446. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640),

Flemish, Albert and Nicolaas Rubens, 1626-1627.

Oil on wood, 157 x 93 cm. Sammlungen des

Fürsten von und zu Lichtenstein, Vaduz.

 

 

Frans Hals

(c. 1582 Antwerp – 1666 Haarlem)

 

Hals must have had fine qualities of mind; how else could he have seen things so simply and completely, and rendered them with such force and expression, inventing for the purpose a method of his own? His method was distinguished by placing his subject in clear light and by working largely in flat tones, to get at the essential facts of a subject, and to set them down rapidly and precisely, so that all may understand them and be impressed. He was, however, so shiftless that in his old age he was dependent upon the city government for support. That he received it, however, and that his creditors were lenient with him, seems to show that his contemporaries recognised greatness behind his intemperance and improvidence; and, when in his eighty-second year he died, he was buried beneath the choir of the Church of St. Bavon in Haarlem.

For a long time after his death, Hals was thought little of, even in Holland, where artists forsook the traditions of their own school and went in search of other mentors – to wit, those of the Italian “grand style”. It was not until well into the nineteenth century that artists returning to the truth of nature, discovered that Hals had been one of the greatest seers of the truth and one of its most virile interpreters. Today he is honoured for these qualities, and of all the much-admired Dutch pictures of the seventeenth century, his are the most characteristic of the Dutch race and of the art which it produced.