Frans Hals, The Lute Player, 1623-24. Musée du Louvre.
Claire Ford-Wille introduces the exciting Frans Hals exhibition organised by London’s National Gallery and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam with the special collaboration of the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, bringing together fifty outstanding, compelling portraits, in the first major retrospective of Hals (1582/3-1666) in over thirty years.
Study afternoon - includes two lectures, Q&A and a short break. Tickets £20
Part One:
The first lecture explores Frans Hals’ early career in Haarlem where his parents settled, fleeing persecution in the Southern Netherlands to the safety of the newly emerging Protestant Dutch provinces. Haarlem was an important centre of trade, and we shall examine the artists working there who might have trained or influenced Hals. From his earliest single or militia group portraits Hals showed his unique innovative abilities to transform his sitters through his extraordinary brushwork, ground-breaking compositions, expressive colour, and light. His work as a portraitist engaged with the Dutch emergence of a new range of subjects appealing to an increasingly wealthy Protestant middle-class, with amusing or moralising paintings of everyday personalities, such as in the National Gallery’s own Boy with a Skull, marriage portraits and sparkling small-scale portrayals of the Five Senses. What were the origins of Hal’s extraordinary technique and whom did he influence at this stage in his career?
Part Two:
During the second half of his long career, Hals specialised only in commissioned single or group portraits. Militia companies were disbanded in the middle of the 17th century and Hals’ later group portraits represent quieter male and female governors of alms houses in Haarlem. His brushwork becomes ever more exciting bringing out the responses of his sitters to the viewer in a penetrating way, as if the viewer were actually there. This is in no way diminished even when, in his eighties, he paints the outstanding group portraits of the male and female regents of the Old Men’s Alms House, so admired by Vincent van Gogh. Hals’ portraits became very influential in the 19th century and his work has been extensively studied since, but there is still much that we do not know. To what extent did Rembrandt know Hals’ work? Why are there no drawings and why did Hals not produce more in his long career? It will be interesting if these and other lingering questions might be answered in the exhibition.
The Credit Suisse Exhibition Frans Hals is at the National Gallery, London, from 30 September 2023 to 21 January 2024,
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This is an online event hosted on Zoom which can be watched live, or on-demand for one month afterwards. You will receive your link to access the event in your email confirmation and the on-demand link after the event ends.