The Portraitist

Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter’s animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.

This is the first full-length biography of Hals in many years. It offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. Nadler tells the story not only of Hals’s life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

Foreword Marrigje Rikken, Head of Collections and Exhibitions – Frans Hals Museum.