Razzle-Dazzle of Frans Hals in London

The Laughing Cavalier stars in a show of the Dutch master's portraits at the Wallace Collection.

I ’m in London now, back for the first time since the Chinese coronavirus turned the world upside down. I’d written about the National Portrait Gallery’s Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things exhibition, a piece NR published on March 14, 2020. It was a celebrity gaga show about Beaton, a serious artist who deserved better. It was fun all the same.

What, in retrospect, a taunting thing to have done. Days later, a confederacy of dullards, charlatans, and quacks seized our lives, crashed the economy, and tossed hundreds of millions of children from school and workers from their jobs, all to tilt at a disease that targets the very old and the very sick. Dumb, middle-aged, and, in the U.S., geezer-aged things raised their heads and tossed their curls.

I came home from the U.K. on the 15th. In a way, I blame the Brits for triggering the mass hysteria and hypnosis. The Italians caught the world’s notice when Lombardy and then the Veneto were forcibly quarantined. “Shut Venice?” I asked, incredulous but not worried. My mother was Italian, so I know they do crazy, showy things like opera. I love Italy and Italians, but it’s Italy, and they’re Italians. Since Italy’s got one of the worst health-care systems in Europe, and hospitals are places people are sent to die, I assumed no one with a brain in his head in the English-speaking world would look to them for guidance.

Then Boris, after correctly picking a tough-it-out plan used with good effect by the Swedes, did the mother of all U-turns. The lockdown here had to the very last gasp a taint of Victorian sadism, cruelty marketed as kindness. The Brits embraced the spirit of Mrs. Danvers as the ultimate gaslighter — not as a housekeeper this round but as a nanny enforcing the new Covid regime. “If they can do it,” the public-health mediocrity and fossil Fauci thought, smacking his lips, “so can we.”

We in America suffer from a grasping public-health miasma, Lilliputian in expertise but titanic, and stealthily so, in lusting after power. In the U.K., Covid twits and nitwits abound, but, strange to say, they’re mostly among the Tories and academics. The astonishing thing to me is this: How could a country like the U.K., with the most aggressive press in the world, actually believe professor-generated, computer-generated models that, over and over again, are not only simply wrong and fake but egregiously, even boisterously, so?

No point dwelling on the past, which I never do. All Covid restrictions ended on Thursday. London looks great, as if it’s had a long, refreshing sleep. I’m here at one of my favorite places, the Wallace Collection, having seen the rewarding and beautiful exhibition Frans Hals: The Male Portrait.

I’ll review the Hals show today and next time write an institutional profile on the Wallace Collection, an Old Master pleasure palace. Hals (1582/3–1666) and Rembrandt are seen as the Dutch Golden Age’s most famous and inventive portraitist. The Laughing Cavalier from 1624 is one of dozens of the Wallace Collection’s showstoppers. Richard Seymour Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford, assembled much of what we know as the Wallace Collection. When he bought The Laughing Cavalier at an 1865 Paris auction, paying five times the high estimate in a bidding war, people wondered, “Who was that smiling man with the wax mustache, fancy sleeve, and black hat?” The in-the-know crowd was just rediscovering Hals. Soon, he’d become famous.

For the exhibition, it made sense for the museum to focus on this one painting and give it context. Step by step, through the best curating, the show asks the question “Why is this painting an icon?” and then answers it. This is what more museums should be doing. Special exhibitions should always be rooted in the permanent collection, and nothing’s better than highlighting a single object that people think they know thoroughly but don’t.

The exhibition gathers a little over a dozen of Hals’s portraits of men done over a 30-year period. It treats The Laughing Cavalier in much detail, as it should, diving into style, technique, conservation, provenance, and the identity of the subject. It also looks at conventions of male portraiture in Haarlem, the small, prosperous Dutch city where Hals lived and worked. These conventions evolved, often at Hals’s instigation. It’s a Dutch Golden Age GQ of a show in its exploration of men’s clothing and the dandy airs of young men in contrast to sedate, married old duffers. And given shorter life expectancies at the time, and girths that can only be called porcine, duffer time might start at age 30. As portraitists to the elite go — Hals’s subjects are almost all rich — the artist pioneered a new style. His figures are self-assured and well-dressed but engage the viewer directly, in a fleeting, friendly moment.

Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull starts the show in its own space, the introductory panel on one side and a wall-mural, bird’s-eye view of Haarlem on the other. The wall color is deep red, the lighting chiaroscuro. The picture is owned by the Barber Institute in Birmingham, the local university’s fine art museum. It’s the earliest thing in the show, painted between 1610 and 1614. It’s dark and subdued. A good chunk of what we now know as the Netherlands, it’s good to remember, was then ruled by Spain, whose own austere portrait aesthetic was an influence.

The figure’s not abstract, not entirely remote, though. His hands and face are strongly modeled and very real, as is the skull. The skull proposes the way of all flesh, and that’s standard. His eyes are penetrating and expressive. The package is new, traditional in its austerity and contemplation of the afterlife but modern in its realism and engagement.

Having been introduced to Hals and cued to where he started and what he brought, the viewer goes to the single main gallery. I’m not saying anything new, given that the Wallace Collection’s temporary show space is about 20 years old now, but it’s a challenging bowling alley of a space. The Laughing Cavalier is at the end of the space on the left. On the other end, and it seems like a hundred feet but it’s less than that, is Portrait of an Unknown Man, from between 1660 and 1663. The other paintings hang on the walls from one end to the other, chronologically, with the same deep red wall color. There are two benches, one on each end.

The space is the space. It comes from architectural decisions made around 2000 when the museum covered an interior courtyard, made a nice restaurant, and converted its basement to an exhibition gallery, a library, and classrooms. I don’t think most people are happy with the exhibition space. The Hals show is certainly dramatic. The pictures have ample space but, looking from one end to the other, seem very small. Those who read my pieces know I love vistas where the viewer is gobsmacked by a work of art from far away. From the other end, The Laughing Cavalier, a glittering painting, holds the wall but barely. From the cavalier’s end of the space, Portrait of an Unknown Man is a blur.

Personally, I would have given up the vista. Yes, a big open space is modern and edgy. But given the tunnel space, the two anchor pictures on either end, and the too-generous space for the rest, I’d have broken up the tunnel with poufs for seating at the very least. It seems to cry “More, please.” I might very well be inordinately bothered by the spare arrangement, but I do tend to like a more packed look.

So much for my floor planning. Back to The Laughing Cavalier. He’s life size, turned to the left, and directly looks at us with dark-blue eyes. He’s got rosy cheeks, a waxed mustache, curly hair, and a short, pointed beard. Groomed to the nines, he’s dressed in the latest French fashion, with a beautifully embroidered doublet with slashed sleeves showing a white linen shirt. It’s a lovely cascade of puffs that carefully conveys nonchalance. He’s 26 years old.

The catalogue, by Lelia Packer and Ashok Roy, is a brilliant book that’s concise, detailed, and informed. Its treatment of iconography is, to me, a feast. It’s the best information since it defines The Laughing Cavalier not as a dressed-up fop but as a wealthy, with-it young man, a blade, eligible and looking for love but actually worthy of it and a desirable catch. Take, for example, its treatment of the cavalier’s embroidered sleeve — arguably the greatest sleeve in painting. It tells us about the interlocking symbols of fortune, strength, love, and virtue, with each one numbered and identified: Mercury’s cap, tongues of fire, a winged arrow, a lover’s knot, a golden star, and a flaming cornucopia, among other things. The wall label’s all right, and gives some basic information, but the painting’s interpretation needs to reflect more of the juicy bits in the catalogue.

I think I might be bringing too much baggage to all of this, but my history is with academic art museums. We like more information, not less. The Laughing Cavalier is, after all, the star attraction. He’s ready for his closeup, and Mr. de Mille surely would have let the camera linger lovingly on him.

This is the approach exhibitions take these days. When museums are sparse on interpretation, I don’t think it’s in the expectation that visitors will, like me, read the book for details. They give the rank and file what they think they can absorb, and that’s too bad. I think a detailed look at the iconography of The Laughing Cavalier’s clothing, its style, even who he was, the picture’s provenance, and even the source of the title, a late-19th-century invention, would have been nice. Or, surely, its own special, content-rich section above and beyond the far end of the gallery. I know curators want visitors to focus on the picture, not words, and I do, too, but why consign so many scholarly riches to the book alone? Few visitors will read it, though I hope all buy it and indeed read it.

But back to that sleeve, which, with the cavalier’s winning smile, is the picture’s biggest draw. Hals didn’t invent the Renaissance elbow, of course. The elbow, poked in our space by a privileged young man painted by, say, Bronzino, was a sign of nonchalance and confidence. Hals made it a staple. Willem Coymans and Jasper Schade, both portraits from 1645, use the elbow to convey engagement, but, let’s face it, those are showpiece elbows. Like The Laughing Cavalier, they express the subjects’ sense of style and affluence but also Hals’s proficiency. Schade’s is a maze of zigzag lines and angular strokes that’s abstract and positively modern. Schade oozes hauteur, which our cavalier doesn’t. As fetching as both are, I think the cavalier doesn’t take himself as seriously.

The exhibition is a salute to men in black. Every man of substance had a closet filled with all sorts of black clothes, and these were the height of chic, but, for a married, prosperous man, and most were businessmen, black conveyed seriousness and sobriety. Hals’s blacks are never dull, though. Van Gogh said Hals had 27 blacks in his repertoire, but that was probably on the low end. In Portrait of a Man, from around 1635, Hals subdues and simplifies his blacks and uses them to set off an elaborate lace collar, a dynamic face, and wild hair. Black is the dominant color in the Portrait of Tieleman Roosterman from 1634. His black suit and the one worn by François Wouters in his 1645 portrait are more symphonic. Sweeping strokes of black paint modulated with cream nuances and textures. They help to model the body. Roosterman, the catalogue proposes, is the likely subject in The Laughing Cavalier.

Hals’s palette, The Laughing Cavalier notwithstanding, is limited. He makes the most of flesh tints, creating ruddy Dutch faces and unexpected passages of color like the red leather of the chair on which Isaac Abrahamsz Massa props his elbow and lovely greens of the trees seen through the window behind him. And Hals is a master of lace. His lace patterns are intricate, generated via thin strokes of white paint applied over finished areas of clothing.

Portrait of an Unknown Man, painted 40 years after Man Holding a Skull, ends the show. Hals at this point was in his 80s and pushing his bold brushstroke technique even further. In Haarlem, that style was considered rough in a good way. His free handling was essential in creating the immediacy and casual confidence his subjects wanted. Of course, these qualities go in and out of vogue. What looked fresh and bold in Hals’s lifetime seemed rough soon enough and even a sign of the artist’s dissolution.

I’d only note a few missed opportunities in this show. The Barber Institute’s painting, the Portait of a Man Holding a Skull, has a pendant, even a better half, in the subject’s wife, though the two paintings were separated at some point. The catalogue shows the two side by side. Portrait of a Woman Standing is not far away — at Chatsworth House — and she would have softened her husband, who gestures toward her, had they been seen together. Since other portraits in the exhibition have pendants, why not include a single instance of mingling of the sexes, to show how Hals developed his style in portraits of men in relation to his portraits of women? Hals excelled, too, in group portraits of men. They’re in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and in the Rijksmuseum. Why not include one? Including women and a group portrait would certainly change the exhibition’s dynamic but, intellectually, they’re part of the story. The group portraits are big but, alas, they’re portraits of men. Clearly, the museum doesn’t want distractions from its Laughing Cavalier, and that’s understandable. The catalogue illustrates examples of clothing the subjects might have worn. Why not include at least a few illustrations of these? A freestanding wall or two might have leavened the space, too.

But I loved the exhibition. Even given changes in taste, Hals’s disappearance from the canon of Dutch luminaries by, say, 1700 is startling in its completeness. It wasn’t until the 1860s that his reputation rose from oblivion. By then, Manet was making Hals’s rough style part of the avant-garde idiom.