I’d cross the street to avoid meeting most of the people Frans Hals painted. They impress me as bores of one calibre or another: oafish, supercilious, run-of-the-mill. The fact that they have been gone for more than three centuries—Hals died in 1666, in his early eighties (his birth date is uncertain)—spared me the trouble but not the thought at “Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum.” The show features the eleven paintings that the Met owns by Hals—the dashing portraitist of Haarlem gentry in the Dutch Golden Age—augmented by two striking paintings on loan and apposite works by some of his contemporaries. Supplementary, painlessly educational exhibits illustrate the problems of telling Hals’s works apart from those of his many imitators (among them one or more of his five painter sons) and point up his lasting influence, as in a crackling little portrait, from 1907, by the American Robert Henri. It’s a sprightly, vigorous show, as any focus on Hals is sure to be. He was one of the three main geniuses of the Dutch Baroque, with Rembrandt and Vermeer, and you can’t beat him for evergreen liveliness.
His celebrated brushwork is at times ostensibly slapdash but always acutely descriptive, and it excites at a glance. Witness “Boy with a Lute” (circa 1625), in which a jovial lad calls for a refill of his empty glass. The motif recalls images of fetchingly louche youths in the light-in-darkness style of Caravaggio, which was then influential, but with a blithe speediness that is utterly remote from the Italian’s frozen radiance. Hals is an avatar of style as a free-floating value—one that is all but independent of its subjects and occasions. This explains the soaring ascent of his reputation, after long neglect, in the mid-nineteenth century, when budding modernists, especially Manet, found in his summary ways of drawing with paint an escape from the airless fuss and polish of academic convention. Hals showed them how candid technique could serve the direct registration of people and things as they really appear: art as an adept performance, in a streaming present tense.
Hals was born in the Flemish city of Antwerp, which his family fled in 1585, when, after a siege, Holland lost it to Spain. His father was a clothworker, and it made sense to settle in Haarlem, a flourishing center of the textile industries. Frans was apprenticed to another Flemish émigré, the Mannerist painter Karel van Mander, and became a member of Haarlem’s painters’ guild in 1610. A fine catalogue essay by the Met’s curator of Dutch and Flemish painting, Walter Liedtke, recounts the decisive effects on Hals of a return visit to Antwerp, in 1616. There he would have beheld the explosive inventions of Rubens and the young Van Dyck, among others, from whom he absorbed, Liedtke posits, an all-around “pictorial literacy.” So Hals’s originality came not out of nowhere but from several sources at once, all perhaps indebted to the “rough style,” as it was termed then, of late Titian. Hals’s panache, notably in dazzling early group portraits of local militias, quickly charmed Haarlem, becoming emblematic of the city’s entrepreneurial zest and robust self-regard.
What was Hals like? Early biographers, writing decades after his death, promulgated legends of loose living, drenched in alcohol. Liedtke finds no basis for them. Yes, Hals may have associated with brewers, but, in 1619, twenty-one of the twenty-four members of the Haarlem city council plied that trade. Liedtke sets aside, as moot, “the question of whether brewers drank a large part of what they produced.” Their profession was highly honored. (Liedtke adds that the beer of the Golden Age was low in alcohol content and a lot safer to drink than the available water.) A story that the artist abused his first wife, who died young, was derived from court records that turn out to have involved another Haarlemite, also named Frans Hals. But the canards speak to a lingering mystery about Hals’s art: its lack of deepening development. The energy never flags, but the tone seems stuck at a lazy bonhomie. Something kept Hals distracted.
Hals’s relentless jolliness isn’t confined to his genre scenes of rollicking topers, such as “Young Man and Woman in an Inn” (1623). The euphoric hero hoists a glass while being attended with fawning approval by a prostitute, a dog, and an innkeeper—three parties, according to a Dutch adage of the time, whose affections come at a cost. (A fourth could be added: the professional portraitist.) But there’s no bite to the moralism in the painting; it’s purely jokey, for the amusement of a rising, self-satisfied commercial class. Hals figures in history not only as a stylist but as an emergent type: the independent contractor to the bourgeoisie, dependably exalting its values of individual identity and status. After his Antwerp sojourn, he rarely left Haarlem, whose newly rich all but lined up at his studio door to be immortalized. He did indeed individualize them, exquisitely specifying their extroverted, typically waggish attitudes. But they all seem to be on the same drug, an intoxicant imparting silly confidence. Hals’s lowlife scenes reassure such citizens that the poorer orders of their society are likewise upbeat. The ravishing “The Fisher Girl” (circa 1630-32), from a private collection in New York, shows a pretty, weather-ruddied urchin grinning as she offers a silvery fish to an unseen customer. Everybody is happy in Haarlem!
Hals outlived his success. By the end of his long life, he was out of fashion and impoverished, which has led some critics to seek signs of embitterment in his late work. John Berger, in a prominent BBC television series and a book, both titled “Ways of Seeing” (1972), thought that he detected a proto-revolutionary resentment in group portraits of charity officials that were among Hals’s last commissions. One of the worthies looks spectacularly drunk. Malcolm Eden, of the rock band McCarthy, expatiated on Berger’s speculation in the song “Frans Hals”: “The poor . . . know your names and they know your faces / they will deal with you.” That’s a stretch, but one enabled by a certain stoniness of heart, beneath the people-pleasing friskiness, in all of Hals’s work. (I fancy that if you were a detective seeking a suspect from Haarlem, with only a Hals portrait to go on, you’d make an easy I.D. not only visually but with a distinguishing feel, unclouded by inexpedient sympathy, for your quarry.) Class content is so dominant in Hals, from the start, that it’s tempting to imagine a changed social perspective, attendant on the artist’s fall; yet Berger’s political reading seems to me strictly a projection. It belittles Hals as an individual. But, then, so does Hals.
Hals’s works are stunning as paintings, but paintings are also pictures: windows on a world. I find Hals’s world dishearteningly pedestrian. It hardly bears comparison to the enchanted realms whose Prosperos are Rembrandt and Vermeer. Hals was of his time to a fault. He caught the vitality of the new bourgeois individualism but not what, in human terms, it could be good for: the plumbing of souls in Rembrandt; the transfixion of the everyday in Vermeer. The life that counts in Hals is that of his own invincibly vivacious eye and hand. To a degree beyond such predecessors as Titian, El Greco, and Rubens, he is the first virtuoso of the visible brushstroke and its fundamental alchemy: materially just lying there, flat, while conjuring substance and space in the eye and rhetorical tone in the mind. It is indelibly up to date; because he so readily imparts tricks of the brush, no other Old Master is more apt to interest a young painter today. But Hals’s very fungibility confirms that none other seems to have made art so little for his own fulfillment. My imaginative participation in his portraits is pretty much limited to sharing the pleasure of the sitters—commonly posed with arms draped over the back of a chair or, standing, with one arm rakishly akimbo—at being able to afford the great one’s fee. ♦
