Frans Hals: The Male Portrait - what the critics are saying
Is new Wallace Collection show simply ‘pale, stale and male’ or an ‘exhilarating’ testament to a ‘dazzlingly bold’ artist?

You’ve got to admire the gumption of the curators at London’s Wallace Collection, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. At a moment when “museums and galleries are obsessed with diversity”, they have opened a show that “couldn’t be more pale, stale or male if it tried”.
Frans Hals (c.1582-1666), was a Dutch Golden Age portraitist renowned for his likenesses of “rich and powerful men”, and best known for the Wallace’s “beloved” The Laughing Cavalier (1624) – that “primped and perfumed dandy”, with his “buoyant waxed moustache” and “smirking aura”.
Yet however unfashionable the artist’s subject matter may now seem, Hals was a true pioneer who “revolutionised” portraiture, depicting his sitters with “swashbuckling brushwork”, and giving them an “immediate, sparky and natural” quality previously unknown in European painting.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From his death until the 19th century, however, he was “baselessly written off as a feckless alcoholic” – chiefly on account of the “boisterous” poses struck by his sitters. It was only in the 19th century that he was rediscovered by the impressionists and their successors – van Gogh was a particular fan – who hailed him as “a harbinger of modern art”. As the show proves, they were quite right. Bringing together around a dozen portraits, this “exhilarating” exhibition is a magnificent testament to a “dazzlingly bold” artist.
“It’s like taking your place for dinner at a gentlemen's club,” said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. Hals spent almost his entire life in the Dutch city of Haarlem, where the prosperous local elites were composed of “burgomasters, minor noblemen and wealthier brewers and merchants”, many of whom sought his services as a portrait artist.
What’s astonishing is quite how unflattering so many of these extraordinary likenesses are: in Hals’s hands, the cloth merchant Tieleman Roosterman looks “unbearably arrogant”, his “puffy eyes” staring down at us past his “bulbous nose”. His 1660 portrait of an unknown man presents its subject as a ruddy-faced “dissolute”; you can “all but smell the sour wine on his hiccups”. Even the famous Laughing Cavalier has an air of smugness to him, his “self-confident come-hither gaze” radiating insincere charm.
The subject may not have changed, but Hals certainly developed as an artist. The show begins with Portrait of a Man, a work from 1610 that clearly “harks back to Holbein”, but it ends with that 1660 portrait, so “loosely and lusciously rendered that it looks forward to Manet”.
We encounter some “terrifically vivacious” characters in this “splendid” exhibition, said Melanie McDonagh in the London Evening Standard. Pieter van den Broecke, for instance, a Dutch East India Company admiral, is a “cheerful, weather-beaten” figure with “unkempt” hair. The curators provide fascinating biographical details: he participated in the slave trade but freed two women with whom he had a child each; he also introduced the coffee plant to Europe.
There’s a “remarkable range of expressions and types” on display here, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Each portrait – the brewer with a beer belly, the merchant leaning over the back of a chair–feels “like a separate event”. It adds up to a “riveting” show.
Wallace Collection, London W1 (wallacecollection.org). Until 30 January 2022
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
'Spending is what card issuers are hoping you will do'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
FCC greenlights $8B Paramount-Skydance merger
Speed Read The Federal Communications Commission will allow Paramount to merge with the Hollywood studio Skydance
-
A potential railway megamerger raises monopoly questions
The Explainer Union-Pacific and Norfolk Southern would create the country's largest railway operator
-
Friendship: 'bromance' comedy starring Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson
The Week Recommends 'Lampooning and embracing' middle-aged male loneliness, this film is 'enjoyable and funny'
-
6 head-turning homes for town house living
Feature Featuring a roof deck with city views in South Carolina and a renovated Harlem brownstone in New York City
-
Bookish: delightful period detective drama from Mark Gatiss
The Week Recommends 'Cosy crime' series is a 'standout pleasure' in an Agatha Christie-style formula
-
Music Reviews: Justin Bieber, Wet Leg, and Clipse
Feature "Swag," "Moisturizer," and "Let God Sort Em Out"
-
Film reviews: Eddington and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Feature A New Mexico border town goes berserk and civil war through a child's eyes
-
Art Review: Hilma af Klint's What Stands Behind the Flowers
Feature Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through Sept. 27
-
Geoff Dyer's 6 favorite books about the realities of war
Feature The award-winning author recommends works by Ernie Pyle, Michael Herr, and more
-
Book review: 'A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck'
Feature A couple works to keep their marriage together while lost at sea