Uncle Behind the Laughter

Only in retrospect was the 17th century in Holland seen as the age of Rembrandt. At the time, it was the glittering solidity of a moneyed middle class, the robust freedom of a people unburdened by spendthrift -- and the plain cockiness of the most successful seafaring nation in Europe that struck the eye. These are characteristics that Frans Hals pictured with precision.

Rembrandt, after a successful early career, turned his back on his age; Hals was its constant mirror.

Unlike Rembrandt, who often made his patrons subservient to his art, Hals rarely betrayed his sitters who wanted themselves painted as they fancied themselves. His Portrait of a Man with Crossed Arms (see opposite page) summarizes the cocksure spirit of his time.

Outlines of the figure are buried in a subdued brownish-black background, yet gilt buttons streak like dim lights to shape his presence. An elbow clad in rich brocade is flattened almost like a chivalric emblem of elegance, while the face gazes out with insolent indifference.

Popularity & Paradoxes. The scanty details of Hals's life seem as boisterous as his art. He reportedly beat his first wife and wore out his second, having an aggregate of some dozen children. Like Rembrandt, he eventually went bankrupt, since, for all his subsequent popularity, he never during his life commanded the prices paid to Bartholomeus van der Heist, whose stiff portraiture was the rage of the era.

The golden period with all its paradoxes is displayed in "The Age of Rembrandt," a traveling show of 107 paintings by 67 Dutch masters that broke all attendance records at San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor. The exhibition opens this week in the Toledo Museum of Art and eventually goes on to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. It has nine Rembrandts, including Norton Simon's Titus. Even against such competition, the seven Halses emerge as the hit of the show.

Serious Spontaneity. Hals's spontaneity has appealed to modern artists. Van Gogh praised "his way of stating the subject right away at one sweep." Manet hailed Hals's ability "to set down, at the first stroke, what one sees." Even the U.S. abstract expressionists found justification for their pure play of paint in Hals's practice of working without preliminary drawings.

One thing the show makes amply clear: Hals is not just the painter of laughing cavaliers and gypsy girls. He is, in fact, more of a Dutch uncle than he first appears. Many of his women are as homely as a wooden shoe. He lived during the dawn of the age of reason, when the philosopher Rene Descartes, whom Hals painted, proclaimed "I think, therefore I am." Man as pictured by Hals bulks almost impertinently from the canvas, but often there is a glint of self-knowledge in his eyes.

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