Frans Hals

Figures depicted by the celebrated portraitist and genre painter Frans Hals jump on out the canvas, full of life and character. Born in 1580 in Antwerp and later moving to Haarlem, Hals developed a style that captured the personality and spontaneity of his subjects, celebrated as one of the greatest Dutch Golden Age painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer.

One of the most famous paintings by Frans Hals is The Laughing Cavalier (1624), now housed in the Wallace Collection, London. This portrait epitomises Hals’s ability to bring vitality and warmth to his subjects. Another celebrated work is Portrait of Isaac Massa (1626; Art Gallery of Ontario), which showcases his mastery of depicting texture, light and the nuanced features of his sitters. Eschewing the static pose in traditional portraiture, Hals often portrayed his subjects in a certain dynamism and sense of animation.

Beyond his famed portraits of citizens of Haarlem, Hals painted group portraits of families, members of the civic guard and regents of Haarlem almshouses. The artist also specialised in genre scenes, many of which depicted children.

Despite his success as a portrait artist, Hals faced financial difficulties in his later years, with him and his works falling into complete obscurity in the decades following his death in 1666. Renewed scholarly interest in the mid-19th century brought Frans Hals back into the spotlight. Described by Vincent van Gogh as ‘a colourist among colourists, a colourist like Veronese, like Rubens, like Delacroix, like Velázquez’, Hals transformed portraiture, and his bold brushwork and vibrant expressions became an important precedent to a generation of Realists and Impressionists, including Edouard Manet.

Hals’s work can be found in major museums worldwide, including the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and more.