despite the boldness of his heavy textures. Hals emerges as a highly original craftsman who solved artistic problems in singular ways.

Grimm, Claus. Frans Hals: The Complete Work. Translated by Jürgen Riehle. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1990. Contains 471 plates, one-third of them in color, with interpretation by Grimm, a German scholar who has spent years studying Hals’s art. Grimm argues that only 145 of Hals’s paintings have survived, and repudiates the authenticity of about 80 paintings commonly attributed to Hals. Grimm also describes how Hals’s painting techniques anticipated the styles of Manet, Cezanne, and other nineteenth century French painters.

Hals, Frans. The Civic Guard Portrait Groups. Text and foreword by H. P. Baard. New York: Macmillan, 1950. A slim volume that discusses Hals’s six paintings of the Civic Guard Company, executed between 1616 and 1639, comparing and contrasting them to the paintings of his contemporaries who also were commissioned to paint the Company. Clearly demonstrates the uniqueness of Hals’s work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Like Father, Like Son? Portraits by Frans Hals and Jan Hals. Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2000. An illustrated catalog of an exhibition held at the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2000. Includes bibliographical references.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Paintings of Frans Hals. Text by Numa S. Trivas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942. Trivas’s discussions of Hals’s major paintings remain pertinent. The accompanying illustrations are appropriately chosen and of acceptable quality, considering the difficulties of printing art books during World War II.

Valentiner, Wilhelm R. Frans Hals Paintings in America. Westport, Conn.: F. F. Sherman, 1936. Although dated, this book lists, and has reproductions of, Hals paintings in collections in the United States. Most of the paintings listed here remain in the same collections that held them in 1936, although additional Hals acquisitions have been made since the publication of this valuable catalog.

Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Catalog of the collection of seventeenth century Dutch paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., including Hals and many of his contemporaries.