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?

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624
Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624
(Image credit: The Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London)

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”.

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