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Updated: May 6, 2025
There is much vigour in the seeing, there is the exquisite handling of Hals, and there is the placing, the setting forth of figures on the canvas, which was as instinctively his as it was Titian's. Hals and Velasquez possessed all those qualities, and something more.
He never left us in doubt either as to the time or the place; and the same obligations of time and place, which Hals never shirked, seem to me to rest on the painter, if he elects to paint his sitter in any attitude except one of conventional repose.
But the Town Hall Museum is hard by. It is the glory of Haarlem as the Rijks Museum is the glory of Amsterdam and Holland. A pull at the bell and the door is opened, a small fee is paid, and you are free to the room where are hung ten large paintings by the inimitable Frans Hals. Here are the world-renowned Regent pictures set forth in chronological order. Drop the catalogue and use your own eyes.
Nearly a thousand pictures bear the name of Rubens. "The artistic labor of Frans Hals of Haarlem extended over half a century. He possessed the utmost vivacity of conception, purity of color, and breadth of execution, as shown in his latest works, and so well did he handle his brush that drawing seems almost lost in a maze of color tone.
And these emotions I experience as the man's, and as his, not in a vague way, but as definitely present in his sculptured form, even in particular parts of it, in the swelling chest and tightened limbs. Or consider another case. Suppose I see Franz Hals' "Laughing Cavalier." I feel jollity in the face, as the cavalier's.
We see this in the portrait of Vice-Admiral Kortenaar at Amsterdam, where the conception of forms, and the unscumbled character of the strokes of the brush, recall Hals. The same may be observed in two larger pictures with archers in the Town Hall at Haarlem, where the inartistic arrangement and monotony of the otherwise warm flesh tones point to the earlier time of the painter.
"The Blacksmith" by Whistler shows you the blacksmith, not Whistler; Rembrandt's pictures of his mother show the woman; Franz Hals gives you the Burgomaster, not himself. Shakespeare of all writers is the most impersonal he does not give himself away. When Rubens painted a portrait of Philip the Fourth he put a dash of daring, exuberant health in the face that was never there.
Its significance is so intensified as to produce a profound feeling in a sympathetic spectator. In the Cassel Museum. If we compare it with the badly named "Laughing Cavalier" of Franz Hals we see clearly enough the difference between drama and realism.
The room was the low-beamed old wonder that I had felt it to be in the candle-light the night before, only now the soft richness of the paneling, which held back into the gloom the faded colors of the books that lined the walls, the mellowed glow of the rough stone of the chimney, and the faded hand-woven rugs on the floor made it all look like one of Rembrandt's or Franz Hals' canvases.
To view five Lucas van Leydens in one gallery is not an everyday event. His engravings are rare enough that is, in good states; "ghosts" are aplenty and his paintings rarer. Here they are chiefly portraits. Rachel Ruysch, the flower painter, has a superior in Judith Lyster, a pupil of Frans Hals. She was born at Haarlem, or Zaandam, about 1600, and died 1660. She married the painter Jan Molener.
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