An Anniversary: 8

An Anniversary: 8 - Esther

There’s a lot to like about Frans Hals. Even if we don’t know or remember his name, we know his works. He often elicits a smile, mirroring the smiles in his paintings. He’s so important, he has work hanging in the Louvre & there’s a statue of him in the town of Haarlem, where he lived, worked & died. He was chiefly a portraitist & made enormous group portraits as well as intimate paintings of single sitters.

We know him best perhaps for “The Laughing Cavalier” but he was truly gifted – perhaps peerless - in the art of depicting humans as they really are, in all their proud folly, earthy wit & savage vulnerability. Complete with bad teeth. Sure, he could produce highly polished, phenomenally accomplished commissioned portraits, but his ability to believably portray a wide range of emotions & unguarded human states is so unusual that his work vaults out from that of other Dutch Golden Age painters. He perfected the depiction of that almost indefinable human quality – the twinkle. Another feature of many of his works is the seated position of many of his subjects, with one arm over the back of a chair. This lends the model an informal & relaxed air. These portraits frequently have a looser painting style, with thicker & more obvious brushstrokes.

Unusually for the 17th Century Frans lived to be old, even by today’s standards. When you live a long time, you’re bound to have some ups & downs & so it was with Frans. It’s a familiar story of an artist from the Middle Ages: widowed, many children, one of whom did not survive (he is said to have been a “devoted” father), successful in his work, until he became less fashionable over time, took on other work to make ends meet, eventually lived in poverty, albeit with a pension from the city & was buried in Haarlem’s Grote Kerk, showing how well regarded he was.

Eschewing Amsterdam, sitters had to come to Haarlem if they wanted their portraits made by Hals

On this day in 1666, Frans died at the great age of 83…or was it 84? Because although we know the day he shuffled off, his birth year isn’t a hundred per cent certain. Although we know him, it’s nice that he’s still a little mysterious.