The Dutch painter Frans Hals (1582-1666) was considered “The Master of Laughter,” and it seems that that nickname and the laughter he gave in his paintings did not sit well with the artistic world that would follow the Golden Age. of Dutch painting. Because if he was then a painter so appreciated that there was a queue to have his portrait painted by him, at the end of the glorious 17th century he was so obscured that many of his works were attributed to other more celebrated painters (there were artists who suffered worse luck, his contemporary Judith Leyster She was also forgotten, even more so because she was a woman, and her works would even be attributed to… Hals).
Laughter has not enjoyed an excessively good reputation in art, nor in societies when it has been expressed openly, that is, like the bursts of joy that we find in the works of the Dutch painter. We have come to this world to suffer and a laugh is fine, but showing one’s teeth without even having the modesty of covering one’s mouth with one’s hand, especially for women, was completely unacceptable, hence the uniqueness of Hals’s expressiveness, who He also painted other types of paintings, large group portraits of the civic militias, individual portraits of prominent men and their wives, the image conveniently adjusted to the seriousness, let’s say austerity, that they wanted to convey. But even in those cases, a smile escaped some of those portrayed.
Without a doubt, the society of Haarlem, Netherlands, where his parents moved from Flemish Antwerp when the future painter was very young (he had been born there), was eminently sober and circumspect, but still not as much as we have come to believe. The Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, owner of a large group of works by the artist, presented the exhibition The Art of Laughter in 2017, which was based on the premise that “rarely have more humorous paintings been produced than in the Dutch Golden Age.
Naughty children, stupid peasants, foolish dandies and bewildered drunks, quacks, pimps, pimps, lazy maids and lustful ladies figure in large numbers in the masterpieces of the period. In fact, in preparing the exhibition the curators made an inventory of the works of art of the Golden Age to look for those that were related to humor and found no less than 2,500 examples “in which it was not just a detail fun, but it was really the essence of the image,” they highlighted.
A mental, temporal and social framework that predisposed to the smiling painting of Frans Hals. Anna Tummers, curator of the exhibition The Art of Laughter, also published a volume conveniently titled De Gouden Eeuw viert fest (The Golden Age is Celebrating); In it he expressed his conviction that the didactic-moralizing approach with which Dutch art has been viewed is not so univocal: “people were not ashamed to celebrate life, as attested by the existence of a festive culture in what we know of the private houses, gardens and public spaces of the time”; According to historian Rudolf Dekker, “the 17th century was the Golden Age of humor in the Netherlands, comparable to the Italian Renaissance.”
While in other European nations art received its commissions mainly from the Court and the Church, in the cities of the Republic of the Netherlands the market was made up of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and in this market there was a niche, as we say Nowadays, for festive art, even the popular strata participated in it: Hals’s paintings of smiling children were copied and sold again and again. Frans Hals was not the only one to paint genre scenes whose protagonists could be said to be bursting with laughter, but he was one of the very few who dared to bring this good humor to individual portraits.
Furthermore, the artist practiced a “bourgeois realism”: his scenes and portraits were full of naturalness, movement, short brush strokes and finishes described as rough that nevertheless infused vitality into his paintings, he showed them with relaxed gestures, like his enigmatic The Smiling Knight (1624), stars of the exhibition at the National Gallery.
For much of his life Hals enjoyed commercial success, but he always had small debts, perhaps due to the fact that he had fathered a not inconsiderable number of eleven children in two marriages. Despite his transgression, he was careful to paint his sitters with a fine smile, while reserving his production of laughter to the paintings of children, lute players, even small fishermen who carried their catch to the city, also crazy and especially drinkers.
It was this last aspect that led to his oblivion in subsequent centuries: in 1718 the painter and writer Arnold Houbraken published a biography of Frans Hals in which he described him as a “drunkard” who supposedly spent his nights in the tavern, of which He only came out when he was already very drunk, and it was his students who made sure he didn’t fall into a canal on the way home.
His biographer’s accusations were one of the causes of Hals and his work’s fall from grace; For almost the entire 18th century and the first half of the 19th, art critics ignored him: his supposedly dissolute life constituted a bad example for young artists, while his pictorial style, so natural, dynamic and innovative, clashed with the new academic mentality. The result was the devaluation of his paintings and his cancellation, since his name did not appear in most texts about the Golden Age.
The history of art is full of disappearances and discoveries, of stellar falls and resurrections, and that of Frans Hals occurred in 1868, when the French art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger was transfixed by seeing the paintings and wrote a couple of articles about a painting of which he said he did not know another “has been executed with such enthusiasm.”
The critic must have been very influential, because Hals’s paintings were immediately revisited, their price rose and the Louvre took over La Bohémienne; Courbet surrendered to the vision of Malle Babbe, even more so when he learned that it was the portrait of a real woman, Barbara Claes, a patient at the mental illness hospital. An outsider, someone who was not part of the ruling classes, someone who Van Gogh, who also fell under the influence of Hals, described in a letter as “the old fishwife full of witch’s joy.” The painters of the 19th century had discovered how revolutionary Dutch painting of the Golden Age could be, which was undoubtedly that of the decorous and circumspect bourgeoisie, but also that of the lower classes portrayed by Hals. And all, with their desire to live. And to laugh.
Report prepared with the catalogs of the exhibitions ‘Frans Hals’, at the National Gallery, ‘The Art of Laughter’, in Haarlem, the essay ‘The sublime comedy: a distinctly Dutch baroque in the work of Frans Hals’, by Frans -Willem Korsten and the texts of the Maurithuis Museum, The Hague.
Frans Hals. National Gallery. London. www.nationalgallery.org.uk. From September 30 to January 21
