Works by Frans Hals

Frans Hals left his brushstrokes in plain sight, setting down a face in a few fluid strokes, and his Haarlem sitters seem caught in a passing moment, often with a glint in the eye or a half-smile.

Hals came from Antwerp, grew up in Haarlem after his parents fled the south, and lived there for the rest of his life: when an Amsterdam militia company wanted its portrait, he insisted the men sit for him in Haarlem, and Pieter Codde finished the picture instead. Haarlem's council had seized the Catholic religious art and the market for such pictures had gone, so he built his name on portraits, and his breakthrough was The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616, a table of officers in ruffs and sashes in which each face and gesture is different. Only once did he paint a married couple on one canvas, probably Isaac Massa and his new wife, Beatrix van der Laen: in Portrait of a Married Couple they sit smiling under a tree, her hand resting on his shoulder.

The Merry Drinker, from about 1628–30, holds a glass in one hand and waves the other, his collar a scramble of white strokes. Over the years the colour drained out of his portraits and black took over, probably because his Protestant sitters dressed soberly, while the brushwork grew looser still. A pose he kept returning to has the sitter lean an arm over the back of a chair, as Willem Coymans does in 1645, his sleeve a dark ground scribbled with gold. Nearly every painting below is a portrait, and men far outnumber women.

Sources: Wikipedia, Frans Hals Museum, Rijksmuseum, National Gallery of Art. Portrait: After Frans Hals.