Collection: Frans Hals
Frans Hals the Elder was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He lived and worked in Haarlem, a city in which the local authority of the day frowned on religious painting in places of worship but citizens liked to decorate their homes with works of art. Hals was highly sought after by wealthy burgher commissioners of individual, married-couple, family, and institutional-group portraits. He also painted tronies for the general market.
There were two quite distinct schools of portraiture in 17th-century Haarlem: the neat (represented, for example, by Verspronck); and a looser, more painterly style at which Frans Hals excelled. Some of Hals's portrait work is characterised by a subdued palette, reflecting the politely serious tones of his fashionable clients' wardrobe. In contrast, the personalities he paints are full of life, typically with a friendly glint in the eye or the glimmer of a smile on the lips.
Hals was born at Antwerp in the southern Spanish Netherlands, but because of the chaos wrought there by the Spanish at that time, his family moved to Haarlem when he was little. Many of his Haarlem clients were also émigrés from the South.
His formative teachers included Karel van Mander the Elder. Notable paintings include The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616, Regentesses of the Old Men's Alms House, Militia Company of District XI under the Command of Captain Reynier Reael, and Portrait of a young man with a skull. His practice spanned portrait painting, genre painting, and schutterstuk. His style aligns with Dutch Golden Age painting. The work sits within the Baroque tradition.
