A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader
into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age.
Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his
style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do
and what a painting should look like.
Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters
alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice
for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals,
militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His
works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the
fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed
his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and
exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured
with energy and immediacy.
Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many
years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this
culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only
of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and
religious worlds in which he lived and worked.
