How Frans Hals taught the world to smile

How do I put this delicately? Frans Hals, the 17th-century painter renowned for the liveliness of his portraits, has an image problem. While countless artists have gained notoriety for carousing, Hals – the subject of a new exhibition at the National Gallery – is generally thought to have been more Falstaffian than most.

According to his 18th-century biographer, Arnold Houbraken, this high-spirited Dutchman – who may well have misspent his youth, given that he was already in his late 20s by the time he produced his earliest known paintings – haunted his local alehouses in the northern city of Haarlem, and was “commonly drunk to the gills every night”. Indeed, he supposedly used to get so blotto he had to be carried home.

His pictures, certainly, are far from sober. During a long career, Hals painted innkeepers, flushed revellers, portly brewers, and peasants clutching tankards. Among his specialities were grog-fuelled banquet scenes frequented by Haarlem’s elite. In one of his most famous works, painted c  1628, which hangs today in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour, a militiaman with ruddy cheeks and parted lips holds out a vessel filled with wine, as if about to clink glasses with the viewer.

Is it a “genre picture”, as art historians call scenes from everyday life,  or a casual portrait of the artist’s drinking buddy? Nobody can say for sure – but you can understand why the Merry Drinker, as it’s known, has encouraged the perception that the painter liked to be in his cups.

Still, given the absence of hard evidence (not a single letter or note by the artist, for instance, has been unearthed), I’m inclined to agree with one of his most ardent 19th-century admirers, the American painter James McNeill Whistler, who declared: “They say he was a drunkard. Don’t you believe it… Just imagine a drunkard doing these beautiful things!”

Have we mistaken the cheerfulness in Hals’s pictures for intemperance? Certainly, the dark side of drink, the violence and depression it can provoke, is never his subject, while a sort of irrepressible merriment – which, in many cases, has nothing to do with alcohol – often is.

Hals captured this attractive quality by mastering expressions that few artists before him had dared to depict: the smile, the grin, even ­outright laughter. Indeed, so gifted was he at painting glee that he became known as “master of the laugh”. Beaming exuberance, rather than boozing, is the fundamental characteristic of his art.

Sometimes, this twinkle is conveyed by the faintest upturn of the lips. That’s the case with his Laughing Cavalier, in the Wallace Collection, who will, exceptionally, be travelling to the National Gallery. He isn’t, in fact, “laughing” at all: the cheeriness derives, in part, from this dashing 26-year-old’s moustaches, which appear as perky and alert as a pair of meerkats. At other times, though, especially in genre pictures, in which Hals would not have felt bound by the wishes of his clients, he let rip: children beam, burghers smirk, the swarthy face of a comical stage character known as Pekelharing (pickled herring) is locked in a perpetual, teeth-baring guffaw.

Sometimes, the expressions Hals paints are knowing. In one picture, coming to London from the Louvre, and known since the 19th century as La Bohémienne (“Gypsy Girl”), a young woman who may be a sex worker offers an alluring, ­narrow-eyed grin; in another, a portrait of newlyweds that also dates from the 1620s, the blushing wife’s smile appears positively postcoital.

Perhaps the most intriguing picture in the National Gallery’s show, though, is a portrait, travelling from Berlin, known as Malle Babbe (“Mad Babs”). It depicts Barbara Claes, a well-known resident of Haarlem who suffered from a psychological condition and was committed to the workhouse. Although in the painting Claes is ostensibly smiling, her expression is really a grimace that matches the frenzied brushwork, offering, perhaps, a terrifying vision of mental anguish.

And what of Hals himself? Only two self-portraits are known; in ­neither is he smiling. Without succumbing to clichés about sad clowns, it’s striking that in one of them – which appears in the background of a large group portrait of militiamen from 1639 – Hals depicts himself as a pouch-eyed, tuberous wraith, lurking in the shadows. For all the merriment in his pictures, his life was no joke: with a large family to support, he was often in debt for everyday fare (including bread), and one of his children, Pieter, ended up in the same institution where, perhaps, he encountered, and painted, Malle Babbe.

Bart Cornelis, the curator of the National Gallery exhibition, confirms that, before Hals, paintings of people smiling and laughing were “very rare”. Yes, the subject of Western art’s most famous portrait – ­Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa – is smiling (hence, its French nickname: “La Joconde”), but her subtle expression is no more than the ghost of a smile; it conveys little of the glee that we encounter in Hals’s work.

Indeed, Cornelis can think of only a ­single other exception to the general rule – a painting, now in the ­Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, by the 16th-century Flemish artist Crispijn van den Broeck, of two cheerfully embracing young men, one offering an apple to the other. These youths, says Cornelis, “smile and laugh in the most natural manner – it’s almost like a photograph”.

So few artists attempted anything like this because, he says, “laughter is about the most difficult thing to paint: it’s hard to get right the way your muscles move around your mouth, to ensure that it comes across as a smile. The chances are that you will turn it into a grimace.” Before the modern era, moreover, boisterous laughter was considered indecorous, and conventional portraits were necessarily sober-faced.

Why, then, did Hals decide to make naturalistic smiles his artistic signature? Because doing so allowed him to emphasise his singular talent. Viewers have always responded to the unguarded quality of his portraits, which have something in common with the modern photographic “snapshot”. There’s nothing stuffy about Hals’s likenesses: when he paints important men and women – especially those with whom he was friendly – he does so in an intimate, informal manner that makes them so engaging.

One pillar of society, for instance, wearing a gold chain in recognition of loyal service to the Dutch East India Company, appears smiling and with unkempt hair, as immediate and jolly as that merry militiaman in the Rijksmuseum. Another, a prosperous cloth merchant with a sardonic expression, leans back so far that – in a first for art history – his chair tilts precariously on two legs.

Hals had a knack, then, for inventing compositional devices to enliven his portraiture. I’d even go so far as to draw a link between his aptitude for depicting laughter and the loose, fluid brushwork – painting vigorously “wet-in-wet”, without, seemingly, any preparatory drawings – for which he’s famous. There’s a deliberate, show-your-working casualness to his style: a few rapid flicks here, a flurry of fluid strokes and zig-zags there, always suggesting but rarely belabouring a form.

The French art critic Théophile Thoré-­Bürger, who rediscovered both Hals and Vermeer during the 19th century, suggested that Hals “painted like a fencer and… wielded his brush like an épée”. To me, though, his dazzling, virtuosic brushwork has a tinkling, effervescent quality, like laughter, so that, in his work, style and subject matter complement one another: there is, Cornelis agrees, “a sort of natural fit” between the two.

For some, however, the merriment of Hals – who generally stuck to portraiture, and mostly refrained from attempting those biblical or mythological subjects once thought to occupy the summit of Western art – is a sign that he’s essentially trivial, a lightweight. “Revoltingly cheerful and horribly skilful,” is how the 20th-century art historian Kenneth Clark characterised his pictures (although, in the same sentence, he revealed that he had subsequently changed his mind about them). Writing in the catalogue for the National Gallery’s exhibition, Cornelis argues that Hals – so beloved at the turn of the 20th century as a sort of precursor of loosely painted, “impressionistic” modern art – has “faded more or less into the background”. The artist’s last significant retrospective opened a generation ago, in 1989.

To dismiss Hals as unserious, though, would be a mistake. The immediacy of his pictures – enhanced by his sitters’ convincing smiles – is their superpower. “With Hals, it’s a visceral experience,” explains Cornelis. “I feel I know these people. Hals understood the joyous side of life.”

Frans Hals opens at the National Gallery, London WC2 (nationalgallery.org.uk), on Sept 30