The Portraitist - Frans Hals and His World

A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy. Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

Product details

• Authors: Steven Nadler, Nadler Steven
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2022
• EAN: 9780226698366
• ISBN: 978-0-226-69836-6
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 158 mm x 236 mm x 28 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies; ART / Subjects & Themes / Portraits, ART / Individual Artists / General, Biography: arts & entertainment, Netherlands, 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799, History of Art, 17th century, c 1600 to c 1699, Individual artists, art monographs, Biography: arts and entertainment, History of art & design styles: c 1600 to c 1800, Portraits in art, Portraits and self-portraiture in art