Frans Hals was a Dutch painter, born in Antwerp around 1582, who spent almost his whole life in Haarlem and died there in 1666. He painted faces that laugh, smirk and glance sideways at a time when portraits were meant to be solemn, with brushstrokes so loose that they are still visible today. He is best known for The Laughing Cavalier of 1624, a portrait with a famous title and no known sitter.
Haarlem's merchants, brewers and militia officers paid him to look alive on canvas, and for fifty years he delivered. The picture that made him famous, though, carries a title he never gave it.
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Look at the man in The Laughing Cavalier and check the title against the face. He is not laughing. The corners of his mouth lift under a waxed moustache, one eyebrow rises, and that is all. Nobody has shown that he was a cavalier, either.
The title is Victorian. When the canvas hung at the Bethnal Green Museum in London between 1872 and 1875, the catalogue called it only A Cavalier. By 1888, at the Royal Academy, it had become the Laughing Cavalier, and the name stuck.
Hals did leave one thing in writing, at the top right of the canvas: the sitter was twenty-six, and the year was 1624. His sleeve is embroidered with bees, arrows and flaming horns of plenty, emblems of the pleasures and pains of love. Nobody has ever found out who he was.
What You'll Discover
Why his family fled Antwerp.
How he painted a laugh.
Who invented the drunkard.
What his creditors found.
What he painted at eighty.
Who brought him back to fame.