The Frans Hals Experience at the Rijksmuseum

The Artist

Frans Hals is considered one of the most prominent painters of the Dutch Golden Age, standing side by side with Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer.

If you want to learn more about Hals’ life and career in 17th-century Haarlem, check out this article and see 10 iconic paintings by Hals that you need to know.

The Exhibition

The years 2023 and 2024 are robust for the Rijksmuseum, located in Amsterdam. The large Frans Hals show is being presented right after a major blockbuster Vermeer show, which was fully booked in the first weeks following its opening.

You can read more about the Vermeer exhibition here. The Frans Hals exhibition runs from February 16 – June 9, 2024, and offers the same range of artistic thrills, excellence, and beauty.

Contrary to the Vermeer show, this one does not introduce Hals to the public using a chronological approach that presents his oeuvre from the earliest to the latest works. This time, curators decided to divide Hals’ paintings into thematic categories embellished with concise and imaginative titles:

ROUGH – highlights Hals’ expressive and innovative way of working, heavy brushstrokes, and masterful command of paint in depicting elaborate expressions, fabrics, and surfaces. However, later in the 19th century, his now iconic technique was associated with his fondness for alcohol, a topic often visible in his depictions of the so-called “merry drinkers.”

BREATHE – presents a wide range of popular genres of pendant portraits of married couples, some of which seem so lifelike that they could breathe.

Below are pendant portraits of Michiel de Wael and Cunera van Baersdorp, who married in 1625. Michiel de Wael is depicted numerous times in Hals’ portraits.

BIG – focuses on the power and vitality beaming from his large, life-size portraits of single sitters or famous group portraits of civic guards. Once again, the famous Meagre Company brought this section to Amsterdam.

The Meagre Company, one of Hals’ six militia men pieces, depicts members of the Crossbow Civic Guard from Amsterdam.

LAUGHTER – arguably the most engaging category of the show. Frans Hals is known to be one of the very few painters who depicted laughter. His portraits, in which sitters are laughing, smiling, or showing their teeth, portray all types of curious characters he encountered on the streets of Haarlem. They are often from the margins of the Dutch Golden Age society: fisher children, sex workers, market women, and people with mental disabilities.

TWINKLE – in this category, the curators paid attention to the presence of children in Hals’ oeuvre. They appear in affectionate family portraits where the sense of kinship is noticeable in gestures or gazes or occasional children’s portraits in which his sons and daughters posed, as you can see below:

Interestingly, the curators decided to include this large-scale family portrait, the largest painting not to depict civic guards. It shows a wealthy Haarlem family in a detailed landscape. What becomes the highlight of this scene is not the main sitters but their almost invisible servant, a black pageboy, brought to the Netherlands during the slave trade, an inhumane enterprise in which the Dutch were heavily involved.

SMALL – the name suggests the size of some of Hals’ paintings, executed in a small format either by commission or as models for larger jobs. In my opinion, this is the biggest strength of the exhibition, as the curators presented the most extensive range of paintings that are not as famous as his larger portraits. Some of these works come from private collections, and others recently acquired an attribution, which can thus be added to Hals’ oeuvre.

BOLD – presents solo male portraiture, which, in contrast to depictions of women who were often restrained to the presence of their male partner, are as bold as they could be through confident or nonchalant gestures, fashion statements, or attitudes. This section contains a true highlight of the exhibition: The Laughing Cavalier (1624), which returns to the Netherlands from the UK for the first time in more than 150 years.

Below, you can see a rarely reproduced portrait of 22-year-old Jasper Schade from Utrecht, who had a passion for fashion and spent a fortune on clothing. His indulgence reached such proportions that Jasper’s cousin was cautioned against following his example.

SMEARING – the last section ends the exhibition with the two significant group portraits by Hals, thought to be his last works before he died in 1666. Hals advised his students to smear their canvases and apply their brushstrokes with bravura, which can be seen in his artistic practice until the end.

The Experience

The Frans Hals exhibition will run in Amsterdam from February 16 – June 9, 2024. Then, it will travel to Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, where you can view it from July 12 – November 3, 2024.

While in Amsterdam, don’t miss out on this excellent opportunity to have a full Frans Hals experience: hop on a train to Haarlem, which is only 15 minutes away!