Frans Hals, Portraying Joy | Entertainment | The USA Print – THE USA PRINT

In the galleries of the National Gallery you can almost hear the laughter of those women, men and children who, alone or in a group, seem alive almost four hundred years after they were painted by Frans Hals (c1582-1666), apparently happy to See visitors walking through the rooms. Hals is part of the Holy Trinity of the Dutch Golden Age, along with Rembrandt and Vermeer, and of the three he is the one who best captured the carefree joy of earthly characters who live life in the moment (respectable citizens, red-cheeked beer drinkers, revelers, fisherwomen or prostitutes with sideways gaze and deep cleavage…) whose energy continues to be a cause for astonishment.

Holding their gaze on ours, Hals’s audacious creatures, as he saw them in real life or as the fruit of his imagination, will meet again starting this Saturday at the Trafalgar Square museum (until January 21) in the largest exhibition to date of a painter who was a successful portrait painter in Haarlem, where the nouveau riche queued at the door of his studio to be immortalized, but at the end of his long life he had gone out of fashion and was impoverished, without money to pay for coal to heat themselves.

Hals does not have Vermeer’s ability to paralyze the everyday, nor does he have the psychological depth of Rembrandt’s portraits, agrees Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, but the singularity with which he captures life through his hand and his look makes it imperishable. “His work spans the centuries and his characters are social creatures who speak to us today very clearly and in a very direct way,” he adds. We could find them today walking on any street in any city, recognize them even if we don’t know them.

Hals, like Vermeer, has had a hard time getting to the podium of the great masters. Already in the 20th century, the historian Kenneth Clark despised him as a “disgustingly cheerful and terribly skillful” painter, even though a century earlier Manet, Courbet, Sargent or Van Gogh had already recognized him as one of their own. Because of the freedom and spontaneity of his brush and the simplicity of the faces, which they saw as a gateway to a liberating and modern art. In the National Gallery, before entering the rooms where 50 of the 220 paintings he made hang, it is Van Gogh who has the first word, tempering the visitor’s spirit with his affirmation that Hals’s painting was worth as much as Michael’s. Angel, Raphael and the artists of Greek antiquity.

The legend of a life soaked in alcohol precedes him, but “you can’t be a drunk and paint that way,” says Gabriele Finaldi

From the Wallace Collection it has been released for the first time The smiling gentleman one of the most popular portraits of the artist, in front of which one has the sensation of being in front of a snapshot taken in the middle of life. And from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, whose walls he had never left (he has maintained a no-loan policy since one of his paintings was stranded in the Thames in the 1950s), they have also arrived. The regents of the hospice for the elderly , the asylum where the painter took refuge when, already old and ruined, he had no means to support himself. Or the group portrait Banquet of the officers of the St. George civic guard one of the calls militia painting a Dutch subgenre whose destiny was to be exhibited in clubs or town halls, and for which Hals charged each of the members individually.

Hals is haunted by a bad reputation. Decades after his death, a legend circulated that his had been a debauched, alcohol-soaked life, thanks to a biography by Arnold Houbraken, according to which he was often drunk. “Engaging in indecent activities, and particularly excessive wallowing in wine, was especially common among painters, and was adopted as a fashion,” he wrote. Hals may have frequented taverns and hung out with brewers, but in 1619, twenty-one of the twenty-four members of the Haarlem town council were engaged in that trade. Finaldi further argues that beer at that time had very little alcohol content and was surely safer to drink than the water available. The pictures of children drinking, of women with a glass in their hand and a jug in the other, of laughter lost between alcoholic drinks, should not have helped to deny it. “But you can’t be a drunk and paint that way,” says the director of the National Gallery.

The exhibition will later travel to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.