Frans Hals

Hals joined the Haarlem painters’ guild in 1610, when he was already about 28 years old. What did he do before then? He probably worked as an assistant to another, established artist, who signed his paintings as if they were his own.

During the first half of his career, Hals executed a number of remarkable genre paintings, but, by about 1640, focused exclusively on portraiture. With a grin on his face and wine sloshing in his glass – a berkenmeier to be precise – the Merry Drinker is dressed like a contemporary soldier or civic guardsman. He is probably meant to be an anonymous comic figure, but might just be a portrait after all.

According to an early 18th-century biographer, Hals spent every evening in the pub and did not leave until he was good and drunk. His devoted pupils made sure he did not fall into the canal on his way home, but also played a practical joke on him one evening; they raised his bed with pulleys so that the poor man thought he was going to meet his maker.

According to a contemporary of Hals, ‘His paintings are imbued with such force and vitality that he seems to defy nature herself with his brush’. In Portrait of a Man, for example, the loose, seemingly dashed-off brushstrokes make the figure quiver with energy.

Unlike the sitters in most 17th-century Dutch wedding portraits, Hals’s Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen are actually smiling. They have emerged from the garden of love in the background into a state of marital bliss.

Hals received several commissions for official group portraits, most notably for five militia pieces of Haarlem’s civic guard, of which he himself was a member. In 1633, he became one of only two painters not resident in Amsterdam to receive a commission to portray a civic guard company of that city in the 17th century.

At some point, Hals lost interest in working on the Amsterdam militia piece now known as The Meagre Company. He did not want to come to the metropolis anymore and tried to persuade the Amsterdam guardsmen to come to him in Haarlem, which they refused to do, preferring to pay their neighbour Pieter Codde to finish the job.

Hals had three children with his first wife and eleven with his second, the first of which was born only a week after the couple’s wedding. Five of his sons would become painters, and many of the copies after his work, such as The Lute Player in the Rijksmuseum, have been attributed to them at some time or another.

Hals was in debt throughout most of his life, usually for small amounts owed for food, drink or rent arrears. In old age, it became impossible for him to make ends meet, and from 1664 he received an annual pension of 200 guilders from the city of Haarlem.

Hals’s dynamic designs and loose brushwork were not appreciated by 18th and early 19th century critics, who considered his work to be lazy and unfinished. This all changed with the rise of such movements as Impressionism, and Hals came to be hailed as a modern painter before his time.