AMSTERDAM (AP) – In the early 17th Century, laughter was almost never captured on a painter’s canvas.
Frans Hals changed that.
“He was not a clean painter,” said co-curator of a major exhibition of the Dutch master’s paintings that opens this week at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum Friso Lammertse.
“The people, they often laugh, and that’s very remarkable in the 17th Century – that they smile or even laugh, which was hardly done,” he added.
The show that debuted at the National Gallery in London last year now moves to the Dutch capital.
Hals was in full control of his artistic process. “It’s really an awareness of what is going on in painting in Europe at this moment,” Lammertse said.
Instead, Hals was likely under the influence of Flemish masters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyk.
“He does this loose brushstroke, because it belongs to the avant-garde of European art at this moment. But it is also functional. It suggests a kind of movement. And he goes further than all the others in aspiring to show that movement,” he said.
The fluid brushstrokes made Hals a major influence of later artists like Vincent van Gogh and impressionists like Édouard Manet.
Hals’ most famous work, The Laughing Cavalier, underscores the humour in his work.
The cavalier, with his smile, upturned moustache and hat at a jaunty angle, has travelled across the English Channel from the Wallace Collection in London. It’s the painting’s first overseas trip since 1870 and is one of 48 works by Hals gathered at the Rijksmuseum for the show.
The Hals exhibition follows recent blockbuster shows at the Amsterdam museum showcasing the two other great names of 17th Century Dutch art – Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer.
