‘Frans Hals’ Review: A Painter’s Soaring Portraiture

London

Following on the heels of last spring’s Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam, “Frans Hals” at the National Gallery here celebrates another Dutch artist (1582/84-1666) whose critically neglected work was rediscovered by 19th-century French scholars and painters. Together with Rembrandt, the triumvirate would define Golden Age painting in the Netherlands. This show of 51 paintings, organized by Bart Cornelis, the museum’s curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings 1600-1800, is the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in decades. Though not as well-known as the art of his two contemporaries, Hals’s incomparable work—its unfeigned naturalism, ebullient brushwork and sanguine vision of quotidian life in the 17th-century Dutch republic—would captivate Courbet, Manet, Van Gogh and other modernist painters, and still resonates today.