Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Frans Hals
Dutch; 17th-century
London, England: Kenwood House
84%
Pieter van den Broecke. 1633. Oil on canvas
Hals is a lesser painter than Rembrandt, though his best pictures are better than Rembrandt's worst (even Rembrandt's middling). This portrait is among his better pictures. Hals's deficiency lies in the particular way his intensity with the brush contributes to the overall presence of his canvases: whereas Rembrandt's handling can draw every inch of an image into accord with every other, Hals's extravagances of application tend to be more local in their focus and effects — more interested in the ways individual objects express themselves in paint than in the ways paintings express themselves as paintings. So, Hals is good when all of his painterly flourishes convince you that they are working better as so many isolated units in vague accord than as constituents of the picture's total assembly. See the wild strokes that make up van den Broecke's right arm, or the blotches all over his cheeks and nose, which his face both subsumes and fails to. These things relate little if at all to the passive tan background or the slightly cocked attitude of the sitter's body, and yet they describe perfectly the moments they're meant to describe. (TFS, 2025)