With a Twinkle and a Smile, a Hals Exhibition in Amsterdam

After Rembrandt and Vermeer opuses, the Rijksmuseum goes for Dutch zest.

I t’s a salve to see people smiling in a museum exhibition, and smiling in an exhibition as serious and smart as Frans Hals at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Smiling people, whether they’re adults or among family, aren’t much to be seen in American museums, calculating and constipated as the museums are over race, equity, belonging, and not giving offense. Only masochists and idiots smile as they negotiate pins and needles. Hals (1582–1666) doesn’t evoke, much less invite, angst. His portraits, and almost everything he painted was a portrait, aren’t a task or a reckoning. They’re about joy and camaraderie and prosperity.

Frans Hals isn’t a retrospective. There are no conservation or connoisseurship sections, no reattributions, no comparisons with the work of other artists, and not much about his patrons. Each section is organized around a word cueing the senses. There’s “big,” “laughter,” “twinkle,” “small,” “bold,” and “smearing,” which doesn’t translate well, but I think the curators are after “loose” or, even better, “juicy,” or they could have meant to suggest a child smearing paint or jam or frosting on his face or, better still, the face of another child. Hals doesn’t fence with his brushes. That implies a passion for process or rules. Rather, he paints intuitively, confidently, and with a magic touch.

I smiled when I read “twinkle.” I’d never seen an art exhibition celebrating a twinkle.

Frans Hals is a momentous as well as joyous occasion. The Laughing Cavalier hasn’t left the Wallace Collection’s Manchester Square home since 1900. Fame doesn’t mean quality, but I’d argue it’s among the most famous paintings ever done and also one of the most splendid. And Hals’s two group portraits of the boisterous, partying officers of the St. George civic guard haven’t left little, pretty Haarlem in 400 years.

Hals got started as an artist, we think, when he was in his late 20s, but he has a long life and career. Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull and Portrait of a Woman Standing, meant to be shown as a husband-and-wife pair, are from 1612. They’re the earliest things in the exhibition. Hals was born in Antwerp, also the home of Rubens, and though he and his family had already moved north to Haarlem, the two portraits have the soft, warm, flesh-and-blood look of Rubens, and then some. The couple is Dutch and bourgeois as well as older, so naturally there’s some distance to be had, but the drama of even these standard portraits is in their magnetic pull. Hals, from the beginning, observes and conveys expression and vitality. The wife is no Hedy Lamarr, but I love that ruddy face and her burgundy velvet frock, warm and red.

Young Man Holding a Skull, from 1627 and owned by the National Gallery in London, isn’t a portrait. Yes, he’s also holding a skull, a downer, but Hals’s model is so young and good-looking, the lighting so clear, the handling of paint so creamy, that feather so jaunty, that we’re convinced the picture isn’t a vanitas — a reminder of the inevitability of death — but a bit of playacting. Hamlet, he ain’t. It’s displayed near Boy with a Wine Glass from 1630. Happy is the child who chugs a slug. It makes me smile. Everyone in the gallery looking at it smiled. Children smiled, though the picture, in a high-brow, authoritative museum, put them in a demanding state of mind.

The Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House, from 1664, is Hals’s late-in-life triumph. It’s a magnificent picture, and a somber one, suggesting that old age and fiduciary responsibility aren’t laughing matters. Along with the group portrait of the regents next to it, this painting informs us that Hals might have reached his peak late but stayed there into his 80s.

But more on The Laughing Cavalier. It’s from 1624, and he’s not laughing but smiling. I wrote about it two or three years ago when it was part of a Wallace Collection exhibition, Hals: The Male Portrait. We don’t know who the sitter is, but he’s almost surely a bachelor since a married man wouldn’t dress like a dude. Hals is one of the few portraitists before modern times who paints smiling figures. “A smile’s the best make-up a girl can wear,” said Marilyn Monroe, but in Hals’s time the smile as well as laughter were regulated by social convention. Both are as old as humanity, but fits, aching sides, guffaws, and falling out of chairs in laughter weren’t approved unless the stricken were children, in which case they were reprimanded. Otherwise, they were drunk, lowborn, or crazy like Malle Babbe, whose portrait — sometimes known as The Witch from Haarlem, from 1640 — is one of Hals’s showstoppers.

The Laughing Cavalier has a socially acceptable but still daring, rakish smile. It’s gentle and seductive but not as sexed as the young couple’s in the splendid 1622 portrait of the just-married Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen. Their smiles are subdued but utterly libidinous. It’s in the first gallery, which presents Hals’s range, and it’s not far from his 1612 portraits of the older, long-married couple, he holding a skull. Hals is a portraitist, and among critics and art historians, portraits “don’t get no respect,” as Rodney Dangerfield would say, or they don’t get as much respect as Rembrandt or Vermeer, who, with Hals, form the trio of great Dutch Golden Age painters. Portraitists, the thinking still goes, do the bidding of rich patrons, so that’s hackwork, but Hals’s pictures of smiling — and laughing — figures are visionary and nearly unique, even by the toothy standards of today.

The Malle Babbe portrait is owned by the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and rarely travels simply because it’s so unusual that it doesn’t explicate many themes in 17th-century art. The picture isn’t a trony, a Dutch genre depicting exaggerated or characteristic expressions. The Merry Lute Player, from the late 1620s, or La Bohémienne, from about 1626, both well known and in the exhibition, are types, and both have boisterous smiles, in the case of the lute player fueled by alcohol.

Babbe wasn’t a drunk or buffoon or barmaid or type of anything, but a woman well known in Haarlem and committed to a workhouse there charged with keeping off-kilter wastrels and beggars off the streets. Hals knew the place well. Two of his children lived there, a son with a mental disability and a daughter who’d had two children while unmarried.

Certainly Malle Babbe was freely, quickly painted, but Hals’s application of paint suggests the frenzy in which his subject lived. A flagon of beer is by her side. An owl, then a symbol of foolishness, is on her shoulder. She’s smiling, but the picture is the rare Hals that’s creepy and that doesn’t make us smile. I’m not sure it evokes empathy. Haarlem was a tiny place and a glass hive. Hals, a savvy observer, knew the dark as well as bright spots. That so much of his art conveys good feeling is a show of his attitude toward life.

The Laughing Cavalier isn’t in a gallery about bonhomie. Rather, it’s in a gallery about the Renaissance elbow, of which Hals was the master. It’s a difficult-to-convey gesture of an elbow — usually a man’s — jutting into the viewer’s space. It’s meant to impress us with the subject’s command and dynamism, and it’s hard to paint. It requires an exact alignment of elbow to hand, arm, and shoulder, with a miscalculation of just a smidgen making for a disembodied limb.

Titian did it well, as did Pontormo, and so did Hals. In The Laughing Cavalier, the figure’s elbow puts his lavish embroidered jacket front and center, but it’s also a show of authoritative biceps. A 1637 portrait near it depicts a much older man. His jutting elbow balances a considerable girth. Hals, like Van Dyke, excels in black-on-black-on-black, but this portrait is a symphony of different grays. A jutting right elbow sometimes balances a left hand that elegantly holds leather gloves.

Two more portraits of Isaac Massa, whom we saw in the first gallery with his new wife, both smiling and feeling the glow of recent copulation, are here. In one, from 1622, he folds his arms and looks straight at us as if to say, “Just dare me.” In another, from 1626, his elbow juts over a chair on which he’s sitting. He’s looking out, to his right, his mouth slightly open as if he’s calling to someone.

It’s challenge enough to do a single-figure portrait with a Renaissance elbow, but Hals’s militia-banquet group portraits are a feast of elbows. Frans Hals displays three of them. These portraits were themselves a niche genre, with the Rijksmuseum owning so many that it’s easy to distinguish the great, the good, and the standard among them. Militia companies helped the authorities defend a city or town from attack or a revolt, but they were often men’s social clubs, based on guilds. They had protocols and hierarchies, as does every military organization and most social groups. The first job of the portraitist aside from making a likeness was depicting these structures, which started with the colonel, followed by provosts and captains, and ended with ensigns, invariably young, unmarried men given, like the man in The Laughing Cavalier, to the fanciest clothes.

Hals’s group portraits are glorious in pose, color, expression, and cohesion. Each of the three has its unique glories. The earliest, painted in 1616, is both a group portrait and an active dinner party with a copious still life of food. A young standard-bearer, his banner tipping theatrically, leans over in conversation with an older, balding man. Another, from 1627, shows a captain, Michael de Wael, whose full-length portrait Hals painted in 1625, seated in the center, turning his empty glass upside down, surely to signal “more, please” rather than “I’m done.” The third, The Meager Company, from 1633, is anything but meager. With 15 figures, most standing, and no food or booze, it’s the most formal, but nothing is contrived. Hals is a brilliant choreographer, in part because his arrangement looks effortless and spontaneous.

I have nothing against Rembrandt’s Night Watch, from 1642, which is, loosely, a painting of a militia company in Amsterdam. It’s a fantastic picture, an opus, and also at the Rijksmuseum so, naturally, I saw it. Rembrandt wandered far from the realm of group portraiture since, great as it is, it’s operatic, with so many layers and so much chiaroscuro that we’re swept by overall drama rather than individual human engagement. This isn’t a criticism but a point of emphasis. Hals’s figures are living, breathing individuals engaged one-on-one with the viewer.

Hals’s two group portraits of regents and the regentesses of the Alms House in Haarlem end the exhibition. They strike an off note in a way since Frans Hals, as a curatorial and marketing proposition, does chase the twinkle in his art, and these two late portraits of old men and old women don’t have much of that, which is not to say they have none. I loved the dramatic Renaissance elbow of the central figure in the portrait of the men. Even in old age, and surveying as he does the work of a home for poor, old men, he still has pizzazz. Another man sports a glimpse of red stocking, a fetching bit of sartorial dash. In the portrait of the old women, the central figure wears a white collar as diaphanous as fog.

I was curious to see what the Rijksmuseum did with Hals. Last year, I saw Vermeer, the cloistral hush-of-a-blockbuster there and, in 2019, All the Rembrandts, a display of the museum’s unmatched collection of Rembrandt’s paintings and the most pristine and the inkiest of his etchings. Vermeer tried to be a religious experience, and All the Rembrandts was indeed a university tutorial. Hals is a night out with the guys, Heineken flowing and stroopwafels for all. It’s a bacchanal, and with all those beer bellies, it’s best that no one strips.

And we feel we’re there, experiencing his subjects’ energy, waiting for that moment when one raises his eyes to meet our gaze or welcomes us into his world with a word or gesture.

The catalogue admits that technical research on Hals “is still at a very early stage” compared with the scholarship on Vermeer and Rembrandt, whose work seems to radiate from an orgy of X-rays. There are discoveries to be made. At TEFAF in Maastricht, I saw a Hals, not a great one, that few knew. Scholars differ on how many pictures Hals painted, but given the length of his career more rather than fewer seems likely. We don’t know much about his studio practice. We know he had assistants but don’t know who did what. As a portraitist, Hals hasn’t gotten the depth of inquiry that he deserves. The catalogue is very good. It’s not a tome like the Vermeer catalogue. Rather, it’s an in-depth but nicely conversational group of essays on aspects of Hals. Its depth and tone suit the subject.