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Frans Hals: The People's Painter
| Article
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15386 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1989 |
2,012 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
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 at least eight more children and worsened his financial situation. By the 1650s he was on the verge of bankruptcy, and in the 1660s he accepted relief from the city of Haarlem.
Notwithstanding, Hals was the city's preeminent portraitist for the middle decades of the century. The art historian Pieter Bieboer has recently established that Hals served as the principal portraitist of the tightly knit oligarchy that
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