John Westbrooke reports on a painter of smiles at the National Gallery
Frans Hals is best known in Britain for “The Laughing Cavalier”, which has just left its home in the Wallace Collection for the first time in 150 years to appear in the National Gallery’s new Hals exhibition.
He may not really be laughing – more like a slightly superior smirk, which viewers have to look up at – and there’s nothing to mark him out as a cavalier either. But the curators say Hals was the foremost painter of smiles and the works displayed here underscore their claim. “He painted portraits, nothing, nothing, nothing but that. But it is worth as much as Dante’s Paradise and the Michelangelos and Raphaels and even the Greeks,” Vincent van Gogh wrote more than 200 years later, and here they are.
He lived at roughly the same time as Rembrandt, with whom he’s often compared, usually to his detriment. After centuries in which only royalty, aristocrats and popes had portraits made, this was an era when the rising middle class, prosperous merchants and entrepreneurs, were having their features recorded, and enjoying it.
Hals is said to have worked quickly, and sometimes you can see it. His depiction of “Malle Babbe”, seen as the local half-mad woman, is sketchy: blobs of colour on her face, a tankard in her hand and an ironic owl on her shoulder. Yet it tells us all about her high spirits: “malle” means foolish, but she doesn’t look like a fool, she seems to be cheerily if tipsily interacting with someone off to the right.
The cavalier’s more detailed, with every inch of his embroidered jacket picked out (his contemporaries would have understood its symbolism), all the lacy finery of his cuffs – but not the lace collar, which is a comparative blur of white, the better to set off his superior attitude, his upturned moustache and little goatee, and dark hat set at a rakish angle. Who was he? We don’t know, even though, unlike Babbe, he presumably paid the painter. Many of his sitters are identified, properly immortalised, lots aren’t.
A couple who are named are Pieter Dircksz Tjarck and his wife Marie Larp, whom he painted soon after they married in 1635, in matching portraits to hang side by side. She has a gentle smile and holds her hands to her heart but she’s otherwise quite formal, with a broad ruff around her neck, painted in detail. He doesn’t smile, but he’s holding a pink rose and looks unusually relaxed twisting to look at the viewer with his arm over the back of his chair.
If you’ve seen the almost Byzantine stiffness of the couple in Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, the informality of “Portrait of a Couple, probably Isaac Abrahamsz Massa and Beatrix van der Laen”, painted a century earlier, will be a surprise. They’ve dressed for the occasion – another lace collar and a big ruff – and yet they’re sitting in the shade of a tree, with a glimpse of a formal garden to one side; he’s leaning contentedly back, she’s sitting up with a grin and an affectionate arm over his shoulder.
They’re both smiling, a happily married couple. They’re wearing black, but it’s not solid black: the daylight shines on the satin clothing, picking out its uneven folds. Hals’s work isn’t gloomy.
As well as ones and twos, Hals painted group portraits, such as the “Meagre Company”, an Amsterdam city guard. He did his best, going to Amsterdam to paint the eight figures on the left. After that, however, they seem to have fallen out: he wanted them to come to his studio in Haarlem (all of 15 miles away) and they refused. In the end another artist, Pieter Codde, took over and finished the work. Hals’s more or less dynamic staging, between two men twisted sideways, is completed by a row of eight more who could be queuing calmly for a bus.
At least everyone got equal prominence; but Rembrandt broke all the rules in 1642 with “The Night Watch”, in which the guard seem to be half in darkness and preparing to face an imminent attack. Inevitably, the Meagre Company standing in line look comparatively meagre.
We don’t know much about Hals’s early years. He was born in Antwerp about 1582 and died in Haarlem in 1666 (that’s the period between Shakespeare getting married and the Great Fire of London, to put it in an English context). But the earliest paintings on display here, another pair, come from when he was 30 or so, a sombre depiction of a man holding a skull and a standing woman with a slightly wary expression. No juvenilia, but nobody smiling yet either.
But by the time he paints “Catharina Hooft and her Nurse”, around 1619, both are all smiles. Catharina’s a chubby-faced toddler swathed in a very fancy dress, and is clearly the subject, yet the anonymous nurse, standing behind her in muted black with a white ruff and cap, is just as lovingly depicted, handing the child an apple. Like so many Hals portraits, it seems to have caught an intimate moment of pleasure on the fly.
Other paintings capture similar fleeting expressions. “La Bohémienne” is looking slyly to her left, eyes half closed; the curators note that this would have been thought improper for a woman, and it might even have been a calling card for a brothel. But there’s nothing judgmental in the portrait, and Hals was good with female subjects.
With children too, whether the bunch crowding round the rommel-pot player – a pig’s-bladder busker – or the pair of a girl singing and a boy playing a violin, possibly Hals’s own children (he had 14 by two wives; several became painters). There’s a merry drinker, a merry lute player, a laughing boy with a wine glass, and even another young man holding a skull but looking quite cheerful about it.
The exhibition itself is a kind of group portrait, of a Dutch city in its golden age – not its buildings or its businesses but its people. Many are identifiable, others perhaps just “types” though not necessarily invented ones; they’re comfortable in their cups, their music, their marriages, and we’d still recognise them in the street today. Hals was out of fashion for a long time, like his compatriot Vermeer, and this is the first big showing of his work in 30 years. Let it cheer you up.
Frans Hals is at the National Gallery until 21 January 2024, then moving to Amsterdam and Berlin. Tickets £20; some concessions.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/the-credit-suisse-exhibition-frans-hals
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