Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
16 February – 9 June 2024
The Rijksmuseum presents “Frans Hals“, an exhibition of some 50 of the Dutch master’s greatest paintings, many on loan from top international collections.
Frans Hals (Antwerp c.1583 – Haarlem 1666) is regarded as one of the most innovative artists of the 17th century, for his brisk, impressionistic painting style. With unparalleled boldness and talent, he captured the vitality of his subjects – from stately regents to cheerful musicians and children – and made them live and breathe on the canvas.
Frans Hals set himself the goal as a painter of capturing his subjects as the living, breathing, spirited people they were, in the most convincing manner possible. He achieved this by deliberately and courageously developing a unique style that was utterly original in Dutch 17th-century painting. Hals chose to use rapid brushwork to achieve an unprecedented sense of dynamism in his portraits. He is one of very few artists in the history of Western art to have successfully painted people smiling and laughing – most painters shied away from this challenge simply because it is so difficult. The subjects of Hals’s paintings come even more to life in this Rijksmuseum exhibition through explorations of their individual identities and social worlds. Malle Babbe, for example, must have been a familiar figure on the streets of Haarlem, and Pekelharing was probably an actor touring with a British theatre company.
Pekelharing or Peeckelhaering (c.1626), Frans Hals (1582:1583–1666), 76x64cm, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig.
Frans Hals’s original style and technique earned him a reputation in his own time as a virtuoso, a status equalled only by the likes of Rembrandt in the Netherlands and Velázquez in Spain. He was an in-demand portraitist among the wealthy citizenry of Haarlem and other cities in the region. Over the course of the 18th century, however, Hals’s work gradually fell into obscurity. It wasn’t until the 19th century that French art critic and journalist Théophile Thoré-Bürger (1807–1869) rediscovered his work, as well as that of Vermeer. Until the 1960s, Frans Hals was regarded as one of the ‘big three’ of 17th-century Dutch painting, alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer. Later, however, interest in the artist waned significantly – reason enough for the Rijksmuseum, The National Gallery, London, and Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, to place him on the highest possible pedestal and to show how truly boundary-breaking he was as an artist.
The artist’s expressive, gestural brushwork has always been seen as the most distinctive quality of his art, and he can justifiably be described as the forerunner of Impressionism. Hals’s virtuosic style influenced fellow artists Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, James McNeil Whistler, Claude Monet, Max Liebermann, Vincent van Gogh, John Singer Sargent and others. Almost all of them visited Haarlem to admire his portraits of individuals and civil militia groups.
Frans Hals is organised by the Rijksmuseum in partnership with the National Gallery, London, and Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.