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Updated: May 6, 2025
Here was a man capable of painting portraits, perhaps not quite so full of grip as the best work done by Velasquez and Hals, only just falling short of these masters at the point where they were strongest, but plainly exceeding them in graciousness of intention, and subtle happiness of design, who would lay down his palette and run to a newspaper office to polish the tail of an epigram which he was launching against an unfortunate critic who had failed to distinguish between an etching and a pen-and-ink drawing!
At Easter the whole city learned that Don Luis d'Avila had eloped with the beautiful Anna Van Hoogstraten, after killing her betrothed bridegroom in a duel on Maundy- Thursday at Hals on his way to Brussels scarcely twenty-four hours before the wedding. "I shall never forget how Junker Van Hoogstraten raged.
Could anything be more natural and unassuming? Look at the Laughing Cavalier, and ask if it is not the man himself, as Hals saw and knew him, not a faked up hero? Hals caught him in his best clothes, that is all. He did not put them on to be painted in he was out on a jaunt. Look at Hals's women, how pleased they are to be painted, just as they are.
But Hals must have popularised painting much more than we generally suppose. An example occurs to me in the picture of The Rommelpot Player, of which no less than thirteen versions are enumerated by De Groot, none of which can claim to be the original. One is at Wilton, another in Sir Frederick Cook's gallery at Richmond, and a third at Arthingworth Hall in Northamptonshire.
Ministerial rank worked a wonderful change; so much so that Noye was actually the originator of the ship-money tax which played so large a share in embroiling the nation. Hals goes so far as to say that Noye "was blow-coal, incendiary, and stirrer-up of the Civil War"; and it was he who prosecuted the arrested members of the House of Commons.
In this field stand preeminent Van der Heist, Hals, Covaert, Flink, and Bol.... Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded of this school of painting its variety, and its importance as the expression, the mirror, so to speak, of the country.
The gallery, the low wing at the upper corner, with lunettes in sculpture by Sherry Fry, Phillip Martiny, Charles Keck, and Attilio Piccirilli, contains pictures by Titian, Paul Veronese, Velasquez, Murillo, Van Dyck, Franz Hals, Rembrant, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz, Manet, Millet, Rousseau, Troyon, Constable, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Raeburn, Reynolds, Romney, Turner, and Whistler.
The atmosphere of this silent street by the river, shaded almost to a twilight by the thick foliage, with the old houses all about us, seemed to invite reminiscence, or dreams of the stern and respectable old burghers and burgesses in sombre clothing, wide brimmed hats, and stiffly starched linen ruffs about their necks as rendered by Rembrandt, Hals, Rubens and Jordaens.
It is a pleasing if somewhat theatric belief that Titian and Velasquez, duelled with their canvases, their rapier a brush. After inspecting many of the Hals portraits the evidences of direct painting, swift though calculated, are not to be denied.
So we are glad to loiter in this vague sensation of delicate colour, and we talk to our friends, avoiding the pictures, until gradually a pale-faced woman with arched eyebrows draws our eyes and fixes our thoughts. It is a portrait by Mr. Sargent, one of the best he has painted. By the side of a fine Hals it might look small and thin, but nothing short of a fine Hals would affect its real beauty.
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