LONDON — While visiting the National Gallery’s monographic exhibition on Frans Hals, curated by Bart Cornelis, an observer remarked audibly: “He isn’t as good as Rembrandt, is he?” This comment encapsulates the popular mindset that has banished Hals to relative art historical obscurity over the last half-century or so. Yet in the second half of the 19th century Hals paintings sold for as much as those by Rubens, Rembrandt, van Dyck, and Velázquez, according to the exhibition catalogue. That he was also adored by Gustave Courbet, John Singer Sargent, and van Gogh indicates his resonance as a “painter’s painter.”
However, former National Gallery director Kenneth Clark, in his seminal television series Civilisation, marked a downturn in popular favor, dismissing Hals as “revoltingly cheerful and odiously skillful.” Cornelis uses this exhibition, the first major retrospective in 30 years, to reinstate Hals alongside Vermeer and Rembrandt. Throughout, close visual analysis of Hals’s virtuosic, highly individualistic, loose brushwork, which so disgusted Clark — and that differs so sharply from the polish of Vermeer and Rembrandt — distinguishes him as a unique and supremely painterly talent.
Several factors have compounded the artist’s obscurity, including scant information about his early life; his two oldest portraits on view date from the early 1610s, by which time he was in his later 20s and fully accomplished. Nor do they relate thematically to the largely biblical work of his tutor, Karel van Mander (1548–1606). We have no surviving primary resources, such as a will or estate inventory, to bolster biographical detail, nor evidence of his workshop practice. And compared to Vermeer and Rembrandt, little technical and scholarly analysis has been performed on his work. It is this technicality — of both making and analysis — that Cornelis focuses on across the captions, highlighting an astonishing level of skill.
For example, infrared reflectography, a common art historical analysis technique, reveals the darker carbon underdrawing beneath a painting’s finished surface, indicating how closely artists (or their apprentices) adhered to the original design outline. We are told that Hals made no underdrawings, implying that he designed and modeled directly onto canvas, alla prima. This knowledge makes it all the more pleasurable, and wildly impressive, to see how he constructed hands, drapery, physiognomies, and costume, rapidly and with no safety net. At a distance, the desired illusion is achieved. Yet up close, the strokes are atomized, near incomprehensible, defying traditional modes of modeling. It demonstrates an economy of application and time akin to that of Velázquez. Yet compared with Velázquez’s softer application, Hals’s unabashed rapid hatching — what 19th-century critic Théophile Thoré-Burger likened to a fencer wielding his saber — may be visually repellent to some viewers. It also speaks volumes about his sheer confidence in his own abilities, and suggests that he did not feel the need to conform to the level of finish practiced by his contemporaries.
This combination of confidence and technical ability crescendo in the final room, displaying his later pieces. Here, the captions emphatically communicate his brilliance, unconcerned with popular conventions. We are told that, at 80 years old, “his tendency towards an ever-bolder application of paint was a deliberate artistic choice … there were patrons who preferred his dynamic brushwork over what was fashionable.” Noting the lack of evidence regarding Hals’s workshop arrangements, the captions instead draw on the visual evidence to help the viewer imagine it. In his late “Portrait of an Unknown Man” (c. 1660) he did not correct a large drip down the canvas: “It feels like he has just walked away from the painting. This is as close as we can get to the sensation of seeing Hals at work.”
Hals himself contributed to his obscurity by portraying his sitters and characters with humor and smiles, rather than aloof nobility. Portraiture occupied a lower status than scenes from daily life or landscapes; these, combined with his predilection for bawdiness — among his commissioned group portraits, commonly of militias, many are full of merriment — support Clark’s “revoltingly cheerful” condemnation. Even his so-called “Laughing Cavalier” (1624), on loan from the Wallace Collection, though not actually smiling, appears mirthful through his expression and jaunty posture. Yet again Cornelis highlights the technical feat of depicting mirth: “Laughter is among the most difficult expressions for a painter to capture. Hals succeeded by imparting a sense of spontaneous movement through his loose brushwork.”
A remarkable section on invented characters, composed from observed composites and all smiling or laughing, indicates Hals’s unique interest in capturing the real people around him. In contrast with his commissioned portraits, this collection of expressive musicians, fools, drinkers, and figures of the lower echelons of society seem to be created simply for the joy of it, the loose brushwork enabling fast production. The catalogue explains that these were sold at auction, which contributed to the artist’s recognition at the time. Indeed, his “Rommel-Pot Player” (c. 1620), in which children take impish joy at the hideous sounds of an old man playing this unsophisticated instrument, apparently became one of his most popular paintings and was frequently copied.
Consistent focus on the technical significance of Hals’s style enables viewers to understand how this was simultaneously his most defining, exceptional talent, and the reason he was overlooked by later art historians who privileged the higher finish and more “refined” tone and content found in his Dutch contemporaries. Cornelis perfectly conveys this in his summary of the brushwork in “Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House” (c. 1664): “Each supremely confident stroke of the brush is essential to our understanding the form it describes.” Thus, despite the lack of finish, the curator shows how the loose technique of Hals’s twilight years culminates in the very essence of painting: each stroke is vital and articulates character, form, and mood — with prodigious economy, and no preparatory drawing. For anyone wishing to grasp the significance of this unfairly marginalized painter, there is no better lesson than this show.
Frans Hals continues at the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square, London, England) through January 21, 2024. The exhibition was curated by Bart Cornelis, curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings at the National Gallery.
