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Frans Hals was the great 17th-century portraitist of the Dutch bourgeoisie of Haarlem, where he spent practically all his life. Hals was born either in 1580 or 1581, in AntwerpBeligum. Like many, Hals’ family fled during the Fall of Antwerp (1584-1585)to Haarlem, Netherlands, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Frans Hals left no written evidence about his life or his works, and only a brief outline of his biography is known. He was the son of a clothworker from Mechelen and of a local girl, and the family moved from Spanish-held Flanders to Haarlem in the free Netherlands by 1591 and except for a brief visit to Antwerp in 1616, Hals lived all his life in Haarlem.

What he did for the first 25 or 30 years of his life is not known. The earliest indication of his activity as an artist was that about 1610 he joined the Guild of St Luke of Haarlem, a group who’s purpose is to register artists as masters. Shortly afterward he married his first wife, Annetje Harmensdochter Abeel. She bore him two children before her death in 1615from child birth. Two years later, Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers, who was to survive her husband by some nine years. In all, Hals had 10 children, and 5 of his 8 sons became painters. None, however, rose to fame.

Hals studied under the Flemish-artist, Karel van Mander whose Mannerist influence, however, is not noticeably visible in his work. At the age of 27, he became a member of the city’s painter’s corporation, the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and he started to earn money as an art restorer for the city council. The most notable of these were the works of Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Jan van Scorel and Jan Mostaert, that hung in de St. Jans kerk in Haarlem.

Hals evolved a technique that was close to impressionism in its looseness, and he painted with increasing freedom as he grew older. The jovial spirit of his early work is typified by the Shrovetide Revellers. In middle age his portraits grew increasingly sad, revealing sometimes a sense of foreboding, as depicted by Nicolaes Hasselaer, 1630-33; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The paintings of his old age show best his genius for portraying character as seen in the Man in a Slouch Hat,1660-66; Staatliche Museen, Kassel.

Frans Hals seems to have begun his career with sober portraits and with group portraits of members of the local guilds and military societies. The best of these early works – which already shows complete competence in portraiture – is a monumental painting entitled Banquet of Officers of the Civic Guard of St. George at Haarlem(1616; Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem), painted with a loose brushstroke technique that is unlike anything else in Dutch art of the time. It already has a sense of life and of relationship between the figures that was then unknown in this type of subject matter. By about 1620, however, Hals had begun to introduce into his paintings the jovial spirit that characterized his early works and that portrays with accuracy and enthusiasm one important aspect traditionally ascribed to Dutch character. Many of his portraits are simply pictures of merrymakers. The portrait of Hans Wurst in The Merry Companyshows the sitter in a tall, wide-brimmed hat, wearing a necklace made of pig’s feet, herrings, and eggs. The portrait of Mr. Verdonck (c. 1627) shows the subject joyfully brandishing the jawbone of a horse. Similar in spirit are the portrait of Peeckelhaering (c. 1628-30) clenching his beer mug, The Merry Drinker, and two later portraits, a picture entitled Malle Babbe(1633-35; Staatliche Museen, Berlin), which portrays an old madwoman laughing, with an owl perched on her shoulder, and a joyful picture in the Louvre Museum of a laughing, carelessly dressed Gypsy Girl(1628-30). In Hals’s group portraits this jovial spirit is evident and it revolutionizes the hitherto austere genre. One such painting is his second Banquet of Officers of the Civic Guard of St George at Haarlem(1627; Frans Halsmuseum), in which the figures take up postures normally employed for the expression of mystical religious rapture to celebrate their well-nourished contentment. In this painting, Hals displays his unmistakable genius for mise-en-scène; the dramatic effects he achieves here set him apart from most other painters. His militiamen are linked in a harmonious composition that makes the viewer aware of the cohesion of their group as a whole. Each conducts a dialogue with his neighbour, and here and there one figure is made purposely to disrupt the scheme with a gesture or a glance in the viewer’s direction. Nothing is happening except a meal shared by typical members of the Dutch middle class and their conversations. Yet there is a majesty to this scene that is equal to any depiction of an incident from the life of a king.

By the 1620s Hals had definitively evolved a technique that was close to impressionism in its looseness. Like the contemporary Spanish painter Diego Velázquez,he used colour to structure forms; and this use of colour is what sets the two artists apart from their contemporaries. Unique to Hals, however, is his use of quick, loose strokes of bright colour that suggest rather than enclose form and are highly expressive of movement and of the subjects’ vitality. Most painters of the 17th century approached their paintings slowly, with preparatory drawings, a certain amount of underpainting, and an elaborate finish. Although there is no certain evidence of his method, Hals seems to have started directly on the canvas and painted quickly, leaving his first spontaneous expression, which is almost an oil sketch, as the finished work. Hals continued to use this technique, which gave a striking immediacy to his perceptive portrayals of character, all his life, painting with increasing freedom as he grew older. Man with Arms Crossed (1622). Others follow that contain the same theme: The Laughing Cavalier (1624; Wallace Collection, London), Portrait of Isaac Abrahamszoon Massa (1626; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), Pieter van den Broecke (1633).René Descartes. Still, although some continued to value his subtle perceptions, the public had generally begun to favour a more elegant style made popular by the portrait painter Anthony Van Dyck in England. What commissions he did receive were not enough to support him, and, like his two great compatriots Rembrandt and Vermeer,he saw his possessions sold at auction for debt in 1654. It was not until 1662 that his right to public assistance was recognized, and he was accorded a yearly pension by the city. In spite of this adversity the portraits of Hals’ last 16 years are his masterpieces. At this point, a view of the world is revealed in his painting in which the human comedy takes a tragic turn, and something breaks in the order that had kept the reasonable man and the madman separated. His portraits, no longer tempered by laughter, seem to express a realization that simply being is enough, after a certain age, for life to impress its tragic seal. group of old men and the other of old women, his men seem overcome with drunkenness and his women entranced by the obsession of death. Here he presents us with the most extraordinary reunion of senile decay ever assembled in the history of the pictorial arts; he shows us the quavering flame of dying life. It is not known whether these portraits were comprehensible to his models.

The joviality began to disappear from the paintings of Hals’s middle age. In the portraits painted after he reached the age of 40, the subjects seem to eye the world knowingly, with a shade of sadness in their faces. The period from 1630 to 1650 was Hals’s most productive. He was very popular among the staid citizens of Haarlem’s middle class, and during this time he painted more than 100 single portraits and 6 group and family portraits.

Frans Hals lived to be very old, and it is in the paintings of his old age that his genius for portraying human character is fully revealed. The last years of his life were difficult materially, and he was harassed by discouraging family problems. Although he continued to work steadily, he received markedly fewer commissions after 1650. He had, during his long career, achieved an impressive reputation; he had been honoured by many important commissions, had become in 1644 an officer of the Guild of St Luke, and in 1649 had painted the philosopher

Henceforth, Hals drew gradually closer to traditional subjects and stored away his drinking glasses and his tableware. At the same time he diminished the intensity, the vividness of his themes, a greater simplicity appeared in his compositions, and he took more and more liberty with his painting. His palette lost a good deal of its lustre. But through decades of work he had evolved a remarkably broad range of blacks and whites to choose from, and these colours were sufficient for what he wanted to show.

Old age fostered self-denial and a strict discipline in Hals, along with a new freedom in his painting. It most certainly was a painful time for the great painter. But the years had also sharpened his vision. There is no sign of religion in the evolution of his art; and it may be assumed that to Frans Hals, painting was a secular concern. Nevertheless, the loving compassion that permeated his art becomes, in his last years, something spiritual.

Like many artists whose style is unique in their own time, he left few direct followers. Hals was for a long time regarded as a competent but limited painter whose consistent neglect of any subjects other than portraits gave him no place in the history of significant art. It was not until the 19th century that interest in his work was revived. He influenced Édouard Manet with his free style and Vincent van Gogh with his subtle range of colours. In modern times he has been appreciated for the serious and excellent realist painter that he was.