Frans Hals

Frans Hals (b.1580 - d.1666) was an extraordinary Dutch portrait painter of the 17th century. He was born in Antwerp, the son of Flemish parents who moved to the Dutch city of Haaarlem after the city fell to the Spaniards. His parents had settled in Haarlem by 1591 and he spent his life there. Hals was a student of Karl van Mander, a Mannerist painter, who had lived in Italy between 1600 and 1603, before setting up his own workshop in Haarlem.

It is not known what happened in the first 25 to 30 years of Hals' life. In 1610, he joined the Guild of St. Luke of Haarlem, which registered artists as masters.
The earliest extant picture is the fragment of a portrait Jacobus Zaffius (1611), and upon the basis of stylistic evidence one or two paintings can be dated a year or so earlier. Nothing he did before 1616 suggested that he would shatter well-established traditions with his life-size group portrait The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company painted during that year. From 1616 onwards there is no shortage of dated or documented works and his artistic development is clear. He was at the height of his popularity in the 1620s and 1630s. During these decades he made five large group portraits of civil guards; one is in the Rijksmuseum and the others are in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

In the 1630s his compositions became simpler and monochromatic effects took the place of the bright colors of the earlier paintings. By this time Hals was using in his commissioned portraits the bold brushwork and the alla prima technique which early in his career he reserved for genre pictures. No drawings by him are known and he presumably worked straight on to the canvas. During the period between 1630 and 1650, Hals became very popular and painted more than 100 single portraits and six group portraits. In 1644, Hals became an officer of the Guild of St. Luke.

He was twice married, had at least ten children. Out of Hals' eight sons, five of them became painters. Hals was constantly in financial trouble. During his last years he was destitute and the municipal authorities of Haarlem awarded him a small pension four years before his death in 1666.