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Frans Hals: The People's Painter |
| Section: THE ARTS / ART |
| Author: Jason Edward Kaufman |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1989 |
| Size: 2,012 Words, 12,589 Characters |
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A half a century after Frans Hals' death (in 1666), his first biographer, Arnold Houbraken, in the Great Book of Netherlandish Painters and Piantresses (1718), characterized the painter as a drunkard. Houbraken reported, "It was Frans's custom to fill himself to the gills each evening." Supposedly, this debauchery prevented the artist from finishing his pictures properly, and his impressionistic brushwork, with its bravura dashes of unblended colors, was labeled as indicative of his intemperate ways.
Very little is actually known of Hals' personality, habits, or day-to-day existence. He left not a single letter, note, or drawing, and his contemporaries recorded nothing about his studio or working methods. As to the circumstances of his commissions and his relation to his patrons, only a few documents survive--and these pertain to a contract dispute over a never-completed work for the Amsterdam militia company.
The few remaining contemporary documents in which he is mentioned reveal that Hals was a poor manager of his affairs. Even during the 1630s, one of his most solvent periods, he was sued for arrears by the governess of his two motherless children as well as by his butcher, baker, and shoemaker. His second marriage brought ...
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...e in the process of taking a third of Haarlem's population and Hals himself destitute in his old age, the haunting chiaroscuro effect would seem to emanate directly from the artist's benighted psyche. Yet, through the gloom, the tremendous sympathy with which he set down the individual personalities of the sitters conveys the penetrating human sensitivity and warmth that was Frans Hals' gift.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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