Why did a once-revered painter, Frans Hals, fall out of favour?

IN THE LATE 19th century, a pilgrimage became fashionable for Impressionist painters and other artists, who were striving to liberate painting from the stifling tradition of exactitude. Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet and John Singer Sargent took the Netherlands’ first train line to Haarlem. There, in a small museum attached to the town hall, they could admire and copy the works of that city’s greatest artist, who more than 200 years earlier had achieved a freedom of style they strove to emulate, with bold strokes, rough fields of colour and a vivid sense of movement.

Vincent van Gogh rhapsodised over the artist’s colours, claiming to have identified 27 shades of black. James McNeill Whistler stayed late and persuaded a guard to let him touch one of the most famous works, a portrait of “regentesses”.