The Story of Dutch Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

But while this common motive of portraiture, which distinguishes every branch of Holland painting, was in response to a common and collective need of the people, it was modified and shaped by the example of two leading personalities: Hals and Rembrandt. So determining was their influence that an analysis of their respective motives and methods is not only a necessary preliminary but the quickest way to a comprehension of the development of the whole school.

They had characteristics in common. One might almost represent the two men by concentric circles; Hals being the inner, Rembrandt the indefinitely larger one. Hals was an epitome of the genius of the Dutch race; Rembrandt was also this, but more—the expression of a genius peculiarly his own. Both manifested, Hals invariably, Rembrandt at times, the quality of direct seeing and doing that was a national characteristic; but at other times Rembrandt was possessed of a spirituality, if one may so call it, that was directly opposed to the prevailing practicalness. Let us study each for the purpose of discovering what was his own personal art and how it affected the art of others.

Hals, then, the leader of the Haarlem School, we will examine first, not only because he was the oldest of the famous men of the seventeenth century, but also because his own genius was so closely representative of that of his countrymen. Of his life there is little to record. He was born in Antwerp, in 1584, but of parents of good Haarlem stock, temporarily driven from home by the vicissitudes of the war. He may have begun his studies in Antwerp, but by 1608 was probably settled in Haarlem. It must have been about two years later that he married a lady named Anneke Hermanszoon, for their child, Harmen Hals, was baptized on the 2d of September, 1611. The marriage appears to have been unfortunate, a record, dated 1616, showing that the husband was summoned and reprimanded by the magistrates for drunkenness and violent conduct toward his wife. She died a few days later, apparently from natural causes, and the following year Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers, with whom he lived for fifty years, bringing up a large family. That his conduct toward the first wife was not very seriously viewed by the community seems to be proved by the fact that in 1617 and 1618 he and his brother Dirck were elected members of the School of Rhetoric. Later they were elected to the Civic Guard and to the Painters’ Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem.

Like almost all the artists of his time, he was involved in pecuniary difficulties. In 1652 a baker sued him for the amount of two hundred guilders, a debt incurred for bread supplied and for small loans occasionally advanced. He obtained possession of the artist’s movables, but allowed him to continue in the use of them. Ten years later we find Hals, now seventy-eight years old, applying for relief from the city government, which granted him one hundred and fifty dollars in quarterly instalments. This exhausted, he renewed his application for public assistance, and was granted a yearly pension of two hundred guilders. Two years later, on or about the 26th of August, 1666, he died in his eighty-second year and was buried beneath the choir of the Church of St. Bavon in Haarlem.

These few circumstances represent practically all that is known of Frans Hals’s life as a man. The main suggestion to be derived from them is that he was held in considerable esteem by his fellow-townsmen. The painters enrolled him in their guild; his creditor did not unduly press him, and the municipality attended to the needs of his declining years. It is fit to dwell on these points, because a tradition, apparently started by Houbraken, the painter-historian of the artists of the period, has clung about the memory of Hals, representing him to have been a frequenter of pot-houses and generally dissolute. But, except for the reprimand administered to him in the affair of his first wife, there is nothing on record to prove the accuracy of this tradition. One is therefore permitted to believe that the incident was a single offense; sufficiently reprehensible, but not to be counted against his whole life. On the other hand, the leniency of the baker and the relief voted by the municipality may be fairly taken as arguments against the story of his worthlessness. But the most reliable evidence of its falsity is to be found in his work as an artist. It is inconceivable that the portraits and character studies which he executed in such numbers could have been produced by a man whose brain was fuddled with dissipation. The very character of his technique gives the lie to such a suspicion; for, as we shall see presently, it was the product of a particularly vigorous comprehension of facts, and was rendered in a method extraordinarily direct and sure, and often under circumstances of great rapidity. While his work is uneven in quality, it is only toward the end that there is a falling off in the certainty and the completeness of his technique. But the pathos that attaches to the two memorable examples of this decline, which now hang in the Haarlem Museum, the groups of male and female Regents of the Hospital for the Poor, is due to their revelation, not of any premature loss of power, but of the sapping of vitality which comes after fourscore years.

On the other hand, it would be fatal to a just appreciation of Hals to try to shape him to our modern notions of propriety. His character was certainly not staid; it may well have been, by present-day comparisons, unregulated. He was a man of his own time, and the character of his fellow-citizens may be seen in the groups he has left behind of the officers of the Civic Guard. They were men of vigorous personality, of strong passions; they lived high and, maybe, at times a bit recklessly. They had faced death in battle, and enjoyed the leisure which their own exertions had helped to bring about. That they enrolled Hals in their organization suggests that he was a man after their own heart. He must have been; otherwise he never could have painted them as he did, realizing at once their individualities of character and the general character of enthusiastic good-fellowship that united them. In none of these portraits is there any hint of excess, but in all the declaration of conviviality. It is quite reasonable to assume that this represents a truer portrait of the artist’s own personal character than the one suggested by Houbraken.

Moreover, there is another phase of his character that is positively revealed in his work. It is that of humor. Whether he is painting one of the curious and sometimes discreditable characters that haunted the streets and resorts of Haarlem, or the portrait of some burgomaster, fully alive to his own importance, or recording the puissance and the pageantry of the military guilds, it is always in a genial mood, not seldom with manifest humor. In fact, if ever there was an artist to whom, as revealed in his work, the epithet “jolly” were appropriate, it is Frans Hals.

And here we may note a shrewd observation by the German critic W. Bode. “The artist’s particular gift,” he says, “which we find in nearly every one of his portraits, consists in his establishing a lively connection between the person or persons represented and a supposed third person.” He does not represent the individual or group as if posing for himself, but as if he had surprised them in the presence of a third person, or as if he had in mind the impression that would be produced in a third person’s mind by the scene in front of him. His own point of view, in fact, is more than objective, more than a recognition of direct, visible facts; it is rather expansive, drawing into the circumference of its own observation the points of view and feeling of others than himself. One may almost say that he has the gift of revealing his personages not only as they appeared to him, but also as they were regarded by their contemporaries. Whether singly or in groups, they seem to be perfectly at home in an atmosphere at once sympathetic and conducive to the most spontaneous expression of their own natures. Thus, as Bode adds, “he has a great gift of rendering any passing moment of psychical agitation.”

Before proceeding to an analysis of his technique, we may note two other general characteristics: the vigor and the imagination that it involves. An artist’s technique is a measure of his personality, even though his