Unit XV Hals (1581/85-1666)
Recognized today as one of the most brilliant of all portraitists, Frans Hals was probably born in Antwerp and was brought to Haarlem as a child. Interested in human face and figure, Hals was blessed with a gift for catching the individual in a moment of action, feeling, perception, or expression and recording that moment with unerring strokes. Among his early commissions were group portraits of the militia companies that had been largely responsible for defending the new Dutch republic in the hostile world; these paintings radiate its self-confidence and optimism. Hals usually shows the citizen-soldiers in the midst of the banquets. The compositions, picturing a dozen or more males, mostly corpulent and middle-aged, each of whom had paid equally and expected to be recognizable, were not conductive to imaginative painting. The predecessors of Hals had composed these group portraits in alignments hardly superior compositionally to a modern class photograph. It was the genius of Rembrandt to raise them to a level of high drama. But Hals in his Banquet of the Officers of the Saint George Guard Company, of 1616 has a superb job within the limitations of the traditional type. The moment is relaxed, the gentlemen turn toward each other or toward the painter as if he had been painting the whole group at once, which was not certainly the case. Massive Baroque diagonals – the curtain pulled aside, the flag, the poses, the ruffs – tie the picture together into a rich pattern of white and flashing colours against the black costumes. Broad brushstrokes indicate the passage of light on colour with a flash and sparkle unknown even to Rubens.
The warmth of Hals's early style is seen in The Laughing Cavalier. The date 1624 and the subject's age 26 are inscribed in the background, and since the Cavalier's diagonal shadow also falls on it, it is clearly a wall. The Caravaggesque nowhere is thus converted into a definite here. The wall is irradiated with light and seems insubstantial. The armours proclivities of the young man are indicated by the arrows, torches and bees of Cupid and the winged staff and hat of Mercury embroidered in red, silver and gold on the dark brown of his slashed sleeve, with his glowing complexion, dangerous moustaches, snowy ruff and dashing hat, the subject is the symbol of Baroque gallantry. The climax of the painting is the taunting smile on which every compositional force converges.
