Early life and works Frans Hals left no written evidence about his life or his works, and only a brief outline of his biography is known. He was the son of a cloth worker from Mechelen (Malines) and of a local girl, and the family moved from Spanish-held Flanders to Haarlem in the free Netherlands by 1591 at the latest; the local town hall records give this date for the christening of Frans’s younger brother Dirck, who also became a painter. Except for a brief visit to Antwerp in 1616, Hals lived all his life in Haarlem.

What he did for the first 25 or 30 years of his life is not known. The earliest indication of his activity as an artist was that about 1610 he joined the Guild of St Luke of Haarlem, a body empowered to register artists as masters. Shortly afterward he married his first wife, Annetje Harmensdochter Abeel. She bore him two children before her death in 1615. Two years later, Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers, who was to survive her husband by some nine years. In all, Hals had 10 children, and 5 of his 8 sons became painters. None, however, was of note.

Tradition has it that Frans Hals was the pupil of Carel van Mander, a minor painter and poet who helped found a successful painting academy at Haarlem. There is no evidence either to support this claim or to refute it. From the beginning, howeve

Frans Hals was the great 17th-century portraitist of the Dutch bourgeoisie of Haarlem, where he spent practically all his life. Hals evolved a technique that was close to impressionism in its looseness, and he painted with increasing freedom as he grew older. The jovial spirit of his early work is typified by the Shrovetide Revellers (Merry Company, c. 1615; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In middle age his portraits grew increasingly sad, revealing sometimes a sense of foreboding (e.g., Nicolaes Hasselaer, 1630-33; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). The paintings of his old age show best his genius for portraying character (e.g., Man in a Slouch Hat, 1660-66; Staatliche Museen, Kassel).

Hals’s work conflicted with the typical mannerisms of his presumed master. His early work is actually closer in spirit to that of Jacob Jordaens, who was an outstanding Baroque painter from Antwerp and a pupil of Peter Paul Rubens. The good humour of Hals’s popular scenes recalls the joyous gatherings painted by the contemporary Dutch followers of the earthy, sensuous Italian painter Caravaggio.