Black and White -- But Not Much Colour

Frans Hals is one of the three greatest artists of the Dutch Golden Age, along with Rembrandt and Vermeer, and if you go along to Frans Hals at the National Gallery in London, you'll understand why, hopefully. He was a master portraitist, who appears to have been able to apply paint to canvas almost without effort and to dazzling effect. That loose brushwork was a huge influence on artists in late 19th-century France. There are about 50 paintings in this exhibition, the first Hals retrospective for several decades, and they're mostly terrific. 

And yet.... we found this show oddly underwhelming, surprisingly flat. The pictures are glorious, but the presentation seemed curiously contextless. Nowhere do you get a feel for the society in Holland and Hals's home city of Haarlem that allowed this upsurge in artistic creativity at the start of the 17th century, the bourgeoning capitalism, expanding middle class and economic growth that permitted all these men in up-to-the-minute tailoring and their fashionable wives to commission such splendid portraits from this technically brilliant artist. Nor, apart from a single quote from Vincent van Gogh, do you get a sense from the wall captions that Hals was such an inspiration to the Impressionists.

Eight of the paintings on display at the National were also in the Wallace Collection's superb exhibition two years ago of Hals's portraits of individual male sitters. What made that show so good was the way the curators provided extra interpretation to really deepen your appreciation of Hals and his world. Back then, we spent nearly two hours exploring just 13 pictures. This time, we were round a show about four times the size in about 90 minutes. And we noticed we were no quicker than many other visitors entering at the same time as us.

To be fair, we've seen a lot of Hals. If you haven't, though, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. There are lots of men and women in black. Black and white was the sober colour choice for the God-fearing hard-working burghers of the Dutch Republic. But monochrome didn't mean dull. Just look at the gorgeousness of this outfit worn by Catharina Brugman, wife of the wealthy cloth merchant Tieleman Roosterman, whose portrait hangs alongside hers. 

Van Gogh said Hals had 27 shades of black, and there are quite a few on display in this painting. No preparatory drawings made by Hals are known to exist, and it seems he worked directly on the canvas, applying paint on wet paint. While in many of his works, including the Roosterman portrait, you can see how Hals has made broad brush strokes that are transformed, incomprehensibly and somehow miraculously, into accurate representations of facial features and items of clothing, the application of paint on the Brugman portrait is much more finely detailed. 

Just look at that diamond pattern on the skirt, and the complicated floral design on the sleeves and bodice. The intricate lacework, so time-consuming and laborious to produce, on the cuffs and that winged collar. And then there's the ruff.... Two thoughts are at the forefront of your mind when you examine Brugman's portrait, which hasn't actually been shown in public since the 1930s: The first is disbelief that Hals could execute that ruff freehand; and the second is amazement at the sheer wealth on display. Because in addition to the ruff and the lace, Catharina (who's only 22, 14 years younger than her husband) is nonchalantly holding an extremely expensive-looking pair of gloves and wears five strings of pearls round each wrist, at least four round her neck and two sizeable earrings. No wonder she looks so quietly pleased with herself. As does her husband.    

Hals didn't need to make you so formal to look good. From much the same period, in his early 50s, comes this delightful, relaxed portrait of a man called Pieter Tjarck. Like the Roostermans, Tjarck and his wife, the much more stiffly posed Marie Larp (with a ruff to rival Catharina Brugman's), have been reunited for this exhibition after many decades.

Tjarck leans on the back of his chair, casually holding a rose as a symbol of his love for his wife. Here's Hals's signature brushwork in all its glory: the slashes of white and grey in the collar, and the highlights on the sleeve of the jacket, capturing the way it has ridden up. But you can't take your eyes off Tjarck's handlebar moustache or his extended goatee beard, giving you the impression he might twist the end round from time to time in an idle moment.

There often seems an element of joy, of contentedness in Hals's portraits. We don't know the identity of this Family Group in a Landscape, but the interlocked gazes of the parents speak of tenderness and devotion. 

Of course, you don't very often get the seamier side of life in Dutch Golden Age painting, but the young black servant at the back reminds us that the Netherlands grew wealthy on commerce, and such commerce also included involvement in the slave trade. 

Hals breathes life into all the sitters in his portraits -- old or young, masters or servants. It's not the smiling nurse holding the apple that's the subject of this painting. Closer examination reveals that it's the small child who's the main focus -- and she knows it.  

The extravagantly attired Catharina Hooft -- just imagine the quality and thickness of the cloth in her dress, and don't forget the lace -- appears to be pushing her nurse back with her outstretched right arm. 

One of Hals's specialities was characters caught mid-action in pictures that cross the boundary between genre scenes and tronies -- those Golden Age pictures that aren't quite portraits, more character studies, with often a bit of exotic headgear and clothing thrown in. The Lute Player from the Louvre is a prime example. 

Caught with a smile on his lips in a rather outlandish costume, the colour and the loose brushwork have the sort of spontaneity impression you could see the Impressionists admiring. 

There's more music-making in some of the smallest works in this show, depicting a girl singing and a boy playing the violin. It's recorded that Hals's children were fervent musicians, and an inventory from 1644 mentions two square portraits of his children. 

So are these the offspring of the master? Whoever the performers are, the depictions are delightful, so fresh and immediate. 

Hals was a painter in demand well beyond Haarlem; he was summoned to Utrecht to paint the very fashionable and very spendthrift young Jasper Schade (an uncanny ringer for David Cameron), and he even got a call to Amsterdam to immortalise a company of the civic guard there, a highly sought-after commission that was rarely given to an out-of-town artist. He never actually finished the job, though, and Amsterdammer Pieter Codde was brought in to complete The Meagre Company. 

The Meagre Company is one of two of Hals's six Civic Guard groups on show at the National, but you don't get any real sense here of why these paintings are such a big deal in Dutch art history. Rembrandt's The Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum is possibly the most famous Dutch artwork of them all, and if you go to see it, or to look at Hals's own creations in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, you'll learn about the significance of the militias in the society of the time and how Rembrandt and Hals breathed new life into what had originally been very formulaic images. 

The great and the good of Dutch society liked to indulge in charitable work, and they liked to record themselves for posterity, so even at the age of around 80 Hals was still being asked by the Regents of the Old Men's Alms House in Haarlem to paint their portrait. 

Hals's late, late style seems centuries ahead of its time. Look at that white linen worn by the men in the centre and on the far right. And the splash of red. Would the regents have preferred something a bit smoother, a bit more detailed, perhaps? Possibly, but it would have been by a lesser artist, and we wouldn't be looking at them so closely four centuries later.   

So this was one of those shows where we loved the pictures but found ourselves disappointed by the presentation. For us, a successful exhibition involves not just assembling artworks, it means putting them into context and making them more accessible, more understandable. If the exhibition-goer doesn't want to read any captions, of course they can just look at what's on the canvas, but we like to see art in the round. On that score, we don't feel the National Gallery did a great job here. 

Practicalities

Frans Hals is on at the National Gallery in London until January 21. It's open daily from 1000 to 1800, with lates on Fridays to 2100. Standard admission is £20, but for Friday evenings you can book a pay-what-you-like ticket, minimum £1. Tickets can be reserved online here. The National Gallery is on the north side of Trafalgar Square, just a couple of minutes from Charing Cross or Leicester Square stations on the rail and Underground networks. 

The exhibition moves on to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam from February 16 to June 9 and then to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin from July 12 to November 3. 

Images

Frans Hals (1582-1666), Portrait of Catharina Brugman, 1634, Private collection. Photo © Courtesy the owner
Frans Hals, Portrait of Pieter Dircksz. Tjarck, about 1635-38, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. © Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Frans Hals, Family Group in a Landscape, about 1645-48. © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Frans Hals, Portrait of Catharina Hooft with her Nurse, 1619-20, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. © Photo Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin. Photo: Jörg P. Anders
Frans Hals, The Lute Player, before 1623-24, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Mathieu Rabeau
Frans Hals, Girl Singing and Boy Playing the Violin, about 1628, The Jordan and Thomas A Saunders III Collection, on loan to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond 
Frans Hals, Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House, about 1664. © Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem