Frans Hals was a Dutch portrait painter, born in Antwerp around 1582, who spent almost his whole life in Haarlem and died there in 1666. His sitters laugh, smirk and glance sideways at a time when portraits were meant to be solemn.
He left his brushstrokes separate and visible, so that up close a silk sleeve breaks into long, quick marks of paint. His best known picture, The Laughing Cavalier of 1624, carries a title everyone knows and shows a man nobody can name.
Haarlem's merchants, brewers and militia officers paid him to look alive on canvas, and for fifty years he delivered. Yet he ended his life in debt, living on a city pension, and for generations after his death critics passed him over.
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The Antwerp of his birth was one of the richest cities in northern Europe, until Spanish forces retook it in 1585 after a long siege. Catholic Spain was fighting to keep the rebellious Netherlands under its king, and the city's Protestants were given four years to settle their affairs and leave.
Thousands of Protestant families packed up and fled north into the Dutch Republic, the provinces that had broken away from Spain. The Hals family was among them. By the late 1580s they had settled in Haarlem, a busy cloth and brewing town near Amsterdam, whose brewers would one day sit for the boy.
Around 1600 that boy went to learn from the painter Karel van Mander, though little of his teacher's style ever shows in his work. Van Mander's fame rests on a book, the Schilder-boeck of 1604, a collection of painters' lives that became a landmark history of the art of the Low Countries, north and south.
In 1610, already close to thirty, Hals entered the painters' guild of the town. It was named after Saint Luke, who according to legend had painted the Virgin Mary, and every working painter had to join it before selling a picture.
The commissions that followed began quietly. His earliest known portraits, from around 1612, are careful and formal, and they give no hint of the faces he would paint a few years later, or of the title a later portrait would receive long after his death.
Painting Haarlem's militia
The Dutch Republic had no royal court and few grand churches handing out commissions, so a painter could not live on kings and altarpieces. His customers had to be found in the town itself, and in Haarlem some of the most eager ones came armed.
What You'll Discover
Why the Laughing Cavalier does not laugh.
How he painted a laugh.
Who invented the drunkard.
What his creditors found.
What he painted at eighty.
Who brought him back to fame.