Good at Hands: Frans Hals
The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals (1582-1666) is a paradigm of the immediately approachable in classical painting: the Mona Lisa of the unsubtle chuckle.
The Hals exhibition at the National Gallery confirms his talent for smiling faces. They are everywhere: exuberant, tender, confident, self-satisfied.
What a cheerful place C17 Haarlem (Where Hals spent nearly all his career) must have been, if its inhabitants as shown by Hals were typical. But no doubt he got commissions from people expecting to portrayed with a sympathetic grin.
There’s another striking feature about many of the portraits – the hands.
Hals is exceptionally good at doing hands, and he shows off this skill as much as his facial ones. Again, the hands are on loving display everywhere, almost self-satirically so in the case of one late group portrait.
Hals is noted for his loose brushwork, with which he managed to create both exquisite details and impressionistic effects. I sometimes wondered whether he didn’t have different tariffs, whereby patrons could pay more to have the richness of their clothing finely rendered, or to be contented, at a lower price, with broad sweeps of colours. Certainly, there are huge differences in detail between various portraits.
It was doubtless paintings of the latter type that found favour with many of the Impressionists, including Manet, Monet and Van Gogh. Van Gogh said: Hals painted portraits, nothing nothing nothing but that..But it is worth as much as Dante’s Paradise and Michelangelos and Raphaels and even the Greeks. A touch of hyperbole, perhaps.
But Hals was, on occasion, a portraitist of his time.
When I visited the Exhibition, I was re-reading the novel Restoration (1989) by Rose Tremain, set in the time of Charles II. Indeed, it is set precisely in the year 1664, when Hals was still alive, in his 80s, and perhaps still painting. The book’s comic-tragic protagonist, and very reliable narrator, at on point takes up painting (he seems to have been an early abstract expressionist, rendering landscapes entirely in colour). He hires a priggish tutor to teach him portrait painting. The tutor lays down certain accepted rules of the genre.
He began to discuss his technique with regard to background, which, he said, should always be classical – a Palladian garden, with broken columns, a naval battle, or a merry hunting scene..
And lo! There is one Hals portrait that obeys this rule absolutely. Never mind that the relaxed couple are, in true Hals style, presented so affectionately- admire the receding background of classical park and scenery.
December 2023
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