Franz Hals at The Wallace Collection

About Franz Hals

Frans Hals (c.1582/3-1666) is one of the greatest artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Praised for his ability to paint likenesses that seemed 'to live and breathe', his portraits of individual men remain particularly vivid.

With them, Hals transformed the male portrait into something new and fresh, capturing his sitters' personalities and painting them in a bold technique entirely his own.

This exhibition, for the first time, gathers a fine selection of Hals's male portraits from across the five decades of his long career. In so doing, it situates The Laughing Cavalier - the artist's most famous work, and one of the most beloved pictures in the Wallace Collection - within the context of his radica reinvention of one of the oldest genres of art.

Hals's portraiture is intimately bound up with the Dutch port city of Haarlem, in which he lived and worked.

His patrons were predominantly from the city's elite, and included members of the militia, burgomasters and its many wealthy merchants and tradesmen.

Haarlem was also home to many professionals - including artists who had fled religious persecution in the Flemish southern Netherlands, then under Spanish rule.

This not only made Haarlem a cosmopolitan and vibrant artistic centre, but one in which young men dressed in flamboyant imported fashions and where patricians and nouveau riche alike appreciated the sophisticated flair with which Hals portrayed them.

Despite a successful career, Hals's work fell into obscurity following his death in 1666. His reputation as one of the great innovators of Dutch art, which preceded that of Rembrandt, was largely forgotten.

Some even suggested his bravura painting technique was the result of dissolute living! It wasn't until the second half of the 19th century and the 4th Marquess of Hertford's high-profile purchase of The Laughing Cavalier in 1865, that Hals's reputation was re-established, and admirers especially the Impressionists once more marvelled at his achievement.

Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull

c. 1610-14

One of Hals's earliest-known paintings, this sombre portrait highlights his somewhat conventional beginnings. The man's upright bearing and sober attire attests to the strict Spanish fashions prevalent in Dutch society in the early part of the 17th century. The inscription, saying that the man is sixty years old, may account for the skull he proffers - a prop commonly used to suggest the brevity of human life. Hals would omit such overt (and gloomy) symbolism from his portraits after this point.

Oil on panel

The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts,

The University of Birmingham

Pieter van den Broecke

Hals delights in depicting the ruddy cheeks and untidy hair of this successful merchant and admiral in the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Van den Broecke had travelled widely to Africa and South Asia, forging trade links and, we now know, engaging in the early years of the slave trade.

His metal gorget (collar) and the baton on which he leans reference his rank as admiral, while his heavy gold chain a gift from the VOC - Indicates his considerable wealth. It was worth four times the annual wages of a skilled craftsman.

Oil on canvas

English Heritage, The Iveagh Bequest (Kenwood, London)

Portrait of a Man, possibly Nicolaes Pietersz Duyst van Voorhout

C. 1636-8

Van Voorhout was a Haarlem brewer and art collector. Like The Laughing Cavalier, he faces left with one arm akimbo (elbow bent, hand on hip) and looks down at us from a height. He also sports the latest fashions including a magnificent grey satin doublet that bulges over his substantial midriff.

The picture sparkles with painterly flourishes including the sharply angled strokes that suggest the folds in his sleeve, and the short, parallel strokes used to model the front of his jacket.

Oil on canvas

Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection

1949 (49.7.33)

The Laughing Cavalier

1624

A highlight of Hals's career, this portrait stands apart in its lively immediacy and in the intricacy of the costume depicted. Portrayed at age twenty-six, the life-size sitter wears the latest French fashions accessible only to the Dutch elite.

His beautifully embroidered doublet is decorated with emblems associated with fortune, strength, love and virtue. He is most likely a bachelor due to his dashing attire and left-facing orientation (in paired portraits of married couples, men usually turned rightward to face their wives).

The picture was given its catchy title around 1888 and, despite the fact that the sitter is neither laughing nor a 'cavalier'. it has never been renamed.

Oil on canvas

The Wallace Collection London

Issac Abrahamsz Massa

1626

The son of Flemish immigrants and a friend of Hals's, Massa was a prosperous merchant and diplomat who spent years in Russia. His portrait exudes a casual informality. With one elbow hooked over the back of his chair, he turns to look at something beyond the picture, while his parted lips give the impression that he is mid-speech.

Hals reserved this innovative pose - which gives the sense of being captured in a fleeting moment for his male sitters, and returned to it throughout his career.

Oil on canvas

Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Bequest of Frank P. Wood, 1955

Portrait of Tieleman Roosterman

1634

Roosterman's luxurious black velvet doublet, adorned with small buttons and ribbon rosettes, befits his success as a Haarlem textile merchant and dealer in fine linen and silk.

Hals pays great attention to Roosterman's large cambric cuff adorned with intricate lace, and to the generous folds of his flat collar designed to show off his fashionably long hair. The hat he clasps at his side was a sign of authority and male supremacy in 17th-century Holland.

Oil on canvas

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund

1999.73

Portrait of a Man

1630

This imposing, three-quarter-length portrait is masterful in its apparent simplicity. Standing proud, with one hand on his hip, the man confronts the viewer with tremendous dignity.

Although unidentified, the inscription in the upper right indicates that he is thirty-six years old. Hals's depiction of the man's black clothing, brilliantly modelled with a limited palette of blacks and greys, signal his wealth and social standing, as do the costly leather gloves he holds, which were a coveted luxury item.

Oil on canvas

Lent by Her Majesty The Queen

Portrait of a Man

C. 1635

Hals painted this portrait mostly wet-in-wet (without letting the preceding paint layers dry), which has resulted in a blurry, impressionistic effect.

The sitter's dynamic pose is equally lively and informal, with Hals positioning the sitter in the extreme foreground with his elbow jutting forward as if it were entering our space.

The picture was originally paired with a portrait of the man's wife, who is more formally posed and less sketchily painted - a distinction Hals often made in his pendant portraits.

Oil on canvas

Rijksmuseum. Gift of Jonkheer J.5.R van de Poll, Arnhem

Portrait of a Man

early 1650s

Hals's subjects often adopt this forward-facing pose, with one arm akimbo. But here, Hals places the man lower down the canvas, more on our eye level, and captures a watchful expression suggestive of great psychological depth.

The subtlety of Hals's depiction of this man's quiet presence is matched by his restricted use of colour. Only the looped ribbons hanging below the man's doublet enliven an almost entirely monochrome picture.

Hals's ability to achieve such tonal variety from this limited palette later led Van Gogh to quip about the master's colours: "Frans Hals must have had 27 blacks.'

Ol on canvas

Lent by The Metropolitan Museut

Gift of Henry G Marquand 1990 (91269)

Jasper Schade

1645

Jasper came from a prominent patrician family in Utrecht where he held various public offices. That such an aspiring young aristocrat chose Hals to paint his portrait, is a testament to the artist's far-reaching reputation beyond Haarlem. Jasper had an eye for fashion and was notorious for running up large bills at the tailors.

The year this portrait was painted, he spent 300 francs on a single piece of clothing in Paris, three-quarters of a skilled craftsman's annual wage.

Oil on canvas

National Gallery Prague

Portrait of a Man

C. 1660-63

Painted when Hals was in his eighties, this portrait's extremely loose technique could easily pass for the work of many of the artists who later admired him, such as the 19th-century painter, Edouard Manet. Here Hals rapidly sets down bold, unblended strokes using a broad brush.

The cloak, for instance, is composed of angular sweeps that suggest the fabric's folds and highlights, while in other places the application of paint is highly impressionistic with marks appearing to float on the canvas's surface.

Oil on canvas

The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge

Willem Coymans

1645

Hals's capacity to pair refinement with nonchalance reached an apogee in this portrait of Willem Coymans, a member of one of Holland's most affluent and influential merchant families.

Hals painted the gold thread of his embroidered doublet and the folds of his linen shirt using bold strokes and dashes of paint that coalesce into a remarkably descriptive whole when seen at a distance. Hals probably took greater liberties with both pose and technique in his portraits of bachelors like Coymans, as these men were less bound by social convention.

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.69

Portrait of Francois Wouters

1645

Hals could enliven even relatively formal portraits. Wouters, who was a successful brewer as well as a city councillor, alderman and burgomaster, commissioned this picture as one of a pair of portraits to celebrate his second marriage (the other depicted his new wife).

He wears sober dress, with a simple linen collar and a cloak tied over his black doublet. Hals introduced a hint of informality, however, by leaving the skin of Wouters's wrist visible just above his rumpled glove.

Oil on canvas

National Galleries of Scotland.

Presented by William McEwan 1885

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