Frans Hals

Frans Hals was born in Antwerp in 1582 or 1583 to Franchois Hals (1542–1610), a cloth dresser from Mechelen, and his second wife, Adriana van Geestenryck (1552–1616), the widow of a tailor.1 The family moved to Haarlem shortly after the Fall of Antwerp in 1585. Hals’s brother, Dirck (1591–1656), was born there in 1591 and also became a painter. We have no information regarding Frans’s artistic training. According to the anonymous biographer of Karel van Mander (1548–1606), Hals trained under him, but Van Mander himself makes no mention of this in his Schilderboeck of 1604.2 Hals could have spent some time in Van Mander’s workshop after the publication of this book, though this seems fairly unlikely considering that from 1603 until his death in 1606 Van Mander was not living in Haarlem. The first official record of Hals’s presence in Haarlem dates from 1610, when he joined the Guild of Saint Luke . Except for a brief sojourn in Antwerp in 1616, where he became acquainted with the work of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) , Hals spent his entire life in Haarlem. He married Anneke Harmensdr Abeels (1590–1615), the daughter of a bleacher, around 1610.3 This union should have gained Hals entry into the ruling elite, for Anneke’s godfather and guardian, the wealthy brewer Job Claesz Gijbland (1572–1638), sat on the town council. For unknown reasons, however, Gijbland showed little interest in Hals and his family. When Gijbland had himself portrayed in 1611, he chose the established painter Frans de Grebber (1573–1649) over the still inexperienced Hals.4 That Gijbland also subsequently never supported the couple is clear from the fact that he did nothing to prevent Anneke from being buried in a pauper’s grave when she died in May 1615.5 In 1617 Hals took a second wife, Lysbeth Reyniersdr (1593–after 1675), the daughter of a glassmaker; they would have eleven children. By this time, his career had taken off and he had been granted a prestigious commission in 1616 to paint a banquet of the officers of the Saint George Civic Guard.6 Without diminishing his success, it should be noted that Hals faced little competition in these early years. The only other portraitist of significance in Haarlem, besides Hals and Frans de Grebber, was Cornelis Engelsz (1574/75–1650). The tense political situation at that time impelled Prince Maurits (1567–1625) to dissolve the Haarlem town council in 1618 and then reinstate it with his own supporters. Hals rapidly emerged as the leading portraitist of these new leaders and their families. His greatest patron was the affluent and highly influential Olycan family of brewers, at least fourteen members of which he portrayed. Various members of the Coymans family also sat for him. The most famous of these works may be the bewitching portrait of Isabella Coymans, the daughter of the wealthy merchant Josephus Coymans.7 The lifelikeness of Hals’s portraits was as highly praised and appreciated in his own time as it is today. In his 1628 city chronicle, Samuel Ampzing (1590–1632) exclaimed, “How dashingly Frans paints people from life!”8 Twenty years later, in 1648, Theodorus Schrevelius (1572–1649), writing about Hals’s portraits, would likewise extol how they “are colored in such a way that they seem to live and breathe.”9 Hals’s clients came not only from social and political elite, but also from other echelons of society. He portrayed various clergymen, including the Dutch Lutheran minister Conradus Viëtor in 1644 ( Portrait of Conradus Viëtor in The Leiden Collection),10 and—in small format—the city chroniclers Ampzing ( Portrait of Samuel Ampzing in the Leiden Collection) and Schrevelius.11 The scholar Petrus Scriverius (1576–1660) and the celebrated French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) also sat for him, the latter around 1649 shortly before his departure to Sweden.12 In the meantime, Hals was facing fierce competition not only from his contemporary Pieter Soutman (ca. 1580–1657), who returned from a