Was Frans Hals a Catholic or a Protestant? It’s a question which Steven Nadler fretted about in The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World, which he brought out last year with the University of Chicago Press. Hals’s father had been raised in the Faith, and young Frans is likely to have received baptism at the hands of a Catholic priest. His marriage to his first wife only appears in the Haarlem city registers, rather than in any Protestant record books, suggesting it was a Catholic service. However, pragmatism triumphed in the end.
The social monopoly exercised by the Dutch Reformed Church in Haarlem eventually proved irresistible for an elderly artist on his uppers: formally joining it only in his 70s, Hals died a nominal Calvinist in receipt of a city pension; his second wife, then a poor widow, entered the local almshouses. To be an overtly Catholic artist in Haarlem in the first half of the 17th century would have been social and professional suicide, and Hals evidently did not have a taste for martyrdom.
The events of the Haarlemse Noon in 1578, just a few years before Hals’s birth and part of the 80 Years War between various local reforming groups and the ruling Spanish Habsburgs, set the tone for the Haarlem religious scene. All Catholic devotional art was confiscated; that considered suitably Protestant enough to remain was displayed in the town hall, and the rest was sold and dispersed. With the market for religious themes having disappeared overnight, the young Hals set out as a portrait painter instead.
He didn’t have to wait long, such was his talent, to establish himself as a master of his art – and when you look at the examples that the National Gallery has brought together, it’s easy to understand why. Transcending their dark and dour robes, the burghers of Haarlem (and far further afield) look out of their frames with faces on fire with humanness. Broad grins, enigmatic smiles, wistful gazes – they are so utterly realistic that out of context you might think they were a photograph of someone in fancy dress.
Perhaps, in fact, it’s the Protestantism that lends them their impact. Set on an easel of black clothes and framed with white ruffs, the colour and sparkle of cheeks and eyes and the depth and laughter of lines and wrinkles have less to compete with than if they had been painted in more colourful outfits. That’s not to say that there’s not colour in some of his more informal portraits; but it comes across most forcefully in his formal commissions, and becomes something of a motif as the exhibition progresses.
Hals’s most famous portrait is surely The Laughing Cavalier, now in the Wallace Collection, which he painted in 1624. It’s a bit of a misnomer, because the subject’s really modelling more of a smirk; he knows the answer to a riddle that he’s just told you, but is giving you a few more seconds to see if you can work it out for yourself. McEwan’s brewery co-opted him as their mascot years ago, giving him a real belly laugh as well as a pint of ale. Still, the originals on display include some real smilers, smirkers, laughers and grinners.
As such it’s impossible not to leave the show feeling a bit more cheerful than when you went in. There are hints, too, of what might have been. The green and gold silk in which the toddler Catherina Hooft is swathed could easily have been used for an altar hanging, but by the time it came to be painted in 1619 that was no longer an option. The heavy gold chain held by the sitter of Portrait of a Woman Standing of about 1612 could easily have been that of a prelate’s pectoral cross, but the same applies.
Girl Singing and Boy Playing the Violin, of about 1628, would have been angels playing instruments around a nativity scene had they been painted in different circumstances; the straw clutched by Pieter Cornelisz van der Morsch in 1616 belongs in a manger. Squint a little and a A Man, Possibly a Clergyman of 1658, with his distinct-ive collar, turns into an Oratorian; another Unknown Man, swathed in grey in 1660, becomes a Franciscan cardinal. There is lace – exquisitely rendered – almost everywhere.
But there were no great altarpieces for Hals to paint; no great apotheoses of saints into heaven; no fat putti fluttering around Assumptions of Our Lady; no weeping cherubim attending Passions of the Lord. Instead he had to make do with the people around him, whom he captured as living subjects, full of vim and vigour. St Irenaeus teaches that “the glory of God is a man fully alive” – just as all Hals’s subjects clearly are. And so with them, maybe, he prises open heaven just a little – even if they were all Protestants.
Frans Hals is at the National Gallery, London, until January 21, 2024.
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