FRANS HALS

This monumental monograph is devoted to one of the major painters of the Golden Age of Holland. Frans Hals was born in 1582 or 1583; he lived and worked at Haarlem, often in great poverty, and died there in 1666. His surviving paintings show him to have been one of the greatest portraitists of all time. Most of Hals’s sitters were men and women of the prosperous middle class. He also painted large group portraits of civic guard companies and governors of charitable institutions, as well as pictures of fisherfolk, merry drinkers, children and musicians. The almost magical spontaneity and boldness of Hals’s brushwork endows his paintings with a brilliance and immediacy that have assured him a unique place in European art.