How Art Rose With The Dutch Republic

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

If in the intoxication of victory, coming and assured, some of the soldier-patriots of Holland became boisterous in their exuberance, who will blame them? And who will blame Hals if in this great and exhilarating period his art also becomes boisterous and exuberant?

It was nearly a quarter of a century before the final victory and the Spanish acknowledgment of Holland’s independence, when Frans Hals about 1624 painted that portrait of an officer known all over the world as ‘The Laughing Cavalier’. The treatment and the subject are in complete unity, for the swagger of the brushwork is in harmony with the swaggering pose of the officer. Mr Davies, the Master of Charterhouse, has commented on the extraordinary mobility of feature in the expression of this portrait—how at one moment the face of the cavalier seems provocatively disdainful, at another full of amused good humor. Another brilliant example of the unrivalled power of Hals to catch a fleeting expression will be found in his later painting, ‘Nurse and Child’, a work which with its wonderfully elaborate and intricate detail no alcoholic hand could possibly have painted. Look well at this babe with its odd little old face, and you will see it ‘just beginning to ripple all over with the laughter that will come in a minute.’ Mr Davies thinks Hals must have learnt the knack of this from watching his own children in his own home, and surely we may say with conviction that the man who could paint babies with so penetrating an eye was a good father.

Splendid as these two paintings are, good as the portraits by Hals in the National Gallery, London, yet to know Hals to the uttermost it is necessary to visit his hometown of Haarlem and to see there the series of great portrait groups he painted of the Guilds, the ‘Archers of St George’ (Joris) and the ‘Archers of Saint Adriaen.’ These shooting guilds may be roughly described as equivalent to our own Honorable Artillery Company when it was first instituted.

It is in these paintings of the citizen soldiers of his own city that Hals displays his highest gifts both as a decorator and as a painter of actuality. The figures are so real that we look at them seem to be one of the company; but though the arrangement appears so natural our eyes are always gladdened by a beauty of pattern, a flow of line, and a balancing of masses which testify to the painter’s science of design. There is nothing with which we can compare them save ‘The Surrender of Breda,’ and in making this comparison we must not forget that if Velazquez was his contemporary he was also by nearly twenty years the junior of Hals. It is easy to count up the qualities lacking in the art of Frans Hals, who had neither the grave dignity and mastery of light that Velazquez possessed nor the scenic splendor of Rubens, nor the thought of his contemporary Rembrandt; but a painter, like a man, must be judged by what he is—not what what he is not—and Hals keeps his place among the great masters by his own peculiar gifts as an exuberant, and indeed an inspired, portrayer of the bravery of Holland in her greatest hour.

How Art Rose With The Dutch Republic (continued)