Dutch artist Frans Hals' painting "Portrait of a Man." When you go to an exhibition of an artist who has been a household name for as long as Frans Hals (1582-1666) has been, it’s almost inevitable that you will stub your toe on the difference between the iconic meaning of his brand-name style and his personal truth. Today, of course, we favor artists who express what appear to be authentic individual truths above all else. But 350 years ago, style was not yet truth.
“Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum” is a small show, just 13 paintings by its titled artist (including two loans from nearby private collections) and perhaps as many more again by antecedents, students, and distant admirers (like Hals’ most slavish 19th-century American fan, Robert Henri). In history, Hals is considered one of the great juicers of painting, creator of lifelike portraits and ribald tavern scenes in dashing brush strokes that suggest a freshness only wet paint can convey.
The lingering undertow is that he was slightly sloppy, a painter of portraits and not the nobler histories because he did not have quite the sticking point that folks like Rubens or Rembrandt displayed — and would a modern artist make taverns and smokers so much a part of what he paints if he didn’t, ahem, perhaps partake too much?
Reality is something else. Hals was born in Antwerp, to a cloth worker and a Catholic, apparently, who moved to Haarlem when Frans was 4 years old to become a Protestant. This religious move north may be just about all you need to know about Hals: He painted portraits because histories and even religious themes were frowned upon in convert Protestant circles.
His bravura style was admired even in his lifetime, but it is anything but sloppy. His portrait of “Samuel Ampzing” (1630) lays that to rest. One of only three Hals pictures done on a small copper plate, its bold highlights are tightly controlled to convey a tactile realism, especially in the delicate ruff and bristling beard.
And nobody in the 17th century lived to 85 or so, working right until the end, if they drank too much. Hals maintained a famous practice in Haarlem for almost 60 years, supporting 13 children in middle-class comfort for longer than the life expectancy of 99 percent of the population. That he could have been anything but a drone bee reminds us of the reception one of the Met’s masterpieces, “Portrait of a Man, possibly Nicolaes Pietersz Duyst van Voorhout,” has always gotten — that his florid face means he was a brewer.
Actually, van Voorhout was a brewer — but brewing 17th-century beer (which was low in alcohol but safe to drink, unlike the water) wasn’t a Homer Simpson job. A good 21 of the 24 members of Haarlem’s town council in the 1620s were, in fact, brewers. And this portrait may convey something Rabelaisian in its silk jerkin, bulbous nose and goaty mustache/soul patch combo entirely by accident. Close examination of the expression suggests not happy inebriation but weary wariness.
Of course, Hals was known for his tavern and banquet scenes, like any good Dutch 17th-century genre painter, and the Met has three great examples, “The Smoker,” “Young Man and Woman in an Inn” and “Merrymakers at Shrovetide.”
“Merrymakers” is the most remarkable, a scene in a crowded tavern pushed up against the picture plane: In the foreground, a pre-Lent table set with tankards, mince pies, sausages and cuts of ham (did the Dutch give awards for ham painting? There are hams in almost every picture), and behind it an apple-cheeked woman in satin embroidery flanked by two characters from Dutch folklore, Jan Wurst (i.e., John Sausage) on the right and Peckelharing (Pickled Herring). They make obscene gestures and cozen up to the blonde suggestively.
Par-tay. But you’re supposed to look more closely. The eggs Peckelharing dangles from his ropes of sausage are broken, the bagpipe on the table is wrinkled and collapsed, and the sausages have ends pierced with wooden sticks — this is a condemnation, a Mad Magazine cartoon about excess. And the beautifully painted woman’s dress is Flemish, hence Catholic.
And that’s Frans Hals’s real personal truth.
Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum
Where: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, New York City
When: Through Oct. 10. Open Tuesdays to Thursdays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sundays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
How much: Recommended admission for adults, $20; $15 for seniors; $10 for students; children younger than 12 free. For more information, call (212) 535-7710 or visit metmuseum.org.