Following Rembrandt and Vermeer, Dutch master Frans Hals holds a major exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
In the early 17th century, laughter rarely appeared on painters’ canvases.
Frans Hals changed that.
“He was not a modest painter,” says Friso Rammerze, co-curator of a major exhibition of the Dutch master’s paintings opening this week at the Rijksmuseum.
“People laugh a lot, which is quite remarkable in the 17th century. They even smile and laugh, but that was rarely done,” he added at a preview of the exhibition on Tuesday. Ta.
The exhibition, which first opened at London’s National Gallery last year, now moves to the Dutch capital.
Despite being said to have loved alcohol, Hals had complete control over his artistic process.
“It would be a stretch to say that his style was because he drank too much. It’s really an awareness of what’s going on in European painting at the moment,” Rammerze said.
Rather, it is likely that Hals was under the influence of Flemish masters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.
“He has this loose brushstroke, because it belongs to the avant-garde of European art at the moment. But it’s also functional. It…suggests a kind of movement. “And he’s ahead of everyone else in wanting to show that movement,” he said.
Hals’ smooth brushstrokes had a great influence on later artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Impressionists such as Edouard Manet.
Hals’ most famous work, “The Laughing Knight,” emphasizes the humor in his work. This innocent-looking man, smiling, with an upturned mustache and his hat held at an artful angle, came across the English Channel from Wallace’s collection in London. The painting was Hals’s first overseas trip since 1870, and is one of 48 works brought to the Rijksmuseum for the exhibition.
The Hals exhibition follows a recent blockbuster exhibition at the Amsterdam Museum of Fine Arts that showcased two other great names in 17th-century Dutch art: Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer.
“They’re all created in the same medium, oil on canvas, but they accomplish something completely different with it,” said Rijksmuseum Director General Taco Divits.
“For Rembrandt, it’s emotion, it’s the human condition. For Vermeer, it’s stillness. And for Frans Hals, it’s movement, it’s joy. Almost everyone, looking at Frans Hals’s photographs, It makes me laugh. And when I walk through the exhibit, I laugh at myself because the brushstrokes are so free. It’s like the brushstrokes dance on the canvas.”
The exhibition opens at the Rijksmuseum on February 16th and will run until June 9th. In March, it was moved to a museum in Berlin.