42 Facts About Frans Hals

Frans Hals the Elder was a Dutch Golden Age painter.

Frans Hals lived and worked in Haarlem, a city in which the local authority of the day frowned on religious painting in places of worship but citizens liked to decorate their homes with works of art.

Frans Hals was born at Antwerp in the Spanish-occupied southern Netherlands, but because of the chaos wrought there by the Spanish at that time, his family moved to Haarlem when he was little.

Frans Hals studied under Flemish emigre Karel van Mander, whose Mannerist influence is barely noticeable in Frans Hals's work.

In 1610, Frans Hals became a member of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and he started to earn money as an art restorer for the town council.

Frans Hals worked on their large art collection, which Karel van Mander had described in his Schilderboeck published in Haarlem in 1604.

The earliest known example of Frans Hals's art is the portrait of Jacobus Zaffius.

Frans Hals's 'breakthrough' came with the life-sized group portrait The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616.

Frans Hals married his first wife Anneke Harmensdochter around 1610.

Frans Hals was of Catholic birth so their marriage was recorded in the city hall and not in church.

Frans Hals was a devoted father, and they went on to have eight children.

Contemporaries such as Rembrandt moved their households according to the caprices of their patrons, but Frans Hals remained in Haarlem and insisted that his customers come to him.

Frans Hals's work was in demand through much of his life, but he lived so long that he eventually went out of style as a painter and experienced financial difficulties.

Frans Hals's creditors took him to court several times, and he sold his belongings to settle his debt with a baker in 1652.

The Dutch nation fought for independence during the Eighty Years' War, and Frans Hals was a member of the local schutterij, a military guild.

Frans Hals included a self-portrait in his 1639 painting of the St Joris company, according to its 19th-century painting frame.

Frans Hals was a member of a local chamber of rhetoric, and in 1644 he became chairman of the Guild of St Luke.

Frans Hals died in Haarlem in 1666 and was buried in the Grote Kerk church.

Frans Hals had been receiving a city pension, which was highly unusual and a sign of the esteem with which he was regarded.

Frans Hals is best known for his portraits, mainly of wealthy citizens such as Pieter van den Broecke and Isaac Massa, whom he painted three times.

Frans Hals painted large group portraits for local civic guards and for the regents of local hospitals.

Frans Hals was a Dutch Golden Age painter who practiced an intimate realism with a radically free approach.

Frans Hals was fond of daylight and silvery sheen, while Rembrandt used golden glow effects based upon artificial contrasts of low light in immeasurable gloom.

Frans Hals seized a moment in the life of his subjects with rare intuition.

Frans Hals became so clever that exact tone, light and shade, and modeling were obtained with a few marked and fluid strokes of the brush.

Frans Hals became a popular portrait painter and painted the wealthy of Haarlem on special occasions.

Frans Hals won many commissions for wedding portraits.

Early works by Frans Hals show him as a careful draughtsman capable of great finish yet spirited, such as Two singing boys with a lute and a music book and Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia.

Only once did Frans Hals portray a couple on a single canvas: Couple in a garden: Wedding portrait of Isaac Abrahamsz.

Frans Hals's restricted palette is particularly noticeable in his flesh tints, which became greyer from year to year, until finally the shadows were painted in almost absolute black, as in the Tymane Oosdorp.

Many artists in the 17th century in Holland opted to specialise, and Frans Hals appears to have been a pure portrait specialist.

Frans Hals was a master of a technique that utilized something previously seen as a flaw in painting, the visible brushstroke.

Frans Hals did occasionally paint without underdrawings or underpainting, but most of the works were created in successive layers, as was customary at that time.

Frans Hals displayed tremendous daring, great courage and virtuosity, and had a great capacity to pull back his hands from the canvas, or panel, at the moment of the most telling statement.

Still lifes formerly attributed to his son Frans Hals II have since been re-attributed to other painters, however.

Frans Hals painted a young woman reaching into a basket in a still life market scene by Claes van Heussen.

Frans Hals had a large workshop in Haarlem and many students, though 19th century biographers questioned some of his pupils, since their painting styles were so dissimilar to Frans Hals.

In terms of style, the closest to Frans Hals's work is the handful of paintings that are ascribed to Judith Leyster, which she often signed.

Nevertheless, Frans Hals's art did not go altogether unappreciated in the time between his death in 1666 and the 1860s.

Frans Hals's work remains admired, particularly with young painters who can find many lessons about practical technique from his unconcealed brushstrokes.

Frans Hals's works have found their way to countless cities all over the world and into museum collections.

Frans Hals was pictured on the Netherlands' 10-guilder banknote of 1968.