Frans Hals: The Male Portrait

Frans Hals The Male Portrait

Frans Hals is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time and, together with Rembrandt, is one of the most eminent seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Published to coincide with the Wallace Collection’s exhibition of the same name, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artist’s highly innovative approach to male portraiture, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666.

Frans Hals

The Male Portrait

Through pose, expression and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters’ characters like no one else before him. This book includes the first in-depth study of Hals’s great masterpiece, The Laughing Cavalier, from 1624. The extravagantly dressed young man, confidently posed with his left arm akimbo in the extreme foreground of the picture and seemingly penetrating into the viewer’s space, has been charming audiences for over a century.

Richly illustrated, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait situates The Laughing Cavalier within the artist’s larger œuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve this great masterpiece.

lelia packer is Curator of Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German and Pre-1600 Paintings at the Wallace Collection. ashok roy is former Director of Science and Collections at the National Gallery, London.

ISBN 978-1-78130-110-4

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Front: Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624, oil on canvas, 83 x 67.3 cm.

The Wallace Collection, London Back: Detail of The Laughing Cavalier

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1.3 Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman, 1610–15, oil on canvas, 94.2 x 71.1 cm. Chatsworth, Derbyshire (267).

toward his wife as he gestures with his right hand in her direction.

Such touches of activity would become increasingly prominent in Hals’s portraits. The shield with the man’s coat of arms is displayed slightly from the side, attesting to Hals’s interest in spatial and physical reality.

The effective highlights on the strongly modelled hands and skull, and the vivid rendering of the man’s ruff signal Hals’s bolder handling to come.

Cat. 1. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull, c. 1610–14, oil on panel, 92.8 x 71.2 cm.

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (38.6).

An Established Master: Portraits from the 1620s During the 1620s, Hals explored novel ways to represent and animate his sitters. By 1624, when he painted The Laughing Cavalier (cat. 2), he was an established artist in Haarlem with a reliable clientele.6 A highlight of Hals’s career, The Laughing Cavalier stands apart in its directness, liveliness, immediacy, and in the intricacy of the sitter’s

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Aside from adapting a pose he had used in civic guard paintings, Hals adopted painting techniques found in his genre paintings to create an informal portrait that suggests a transitory moment. Massa’s parted lips give the impression that he is speaking, an effect reinforced by the way Hals modelled the face with individual hatched brushstrokes.

For example, Hals’s Jester with a Lute similarly diverts his gaze to something outside the painting (fig. 1.8). His rosy cheeks also recall those of Massa.

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1.6 Dirck Barendsz, Banquet of Eighteen Guardsmen of Squad L, Amsterdam 1566, known as ‘The Perch Eaters’, 1566, oil on panel, 120 x 295 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-C-365).

1.7 Frans Hals, Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard, 1616, oil on canvas, 175 x 324 cm.

Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

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1.8 Frans Hals, Jester with a Lute, 1623/4, oil on canvas, 70 x 62 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (FR 1984-32).

1.9 Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, 1622, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 107 x 85 cm. Chatsworth, Derbyshire (PA 266).

Hals positioned Massa in a tight pictorial space between the chair and wall behind him. An opening to a view of a verdant forest beyond provides respite to an otherwise compact composition. The landscape with conifers is exceptional in Hals’s independent portraits. Hals may have called upon the Haarlem landscape painter Pieter Molijn (1595–1661) to paint the landscape, as the handling differs from the brushwork elsewhere in the painting.12 Massa holds a branch of holly in his right hand, a traditional emblem of friendship and constancy.

The son of Flemish immigrants, Massa spent years in Moscow as a merchant, diplomat and Dutch ambassador for a period. He was highly learned, spoke fluent Russian, was a geographer and cartographer and was the first Westerner to publish an account of Siberia. Massa was friends with Hals as he was a witness at the baptism of Hals’s daughter, Adriaentje, in 1623. Hals had painted Massa a few years earlier in the double portrait with his wife (fig. 1.4) and would depict him again, a decade later, in an engaging, smaller picture in which Massa is shown gesticulating with his left hand.13 Massa is also the probable sitter in Hals’s earlier Portrait of a Man at Chatsworth House, the first and only time that Hals posed a sitter with his arms crossed across the chest (fig. 1.9).

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coined a century earlier by the prominent Renaissance author and courtier Baldassare Castiglione in the Italian term sprezzatura,

2.3 Doublet, French, early 1620s.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1989.196).

[nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.8

The sitter’s soft falling ruff was also newly introduced in the 1620s (fig. 2.4). It provided a modern alternative to the stiff, heavily pleated ruffs still being worn at the time. Multiple layers of ruffled linen trimmed with bobbin lace lie softly over the man’s shoulders and upper chest. A comparable, contemporary ruff composed of three layers of white linen tightly gathered at the neckline and trimmed with lace exposes the delicate finery of this item (fig. 2.5). Hals’s collar is a masterpiece of brushwork, with countless individual strokes of white on an ivory-coloured ground. Lying on top of the white ruff is a black ribbon used to tie it, which picks up on the blacks in the hat, cloak and doublet, thus visually unifying the costume into a coherent whole.

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2.4 (top left) Detail of the sitter’s ruff in The Laughing Cavalier (cat. 2).

2.5 (top right) Ruff, 1620s.

The Royal Armoury, Stockholm (LRK 33076).

2.6 (bottom left) Detail of the sitter’s left cuff in The Laughing Cavalier (cat. 2).

2.7 (bottom right) Border, Italian, 17th c., needle lace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (08.180.472).

Hals accorded centre stage in the foreground to the white cuff, composed of delicate and costly lace, whose intricate geometric design and airy transparency he meticulously replicated with thin white strokes of paint applied over completed areas of clothing (fig. 2.6).9 Similar lace with pointed stars and shafts, seen in a contemporary surviving example, attests to Hals’s precision (fig. 2.7). By contrast, he painted the adjacent, brown, turned-back cuff with broadly executed, unblended brushstrokes. The man’s sumptuous black silk cloak, enlivened by black laces rendered in a criss-cross pattern, hangs from his left shoulder and is draped around his body.10 The cloak recalls Vincent van Gogh’s famous declaration that ‘Frans Hals must have had twenty-seven blacks’.11 What else would the sitter have been wearing? His doublet would have likely been paired with matching breeches that reached to the

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hals’s masterpiece: the laughing cavalier

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