The Portraitist

Frans Hals and His World

De: Steven M. Nadler

Narrado por: Paul Heitsch

A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the listener into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age.

Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.

Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.

Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

©2022 The University of Chicago (P)2023 Tantor

Not just Hal’s - also Harlem - excellent account of both.

The author admits right off that he is not an art historian, and that is great! Consequently, no art history jargon, none of the timid, second-guessing common in art history writing - just the facts which are known. And in Hals’ case, there aren’t a lot of facts, so Nadler offers a lot of information about Harlem, where Hal’s principally lived, and information about the other cities which were important art centers and about the political and religious situations during the period of Hals’ long life. There is not a lot of conjecture or theory, and this reader felt that he got a good accounting of the subject. This could be a good beginning to a college course on 17th Century Dutch painting.