Stuart Forster reports from the Frans Hals and the Moderns art exhibition held in Haarlem, the Netherlands, from 13 October 2018 until 24 February 2019.
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On display at the Frans Hals Museum, Frans Hals and the Moderns features notable loan works, including Vincent van Gogh’s Postman Joseph Roulin and Édouard Manet’s Corner of a Café-Concert. John Singer Sargent’s Constance Wynne-Roberts, Mrs Ernest Hills of Redleaf (died 1932) is also among the paintings displayed alongside artworks by the master after whom the building is named.
“Frans Hals posthumously became a teacher for a whole new generation,” said Ann Demeester, the Director of the Frans Hals Museum, while introducing the exhibition.
“Associated with a wild lifestyle, Hals and his work became marginalised in the 18th century,” explained Demeester.
Shortly after Hals’ death, in 1666, his work became largely forgotten. Howver, the artist is now regarded as one of the masters of the Dutch Golden Age. Yet it was not until after the mid-1860s that his work was rediscovered.
Dutch Golden Age
Like many creative souls of the Dutch Golden Age, Hals was born in Flanders during the late sixteenth century. Antwerp, his family’s home city, was under Spanish control. Meanwhile, Holland and the northern provinces of what we today know as the Netherlands struggled to attain independence.
Consequently, many people migrated from the south to the north. Their economic and intellectual capital are regarded as the foundation stones of the Dutch Golden Age.
2019 marks the 350th anniversary of the death of Rembrandt van Rijn. He was another of the masters whose oil paintings depict characters from that era. In commemoration, museums and galleries in cities across the Netherlands will hold Dutch Golden Age-themed exhibitions.
Frans Hals and the Moderns is the first major exhibition with that theme to open.
The Frans Hals Museum
The Frans Hals Museum spans two locations in Haarlem. One is termed the Hof (meaning ‘court’) and the other is termed the Hal (meaning ‘hall’).
The Hal is in a seventeenth-century market hall designed by the celebrated architect Lieven de Key. His stone buildings typify the grand facades of the Dutch Golden Age. It stands on Haarlem’s main market square, the Grote Markt. It is just a few paces from the Saint Bavo Church, in which Frans Hals is buried.
The Hof, the location of the Frans Hals and the Moderns exhibition, is a five-minute walk from Haarlem’s cobbled marketplace. The museum occupies a former almshouse and orphanage with a sizable courtyard. It opened as a museum in 1913.
Frans Hals and the Moderns is the first exhibition to occupy all the galleries within the building.
Restoring Frans Hals’ reputation
In 1863, Théophile Thoré-Bürger paid a visit to the Stedelijk Museum, the art gallery in Haarlem’s town hall. It was a forerunner of the Frans Hals Museum. The building looks onto the Grote Markt.
In 1868, Thoré-Bürger wrote two articles about Hals for an influential French art publication, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. They were key to the restoration of Hals’ reputation. The articles resulted in a surge of interest in the artist’s works.
As a consequence, artists from Europe and beyond began travelling to Haarlem to study Hals’ paintings. The loose, swirling brush strokes for which Hals had long been dismissed inspired artists during the late 19th century.
Van Gogh and Frans Hals
“Van Gogh was obsessed not so much by Rembrandt but by Hals. His works opened Van Gogh’s eyes to colour and a new bravura method,” said Demeester. In letters written by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, the artist enthused about Hals’ use of colour shaped his paintings and featured more than twenty colours of black.
The hands on Van Gogh’s portrait of Postman Joseph Roulin, on loan from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, are painted without significant detail. Spontaneity was also a feature of Hals’ works, ensuring that the focus was on the faces and expressions of his subjects.
“Nowadays, our conservators would go crazy if people were to bring oil paintings into a gallery,” said Demeester while laughing. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it became common practice for artists to visit Haarlem to study and make copies of Hals’ paintings.
Copies painted by artists who saw Hals as a figure of inspiration hang alongside the original works in Frans Hals and the Moderns. They include Antoine Vollon’s The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616.
The faces of the sitters in Hals’ group portrait, Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House, exhibit strokes of yellow, white and red paint. He captured the spirit of the moment, working quickly, a style that contrasted with the more ponderous approach of his contemporaries. This was another reason why he appealed to artists active in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
Frans Hals and the Moderns
“We look at Hals through nineteenth-century artists. They are the eyewitnesses that follow us as we go through the exhibition,” said Marrigye Rikken, the Head of Collections at the Frans Hals Museum and the curator of the Frans Hals and the Moderns.
“Hals was an idol for nineteenth-century painters,” she commented.
“Max Liebermann made more than 30 copies of Hals’ works, of which 10 are extant. He did not copy any other artist,” said Rikken.
The admiration of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists for Hals often “can be seen in the composition, in the poses of sitters,” she added.
In 1910, the American artist Robert Henri took a studio above what is now Café Brinkmann, overlooking the Grote Markt. His work The Laughing Boy, on loan from the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, bears similarities to Hals’ Laughing Boy, which is on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
Ruff days for artists
Several artists active in the nineteenth century, including William Merritt Chase and Frank Duveneck, were inspired to paint sitters wearing ruffs around their necks.
Ruffs were worn primarily by wealthy members of society during the Dutch Golden Age. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, Hals would also paint common people.
This prompted Gustave Courbet, the French painter who was an influential member of the Realism movement, to interpret Hals as an emancipatory social activist. Hals’ painting Malle Babbe, depicting a psychologically disturbed woman drinking from a pewter vessel, was one work that led him to this assumption. Rikken suggests that was reading too much from the paintings.
The final gallery of the museum explores how nineteenth-century photographers drew influence from Hals in their compositions.
Seeing the juxtaposition of artworks from more than two centuries apart is an effective and thought-provoking way of exploring the influence of Frans Hals on later generations of artists.
Frans Hals Museum
See the Frans Hals Museum website for information relating to visiting, ticketing and future exhibitions.
The map below shows the location of the Frans Hals Museum:
Accommodation in Haarlem
Find and book hotels in Haarlem using the website below:
Books about Frans Hals
Interested in learning more about Frans Hals and the Dutch Masters? You can buy the following books from Amazon:
Frans Hals by Bart Cornelis and other authors.
Frans Hals by Gerald S. Davies.
Further information
For ideas about things to see and do in Haarlem, see the Visit Haarlem website. The Holland website also has information about the city.
Thank you for visiting Go Eat Do and reading about the Frans Hals and the Moderns art exhibition held in Haarlem. You may also enjoy reading about art museums in the Netherlands.
Stuart Forster, the author of this post, was named Travel Writer of the Decade at the Netherlands Press Awards of 2020. He is available for commissions about the Netherlands.
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