We live in the “long nineteenth century” and also in the long Dutch Golden Age. Our nests are comfortable thanks to cleverly devised structures of limited liability. We have wrested production from previously fallow ground and swindled inhabitants of the four corners of the earth. Security concerns nibble at us but how serious are any of them? Let’s just amuse ourselves with the classic pastime of those who have come into money: portraiture.
Frans Hals shows people as they want themselves to be seen, and you can see them straining to be seen that way. He feels modern because it’s all so posed. No still-lifes or St Jeromes in this oeuvre: Hals seems to have painted notables in his hometown of Haarlem because they paid him to. The specific energy of his subjects leaps forth. Even more than the mysterious Vermeer or the masterful Rembrandt, a Hals canvas brings us into the presence of a personality.
Zachary Fine explains the political/economic environment of Hals’s pictures:
Artists like Hals and Rembrandt didn’t have a Philip IV of Spain or a Cardinal Barberini in Rome—there was no longer a royal family, and Catholicism was only begrudgingly tolerated, so court and church commissions were minimal—but they could secure private commissions from aldermen, textile magnates, the remnants of noble families, or preachers, doctors, and an ascendant middle class. The Dutch were a God-chosen people, and they were hungry for images of themselves.
Accordingly, studying Hals gives us a view of the Dutch Republic, a commercial society, anomalous among the royalist/theocratic 17th century power structures of Europe. The portraits show a mirthful urban cacophony of confident achievers.
Jonathan Jones is immune to the charms of these self-righteous men, who may more correctly be called “guys.” Jones admits to the technical prowess of the portraiture but doesn’t see any inner life in the subjects. For me that’s just part of the difficulty of the portraitist’s trade: guys hired you to show them in a certain light so you do it, psychological complexity be damned. The work is alive in its furtive, suggestive quality, never saying anything directly but just inviting us nearer to a subject.
Look at 1639’s Officers and Sergeants of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard. These fellas manage to be jovial and self-serious at the same time. The feeling of casualness comes not from any one of the officers but instead from the improvised spatial arrangement, each subject looking somewhere different, trusty pikes pointed every which way under the warm summer light. The guys are dignified and rested, not all that fearsome. Military portraits de-emphasize individual personalities, but in Hals’s hands we have rich expressions, we have real people. The back row is not only irresolute, they look downright uncertain.
These are local political chieftains straining to be seen as military men, an impulse that would quickly go out of fashion. The Peace of 1648 included a transfer of security obligations from local patricians to more nationalized forces. Hals couldn’t know that his commissions for these militias would be the last of their kind and that he would produce a portrait as well as a time capsule.
Hals painted the same company six years earlier in a much more famous painting. We see a cleft in the company: the students are on the right, intellectuals with their books and their internal discussion. The hatless guy in the foreground squints like Clint Eastwood but he’s a little bit doubled over. Over on the left we see a more composed group. They seem to be focused on their own dignity. This is a celebration of the end of three years’ service, a kind of graduation into a less martial way of life. They seem to be furling their flags, removing their finery and heading to the bar after duty’s completion. Mastery of their surroundings has relaxed them.
The spirit of the age of Hals becomes more pronounced when we compare it to the much stodgier portrait of the same company by Frans Pietersz de Grebber from fourteen years earlier. These are not guys but “men,” holding their flag tight, ready to pounce at an enemy or maybe at one another. There is no room for jouissance or spontaneity: they are still busy at the work of raising up their nation, and handling it indoors where there’s less distraction.
It is no disrespect to say that de Grebber does not record the individuality of these putatively military men. That’s likely not what they paid for! They wanted a fractious toughness that combined into an impervious whole. Hals, by contrast, demolishes the staid veneer of public service and gives us people. A Golden Age, indeed.
Further Reading:
Zachary Fine, “Frans Hals: The Man Who Changed Portraiture” The New Yorker, Nov. 3, 2023.
Jonathan Jones, “Frans Hals review—boring lifeless portraits with flamboyant facial hair,” The Guardian, Sept. 26, 2023.