Frans Hals’s great gift as a portraitist – and what made him so popular among the merchants, burgomasters, officers and petty aristocracy of his home town of Haarlem – was his ability both to capture a convincing likeness and to make his sitters seem to come alive. There are several ways in which he did this, and this painting offers some particularly good examples of his techniques.
Although many of Hals’s portraits of individuals (as opposed to his group paintings) are shown only bust or half-length, the artist often found a way to inject a sense of energy into the poses. Here, the sitter leans back slightly, thrusting his elbow towards us. This, and the way that he tilts his head and grasps his gloves in his left hand, lifting them slightly as he does so, implies movement – a moment captured. Hals had to work on the pose to achieve this effect. If you look carefully at the outline of the man’s hat and left arm, you can see that the artist made changes to his first draft, shifting the sitter back slightly in a way that emphasises the tilt of the head and the jut of the elbow.
Hals also liked to suggest a touch of humour in his sitter’s facial expressions. There is often a light in the eye, a twitch of the lip, or – as here – the slightest sense of a raised eyebrow, which gives the impression that the sitter is reacting to the viewer. The effect here is emphasised by the light which rakes across from the upper left side, highlighting the details and nuances of his face, such as the ruddy cheeks and slightly hooded eyes. He seems to be looking at us, as much as we are looking at him.
The artist’s extraordinarily economical and apparently spontaneous brushwork is apparent here too. Hals was a master of suggestion, depicting, for example, the lacy edging of the sitter’s collar with only the briefest of stipple marks made with the edge of his brush. The pair of gloves is articulated with minimal brushstrokes; indeed there is barely enough detail for us to be able to interpret them as gloves. The sitter’s fingers too are described only with broad strokes of grey, green, pink and yellow.
The lack of meticulously defined outlines enhances the feeling that this is not a static image, but one brought to life by the blur of movement. Yet amid such apparently free and spontaneous brushwork, Hals also knew how to work more intensively, using layers and thicker paint to suggest the colour and texture of the sitter’s face. And there are tiny touches too. For example, among the broad paint strokes in the fingers of the sitter’s left hand, Hals has added a minute line of bright pink, where the light has caught one of the tiny ridges on the sitter’s little fingernail.
The sitter in this portrait is clearly a prosperous man, conventionally but expensively dressed in the style of the mid-1640s. Beyond that, no evidence has survived – we don’t know who he is.
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