The paintings may appear a bit superficial, an air of being quickly rendered and spontaneous, like Bob Ross “deep” , but they were painstakingly and deliberately wrought …
Franz Hals is at the Met and the seventeenth-century Dutch master has been described as something of an “empath” in the New York art reviews surrounding the exhibition, as if empathy is some kind of behavioral peculiarity. He is known for creating lively and accessible images of men, women and children that captured a kind of intuitive alertness behind the faces. Hals ( 1582-1666) left the impression that his subjects inhabited a material and psychic spehere continuous and pertinent to our own. Which is not surprising. If you strip away all the technological decoration and our seeming seduction by an unbridled faith in progress as defined by our fervent accumulation and disposition of what we see as necessary, then well, we remain pretty similar to Hals’s subjects.
---This important early painting by Hals dates from about 1615 and recalls contemporary works by the Flemish artist Jacob Jordaens in its coloring, brushwork, and crowded composition. The subject is Vastenavond (Shrovetide or Mardi Gras), a pre-Lenten feast devoted to fools. Two of the figures are recognizable as stock characters from comic theater: Peeckelhaering (Pickled Herring) with the garland of eggs and sausages, and Hans Wurst with sausages on his cap. The young woman (a male actor?) is surrounded by food, objects such as the bagpipe, and an obscene gesture, all of which comprise a chorus of sexual references. The painting inspired copies and versions by Haarlem artists and in its coarse humor brings to mind Adriaen Brouwer, Hals's famous Flemish pupil of the 1620s. Source: Portion of a Pilaster Capital with an Acrobat [French
---Frans Hals was the great 17th-century portraitist of the Dutch bourgeoisie of Haarlem, where he spent practically all his life. Hals evolved a technique that was close to impressionism in its looseness, and he painted with increasing freedom as he grew older. The jovial spirit of his early work is typified by the Shrovetide Revellers (Merry Company, c. 1615; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In middle age his portraits grew increasingly sad, revealing sometimes a sense of foreboding (e.g., Nicolaes Hasselaer, 1630-33; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). The paintings of his old age show best his genius for portraying character (e.g., Man in a Slouch Hat, 1660-66; Staatliche Museen, Kassel). ---Read More:http://www.londonfoodfilmfiesta.co.uk/Artmai~1/Hals%20Frans.htm
Hals later works seem to have more of a psychological subtlety. Van Gogh once calculated that Hals used twenty-seven different tones of black. In any event, early or late, there is a compelling seriousness and sympathy for the human condition that emanates from his work; and the more raw the more this is apparent. After all, some of the lewd gestures and leering point to a deeper melancholic consciousness that points to the work of a Watteau, by establishing the representation of self-awareness as a subject in itself and Hals talent for representing real people living life for the moment, “being” as it were, seemed to be unique for his time. While a contemporary like Rembrandt may have surpassed Hals through a more profound sense of human character that mined some ancient historical continuities, Hals earthy immediacy was unique and even refreshing to be unburdened by that historical prerogative.
Jonathan Jones:Dutch painters in the 17th century were representational: they painted the real world of burghers, their possessions, their neat houses. But these painters were also heirs to a tradition of the grotesque, the lowlands late-medieval art of Bosch and Brueghel. Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2000/aug/05/art
Hals’s combination of life, light and brushwork ultimately made him one of the riverheads of modernity. But it took some time. In the 200 years after his death, his loose handling of paint, which the Dutch called rough style, was out of fashion to such an extent that his canvases were often viewed as unfinished. But this roughness attracted French painters of the 19th century who harbored realist or Impressionist inclinations, starting with Courbet, Manet and Monet, as well as later figures, including van Gogh and Americans like James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent. The high regard for Hals among 19th-century artists rubbed off on 19th-century collectors, particularly Americans of the Gilded Age who helped establish and stock the Met. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/arts/design/frans-hals-at-metropolitan-museum-review.html?pagewanted=2
Hals. Portrait of a Seated Woman Holding a Fan. Read More:http://www.artilim.com/artist/hals-frans/portrait-of-a-seated-woman-2.aspx
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---A well-to-do citizen, fashionably dressed with a wide, lace collar, with one arm cast nonchalantly over the back of a wooden chair. In the other he holds a walking stick. The subject is probably Nicolaes Hasselaer (1593-
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