Frans Hals

Frans Hals the Elder, a Dutch Golden Age painter born around 1582, spent his career in Haarlem. At the time, local authorities discouraged religious art in churches, but citizens enjoyed decorating their homes with paintings. Wealthy burghers frequently commissioned Hals for portraits—whether of individuals, married couples, families, or institutional groups—and he also produced tronies for the open market. Two distinct portrait styles coexisted in 17th-century Haarlem: one neat and precise, exemplified by Verspronck, and another looser and more painterly, where Hals excelled. His portraits often used a subdued palette, mirroring the serious, polite tones of his clients’ fashionable clothing. Yet the people he depicted brimmed with life, typically showing a friendly glint in the eye or a hint of a smile. Hals was born in Antwerp, in the southern Spanish Netherlands, but his family fled the chaos caused by the Spanish there and moved to Haarlem when he was young. Many of his Haarlem clients were also émigrés from the South. His father, Franchois Fransz Hals van Mechelen, a cloth merchant, and his second wife, Adriaentje van Geertenryck, had him in 1582 or 1583. Like many others, his parents left during the Fall of Antwerp (1584–1585) for Haarlem in the new Dutch Republic, where Hals lived the rest of his life. He studied under Flemish émigré Karel van Mander, though van Mander’s Mannerist influence barely shows in Hals’s work. In 1610, Hals joined the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke and began earning money restoring art for the town council. He worked on their large collection, which van Mander had described in his *Schilderboeck* (1604). The most notable pieces were by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Jan van Scorel, and Jan Mostaert, hanging in Haarlem’s St. John’s Church. The council paid for the restoration. They had confiscated all Catholic religious art in the Haarlemse Noon, though they didn’t formally own the entire collection until 1625, when city officials decided what was suitable for the town hall. The remaining art, deemed too Roman Catholic, was sold to fellow guild member Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, on condition he remove it from Haarlem. In this context, Hals began his portrait career, since the market for religious themes had vanished. The earliest known work by Hals is the portrait of Jacobus Zaffius (1611). His breakthrough came with the life-sized group portrait *The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company* in 1616. His most famous sitter was René Descartes, painted in 1649. Around 1610, Hals married his first wife, Anneke Harmensdochter. Because he was Catholic, the marriage was recorded at city hall, not in church; the exact date is unknown, as Haarlem’s older marriage records before 1688 were lost. Anneke, born 2 January 1590, was the daughter of bleacher Harmen Dircksz and Pietertje Claesdr Ghijblant. Her maternal grandfather, linen producer Claes Ghijblant of Spaarne 42, left the couple a grave in the Grote Kerk, where both are buried—though Hals took over 40 years to join her there. Anneke died in 1615, shortly after their third child’s birth; of the three, only Harmen survived infancy, and one had died before Hals’s second marriage. Biographer Seymour Slive notes that older stories of Hals abusing his first wife were confused with another Haarlem resident of the same name. At the time of those charges, the artist had no wife to mistreat, since Anneke had died in May 1615. Likewise, historical accounts of Hals’s heavy drinking largely stem from embellished anecdotes by early biographers like Arnold Houbraken; no direct evidence supports it. After Anneke’s death, Hals took in a fishmonger’s young daughter to care for his children. In 1617, he married Lysbeth Reyniers in Spaarndam, a village outside Haarlem’s banns, because she was already eight months pregnant. Hals was a devoted father, and they had eight children. Unlike contemporaries such as Rembrandt, who moved households to suit patrons, Hals stayed in Haarlem and insisted customers come to him. Haarlem archives show that a *schutterstuk* Hals began in Amsterdam was finished by Pieter Codde because Hals refused to paint there, demanding the militiamen travel to Haarlem to sit. Thus, all his sitters were either from Haarlem or visiting when painted. Hals’s work was in demand for much of his life, but he lived so long that his style eventually fell out of fashion, leading to financial troubles. Besides painting, he worked as a restorer, art dealer, and art tax expert for the city council. Creditors took him to court several times; in 1652, he sold his belongings to settle a debt with a baker. The seized property inventory listed only three mattresses and bolsters, an armoire, a table, and five pictures (by himself, his sons, van Mander, and Maarten van Heemskerck). Left destitute, the municipality granted him an annuity of 200 florins in 1664. During the Eighty Years’ War, Hals served in the local *schutterij*, a military guild.