He’s there. The Laughing Cavalier, who sums up Frans Hals for practically everyone, has come all the way from the Wallace Collection for this splendid Hals show at the National Gallery. With his rakishness, his come-hither expression – not laughing so much as amused – and his delicious embroidered black suit, he sums up all that’s best about a painter who was once the pinup of the Impressionists, whom Van Gogh, Whistler and Courbet recognised as a kindred spirit.
It’s hard to think that in the later 19th century, critics and painters regarded Hals as one of the Big Three of the Golden Age of Dutch painting, alongside Vermeer and Rembrandt. The latter two are still venerated but Hals somehow hasn’t kept up. The exhibition catalogue speculates that it’s because portraiture isn’t our favourite genre and that Hals’ loose brush technique was to become commonplace. True.
This exhibition – the first in London for 30 years – is an opportunity to reassess his standing. Above all Hals sums up a particular time, place and culture: the Dutch Republic in the 17th century.
Hals is seemingly staid, painting solid Calvinist citizens, and the spirit he expresses is fundamentally egalitarian: no grand allegories or history paintings here. His portraits of respectable married couples or groups such as the splendid militia of St George, or the dignified portrait of a wealthy cloth merchant or of an elderly joker wielding the jawbone of an ass, all are expressive of a democratic outlook. Each sitter is endowed with an abundance of personality, each deserving of esteem. That very much includes the dignified little black boy in one family group. But staid he is not.
We encounter the wealthy cloth merchant later on, sitting with his chair tipped back nonchalantly, a remarkable posture. Quite a few of the sitters are drinking, holding their stemless wineglasses by the base; still more are laughing – and this really wasn’t often depicted. They take themselves seriously, these men, but not so much that they can’t enjoy the carnal pleasures of eating, drinking and good company. Many are burghers of good standing, but they are here among equals – even the most aristocratic, the irresistible Jasper Schade. These solid, ruddy Dutch don’t suggest much spiritual depth (though Brian Sewell, of this parish identified an Evangelist by Hals), but they are richly human.
What Hals’s admirers saw in his loose brushstrokes – an almost insolently bravura technique – is still astonishing, especially at the end of his long life. Those strokes loosened further still in old age and it’s hard not to see those swift, impressionistic strokes as prefiguring techniques of a much later period – the louche figure of one old rake is done with a wonderful nonchalance.
He’s also very good with children – he had three by his first wife, eleven by his second. And although his women are less striking, there are some fine females here, not least Susan Baillij, a robust blonde with exquisite gauze collar – Hals’ mastery of fabric is unequalled.
And to the obvious complaint that Hals is a succession of men in black, the only riposte is: what men! what blacks!
