Golden Age Portraiture: Revealing Frans Hals

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has frequently organised exhibitions celebrating the most important painters of its ‘Dutch Golden Age’, most recently Rembrandt and Vermeer, for both of which we have organised webinars with associated tours. It is over 30 years since there has been a major retrospective devoted to the third of the three great ‘Golden Age’ painters, Frans Hals. The Rijksmuseum, in conjunction with London’s National Gallery and Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie has organised a major Hals exhibition, now open in London. I am delighted to announce that I shall give a webinar in connection with the exhibition, Golden Age Portraiture: Revealing Frans Hals, Friday, December 8th. The webinar will be the perfect introduction not only to the exhibition, setting Hals within the context of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ but also for our tour to Amsterdam to look at the career of Hals with special visits within Amsterdam, Haarlem and The Hague.

Frans Hals was born in 1582 in Antwerp, when religious conflict dominated the ‘80 Years War’ between the northern, mainly Protestant provinces and their Spanish rulers, based in Brussels. The family moved to Haarlem to escape religious persecution, where he trained as a painter. His style is immediately recognisable – it displays an intimate realism executed with a freshness that at times seems strikingly modern, indeed as unlike Rembrandt as it is possible to be. As one critic has remarked ‘Hals seized a moment in the life of his subjects with rare intuition, fond of daylight and silvery sheen, while Rembrandt used golden glow effects based upon artificial contrasts of low light in immeasurable gloom’. His subjects come from across the social strata: grandee banquets, meetings of militia officers, local councillors and their clerks, wealthy merchants and their wives, itinerant musicians and the ‘flotsam and jetsam’ of tavern life. It should come as no surprise that his subject matter and technique would fascinate painters in the nineteenth century – he is one of the few great artists who gave black and white so many tonal shades – an inspiration to Manet and Van Gogh.