In the oldest of the shooting guild pieces, the Banquet of the Officers of the Guild of St. George (1616), the brown tone is still dominant until around 1625 but the figures are already full of life and characterized with great accuracy. The manner of the participants is serious and grave, the destruction caused by a war just overcome with difficulty is still noticeable. A complete contrast fills the picture Banquet of the Officers of the St.Hadrian Guild (1627), an unworried, unbound happiness that is especially evident in the Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian Guild (1633). The arrangement of the group is freer and less forced; the impression of immediate life is stronger than in the picture of 1616.
These more expansive lifestyles also correspond to the richer effect of the colours, which are then raised in the large guild pictures of 1633 and 1639 to flowering magnificence. Again it is the officers and under-officers of the two guilds, but this time not at a banquet but in even rows in the garden of the guild houses, on parade. The times had become serious again as the chaos of the Thirty Years’ War now also engulfed the Netherlands. The seriousness of wartime is mirrored in the wonderful character heads of the officers. Among the Regent pieces are the group portraits of The Regents of St. Elizabeth Hospital of Haarlem (1641), The Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse (1664), and The Women Regents of the Haarlem Almshouse (1664). In the two last pictures his gloomier spirit already pervades the picture and this characterizes his last creative period, after the warm gold tone of his heyday yielded to a cool, very fine silver tone.
Besides these comprehensive group pictures, Frans Hals also painted a great number of individual portraits, family pictures as well as groups of individual figures from the population that are spread over the individual creative periods. In these works, the changes of his colouring can be more clearly recognized than in the large guild and Regent pictures.
The older he became, the freer and more elegant his technique became, until finally he stopped applying brush strokes to the canvas, but rather with the greatest care applied brush touches. Characteristic portraits from his best creative period are the 1625 paintings, looking like a quickly thrown down improvisation of Portrait of Willem van Heythuyzen, a man honoured by the founding of welfare institutions, and the Portrait of a Young Woman (c. 1625). Included also are the Portrait of a Priest (1627) and the Self Portrait with his clever second wife who permitted the escapades of her husband but also knew how to restrain him, as well as the Family Portrait with Ten Persons (1645).
Frans Hals was able to completely immerse himself in his mood when he painted the prostitutes and drinking companions that he met in the bars. This painter, who himself liked to laugh, depicted like nobody else laughter in all its stages with great variety and truthfulness, from the slight naive often canny smile at a boisterous joke to the garish grimace. Clowns, singers, actors, revellers, hoodlums, musicians, buffoons, young loose women or old fishwives were the company he liked best and he bent his whole art to painting this band not in half-figures but in natural sizes, individually or grouped together. Included among many other pictures are the Flute Player (c. 1625) the Rommelpot Player (mid seventeenth century), the Peeckelhaering (1627) and the masterpiece and worthy ending of this series, the portrait Hille Bobbe (1629-1630), a woman of irrepressible humour but frightening ugliness.
Among his many pupils there was also his younger brother Dirk, who like many others depicted the lives of the peasants, that of the “better” people. Above all, he portrayed the goings-on of soldiers and officers, who for a long time after the end of the wars of liberation played a very inglorious role in society.
Dirk Hals painted – always on a small scale, very carefully in the details and the colouristic handling – merry companies at their meals, dancing, listening to music or playing cards. A few examples of his work are the paintings Amusing Party in the Open Air (1621) and In merry Company (1640). Also, some of his sons achieved noteworthy success with these social pieces.
Pieter Codde, who worked in Amsterdam, surpassed many others in his ingenuity and dexterity in brushwork and in the liveliness of characterization. His dance-mad music companies or guardroom scenes in the Preparation for a Carnival are the high points of the genre painting.
However, all these social paintings were missing the humour that was such a rich part of the two masterly painters, the Haarlem born Adriaen van Ostade (baptized as Adriaen Hendricx) and Jan Steen. Ostade was a pupil of Frans Hals. At the same time Adriaen Brouwer was also a pupil and assistant to Frans Hals and thus it is no surprise that the genius of the younger man inspired the pupils far more than the good teaching of the older man who occasionally allowed his pupils to take part in his loose life.
Until around 1635, Adriaen van Ostade, the great Dutch peasant painter, painted only inn scenes in the brown overall tones of Brouwer. Then he began to use more light and colour effects, presumably under the influence of Rembrandt, and a warmer, more golden tone became his trademark. Later he found his joy in the free nature and was happy to flee from the darkness of the bar into the fresh air. His peasants now sat in the front of the inns and allowed themselves to be coaxed into dancing by travelling musicians as in the Musical Party. Everything he painted was reproduced by etchings where again Rembrandt was his model. He depicted peasant life so completely that none of his successors found much to add.