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This is the first book to concentrate on Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals's highly innovative approach to male portraiture.Frans Hals is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time and, together with Rembrandt, is one of the most eminent seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Published to coincide with the Wallace Collection's exhibition of the same name,
Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artist's highly innovative approach to male portraiture, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666.
Through pose, expression and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters' characters like no one else before him. This book includes the first in-depth study of Hals's great masterpiece,
The Laughing Cavalier, from 1624. The extravagantly dressed young man, confidently posed with his left arm akimbo in the extreme foreground of the picture and seemingly penetrating into the viewer's space, has been charming audiences for over a century.
Richly illustrated,
Frans Hals: The Male Portrait situates
The Laughing Cavalier within the artist's larger
oeuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve this great masterpiece.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Director's Foreword
Sponsor's Foreword
Frans Hals: A Short Biography
1. Frans Hals and the Male Portrait
2. Hals's Masterpiece:
The Laughing Cavalier3.
The Laughing Cavalier and the Revival of Frans Hals
4. The Making of
The Laughing Cavalier5. Frans Hals and Portraiture: Style and Painting Techniques Interwoven
Appendix: Provenance of
The Laughing Cavalier
Bibliography
Endnotes
Index
Picture Credits
About the author
Lelia Packer is Curator of Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German and Pre-1600 Paintings at the Wallace Collection.
Summary
This is the first book to concentrate on Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals's highly innovative approach to male portraiture.
Frans Hals is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time and, together with Rembrandt, is one of the most eminent seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Published to coincide with the Wallace Collection's exhibition of the same name, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artist's highly innovative approach to male portraiture, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666.
Through pose, expression and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters' characters like no one else before him. This book includes the first in-depth study of Hals's great masterpiece, The Laughing Cavalier, from 1624. The extravagantly dressed young man, confidently posed with his left arm akimbo in the extreme foreground of the picture and seemingly penetrating into the viewer's space, has been charming audiences for over a century.
Richly illustrated, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait situates The Laughing Cavalier within the artist's larger oeuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve this great masterpiece.
Foreword
This is the first book to concentrate on Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals's highly innovative approach to male portraiture.
Additional text
The catalogue, by Lelia Packer and Ashok Roy, is a brilliant book that's concise, detailed, and informed. Its treatment of iconography is, to me, a feast.
