Frans Hals's Extraordinary "The Laughing Cavalier"

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier (1624)

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “The Man Who Changed Portraiture” (newyorker.com, November 3, 2023), reviews the National Gallery’s Frans Hals exhibition. He notes that Hals painted only portraits and calls him “the most talented one-trick pony of the seventeenth century.” He says of him,

His genius boils down to a contradiction: loose, unblended smears of paint that create the flesh-and-blood likeness of a human being. The late works of Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt would all head in this direction with their “rough” manner, but Hals achieved a kind of scary immediacy that seemed almost foreign to the medium—a photographer suddenly among painters.

A photographer suddenly among painters – I like that. It gets at Hals’s exquisite precision. See, for example, his famous The Laughing Cavalier (1624) – the intricate pattern of the man’s doublet, the gold buttons, the subtle shades of black in his cloak, the ornate geometric design of his lace cuffs, the rich layering of his white ruff, the gold handle of his rapier. This is incredibly detailed, artful painting. You can almost feel the texture of that ruff and hear the rustle of the sumptuous cloak.

Which is why I question Fine’s conclusion. He writes, “Hals was a painter of fundamentally modest means with a deep intuition for his medium.” Fundamentally modest means? Come on! The Laughing Cavalier is having a good laugh over that one. How about “acutely descriptive”? That’s what Peter Schjeldahl said of Hals’s painting (“Haarlem Shuffle” (The New Yorker, August 1, 2011). I agree with Schjeldahl.