Hals
Follower of Frans Hals
Hals was born in Antwerp or Malines, c. 1580-5, and died in Haarlem in 1666.1 The painter’s parents came from Malines and settled in Haarlem by 1591. He may have studied under Karel van Mander c. 1603, before the latter left Haarlem. In 1610 Hals joined the Haarlem painters’ guild, and was an established master by 1616 when he was commissioned to paint an important portrait of the officers of a Haarlem militia company. Several other group portraits followed this important work in 1627, 1633, and 1639. His genius for portraiture was fully recognized in Haarlem, and he received a major commission in Amsterdam in 1633. In 1641 he portrayed the regents of the Haarlem hospital. He became an officer of the painters’ guild in 1644. Though his career saw increasing difficulties after 1650, and in his old age he received aid from the city council, two of his greatest masterpieces, group portraits of the regents and of the regentesses of the Old Men’s Home at Haarlem, were painted in 1664. The origins of Hals’s art are far from clear. His portrait style has many elements common to the late works of Titian and Tintoretto. He may have been exposed to Italian sources by Van Mander, who was in close touch with sixteenth-century Italian painting, though his own style has little to do with that of -his brilliant student. The breadth of treatment and the shimmering luminosity of such sixteenth-century Northern masters as Frans Floris may have laid a foundation for Hals’s works; such earlier landscape masters as de Momper and Brill, rather than portrait painters, could have contributed to his brushwork. The fresh, relaxed conviviality of Buytewech’s oeuvre may also have provided a point of departure for Hals’s spontaneous, profoundly perceptive art. All Hals’s known works are portraits. Among these, the only works which seem not to have been commissioned are his vivacious, Hogarthian depictions of Dutch revellers, rustics, fisherfolk and eccentrics. Such artists as Arent Arentsz. (Cabel) gave Hals a springboard for his fisherfolk subjects. Distinguishing the extent of Hals’s activity in this area from that of his immediate followers and later imitators is still a complex issue.
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