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After the famous exhibitions on Vermeer and Rembrandt, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam could not miss the opportunity to present what has long been considered the third column of Dutch Golden Age painting: Frans Hals. The exhibition, which includes around 50 of the master’s largest paintings, many of which come from international loans, and which will remain open until 9 June 2024, is organized in collaboration with the National Gallery in London, and the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen of Berlin, and thanks to a special collaboration with the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the city where the painter arrived as a child from Antwerp and where he lived the rest of his life.
“Laughing Knight”
Among the most important works present: “Portrait of Catharina Hooft with her nurse”, “Malle Babbe” from Berlin, “Laughing Child” from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, “Young Fisherman” from a private collection, “The Feast of the Officers of the Militia of St. George” of 1616, never previously lent, “The Regents of the Hospice” and the “Laughing Knight” a work belonging to the Wallace Collection in London since 1870 and never previously returned to the Netherlands.
The artist
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1582/1584 – Haarlem 1666) is considered one of the most innovative artists of the 17th century for his pictorial style capable of capturing the vitality of his subjects which he represents as living people thanks to a courageously unique and absolutely original style in painting of the time. To do so, the artist chose to use a particularly rapid brushstroke which allowed him to obtain a sense of dynamism even in portraits and made him define himself as a precursor of impressionism, influencing, with his style, artists such as Manet, Monet and Van himself. Gogh. On the other hand, Hals was one of the very few artists to successfully paint people smiling and laughing, a particularly difficult challenge for a painter.
Grandi mostre: Frans Hals Rijksmuseum di Amsterdam
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The exhibition
The subjects of his paintings come even more to life thanks to this exhibition which, with a thematic focus, explores their individual identities and their social worlds, presenting, in each of the ten rooms, a different aspect of the artist’s work: smiles and laughter , family, male subjects, small canvases, group portraits and paintings of couples. Frans Hals’ original style and technique earned him a reputation as a virtuoso in his time, a status rivaled only by the likes of Rembrandt in the Netherlands and Velázquez in Spain. It is no coincidence that he was a portrait painter in great demand among the wealthy citizens of Haarlem and the surrounding areas. But over the course of the 18th century Hals’s work gradually fell into obscurity and it was only in the 19th century that the art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger (1807–1869) rediscovered his work, as well as that of Vermeer .
Frans Hals, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Curators: Friso Lammertse and Tamar van Riessen, since 9 August 2024