In Frans Hals Year 2013, key works by the artist are being shown amidst paintings by such famous predecessors as Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens in Frans Hals: Eye to Eye with Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian. This extraordinary confrontation of old masters is essential to the understanding of seventeenth-century art. Famous painters often produced their works in response to one another, seeking to outdo the other artist and create something exceptional. The best way to assess the results of their efforts is to look at comparable works side by side. Visitors can see for themselves the artistic challenges Hals must have faced and what makes him unique. The paintings come from some of the world’s greatest museums, among them the National Gallery in London, the Prado in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris, and from various private collections.

A New View of Frans Hals

This first major Frans Hals exhibition in almost twenty-five years sheds new light on the artist. It was long thought that Frans Hals’s name was almost unknown outside Haarlem in the seventeenth century and that he did not achieve fame until the nineteenth, when the French art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger rediscovered him, and artists like Vincent van Gogh and Edouard Manet expressed their admiration for him. New research has revealed, however, that he was highly regarded by some of the most eminent painters and art lovers in Europe in the seventeenth century.

Confrontations

Visitors are able to see the choice that the sixteenth-century art theoretician Karel van Mander, Hals’s teacher, presented to painters at that time—whether to paint in a ‘neat’ manner (like Brueghel) or with ‘rough’ brushstrokes (like Titian and Tintoretto). It is also possible to compare swift oil sketches by Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens with work by Hals and Rembrandt and see how closely Hals and his colleagues in Antwerp approached one another in formal portraiture. A vibrant selection of genre paintings set Hals’s masterly brushwork and the expressions of his laughing figures side by side with comparable works by Van Baburen, Jordaens and Van Dyck. Hals’s great group portraits also engage in a dialogue with contemporaries. The most spectacular is perhaps the confrontation between Hals’s last group portraits and the late portraits by Rembrandt, the only other seventeenth-century master who dared to paint with such bravura at that moment.