Shock of the Old: National Gallery’s Frans Hals Show

Frans Hals’ paintings have no precedents. His snapshot informalities and democratic kindnesses were entirely original. No earlier Dutch Master dared the unconcealed boldness, the watch-me-paint-it vigor, of his swiftly moving brush. His markings sing of genius. His sitters look alive.

And yet no free and forceful painter has had a harder time holding his position in the pantheon of painters than the portraitist of Haarlem (1581-1666) whose retrospective exhibition went on view last weekend at the National Gallery of Art.

Hals’ reputation began its oscillations long before his death.

Hals, when in his 40s, dwelt among the rich. Yet he died in crushing poverty. In the winter of 1664, when he was in his 80s, shivering in misery in his rented room in Holland, he did not have enough to buy a brick of peat. His paintings, for a while, had been as popular in Haarlem as Warhol’s in Manhattan, but then his reputation crashed. His lifelike, honest portraits--he painted only portraits--have been variously regarded since as worthless or invaluable, as slapdash or sublime.

Kenneth Clark once scorned them “(all except the last) as revoltingly cheerful and horribly skillful.” But Manet thought them awesome. So did Whistler and Sargent, Cassatt and Courbet. To those who wield brushes, Hals--a painter’s painter--has been a beacon, an exemplar.

But aristocratic connoisseurs have often found his portraits coarse. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, thought them hasty and unpolished. Marcel Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes thought his sitters common; she suggested they be viewed, as one might view riffraff, safely, from a distance, from a quickly moving tram. Other connoisseurs (on apocryphal information) decided the painter was a lowlife-loving drunk.

Vincent van Gogh revered him. He loved the way Hals painted “in one rush.” He loved his subjects too. Hals never painted gods, shepherds in Arcadia, kings or martyred saints. “He did portraits,” wrote van Gogh, “and nothing, nothing else.”

Hals painted Gypsy girls and fishwives, young businessmen with money in the bank, magistrates and drinkers, urchins and committees, cackling crones and cooks. Van Gogh thought his countryman’s truthful vision of humanity “worth as much as Dante’s Paradise and the Michelangelos and the Raphaels and even the Greeks.”

The market has expressed opinions as diverse. Consider, for example, the various values it has placed on Hals’ “Willem van Heythuysen” of 1625, one of the 60 portraits included in the show. That slightly pompous painting--or, to be precise, its slightly pompous sitter with his silver-pommeled sword, his ruff of costly lace and his suit of black embroidered silk--fairly brags of wealth.

Don’t let the sword mislead you. Van Heythuysen was no soldier; he made his money in the textile trade, and he made a lot of it. Hals invites us all to smile at his yuppiesque pretensions. Harvard’s distinguished Seymour Slive, who catalogued the show, tells us that van Heythuysen collected “a vast number of paintings, expensive furniture and silver, a large library, jewelry,” and that he also sported, beneath his rich black suit, “red satin underwear.”

Hals was in high fashion when the painting was commissioned. He was out of fashion in 1800 when it was auctioned in Haarlem for “the trifling sum of 51 guilders.” But then his fortunes changed. After Hals was rediscovered in the mid-19th Century (by the Frenchman Thore-Burger, who had also rediscovered Vermeer) painters, by the score, began to troop to Haarlem as if to a shrine. Hals was back in fashion the next time that the work was sold, from the Liechtenstein Collection to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich in 1969. This time the same portrait brought 12 million German marks. No single work of art had ever sold for more.

Such fluctuating readings and wildly swinging values place a sort of question mark above the gallery’s exhibit, the first Hals show arranged in a quarter of a century. Will the public yawn--or marvel --at those matrons in their caps of lace, those children with the flying hair, those confident Dutch burghers in their somber suits of black? Is the master due for yet another re-evaluation? How will 1989 respond to Frans Hals?

If his reputation flags again the fault will not be his. Our time’s acceleration, the ubiquity of the camera, and abstract painting’s triumph must surely share the blame.

The trouble is that Hals’ greatest innovations--his suddenness and speed, his republican inclusiveness and, especially, the vigor of his emphatic, unsmoothed brush strokes--now seem utterly familiar.

The factors that so moved daring younger painters when Hals was rediscovered today seem slightly tame.

Take his suddenness, for instance, his astonishing exactitude, his ability to tear an instant out of time--say, the dawning of a smile, or the quick and casual gesture of an arm tossed across a chair back, or the flash of recognition in the slightly bleary eyes of the Rijksmuseum’s “Merry Drinker” who raises up his glass to welcome a good friend (the good friend is the viewer) who has just walked through the door.

To seize the passing moment, to make the transitory permanent, is difficult in paint. With a camera it’s a snap.

Hals’s open-minded fondness for different sorts of folks, for young as well as old, drunk as well as sober, rich as well as poor, struck a special chord in 19th-Century Europe as France’s Second Empire and other monarchies decayed. Courbet, who loved his portraits, and copied them with care, was a radical republican. It was far more than the mastery of various shades of black (“Frans Hals,” wrote van Gogh, “had no less than 27 blacks”) that endeared Hals to Manet, for Manet, too, made his various countrymen his subject --the street cleaners, the businessmen, the prostitutes, the drunks. Hals, as Thore-Burger wrote, had viewed 17th-Century Holland as “a country of equality.” Americans as various as Whistler, Cassatt, Robert Henri, Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase, all of whom loved Hals, must have felt some special kinship to his all-men-are-brothers tolerance.

Hals, observed van Gogh, had glimpsed the one “great simple thing: the painting of humanity, or rather of a whole republic, by the simple means of portraiture.”

Though some of his best-loved and most familiar works--the Wallace Collection’s “Laughing Cavalier,” the Louvre’s “Gypsy Girl,” the Frick’s “Portrait of a Man” and many of his largest multifigure portraits--were not available for loan, the gallery’s exhibit, despite its modest size, provides a superb survey of his art.

Hals must have painted quickly, and directly on the canvas. Lesser painters have to work their portraits up from sketches, but if Hals ever made a drawing, none has managed to survive. Looking at his pictures you instead get the feeling that he reached into the world and somehow plucked his likenesses--with their granite-like conceptions and quickly darting brush strokes --whole from real life. The man did not need sketches. For Hals the various acts of forging forms in color, casting them in light, and orchestrating brush strokes somehow became one.

Though van Gogh was convinced that Hals painted “in one rush,” and though his finest portraits strike you all at once, you should battle through that quickness and try to view them slowly, as you would a Cubist work, stroke by telling stroke. We read faces instantaneously. Because that sudden recognition is built into our brains, the viewer may be tempted to seize these paintings at a glance, to get them, and move on. But fight against that hurry. Hals should not be gulped. His pictures should be grazed.

Look at how he painted hands, the whiteness of the knuckles, the blood beneath the skin. No one has ever painted hands as well as Hals. Watch the way his brush manages to catch the stiffness of white linen, the weight of silk embroidery, the transparencies of lace. See if you can count, as van Gogh did so carefully, his 27 blacks. And Hals, as Slive has noted, had as many whites. (Though blacks and whites may rule this show--the burghers of the time still dressed in Spanish styles--the countless colors of his flesh tones are equally remarkable.)

The show is filled with splendid works--though it does include one clunker, the “Fisher Girl” (private collection, New York), which was once in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. The black hat on her head looks like a charred pancake. The museum sold it off in 1967. It is easy to see why.

Most of the Dutch Master’s multifigure paintings have remained in Holland, but three of his most famous are included in the show. One is the “Officers of a Company of the Amsterdam Crossbow Civic Guard Under Captain Reynier Reael and Lieutenant Cornelis Michielsz Blaeuw,” the 15-foot-wide canvas that is popularly known (because of the skinniness of its 16 sitters) as “The Meagre Company.” Hals designed it and began it, but it was finished by another. The standing figure at the left, all dressed in shades of gray, is surely from the brush of Hals. Just look at his boots.

Two of the Dutch Master’s last, dark and most heart-shattering works, “The Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse” and “The Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse,” conclude the exhibition. The “Regentesses” alone justifies repeated visits to the show.

Its five old black-garbed women haunt the room like ghosts. Though Hals is rightly known for his merriment and brio and warm conviviality, he touches in this masterpiece the dark soul-stirring grandeur that only rises in the final works of such master painters as Rembrandt, Titian, Goya, Rothko and Cezanne. All that is extraneous has been expunged from this great painting. Looking at its sitters (they inspired, and they dwarf, Whistler’s portrait of his mother) you cannot escape the feeling that Hals, who so loved daily life, has here accepted death.

The show, in the West Building, will travel in January to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and in May to the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem. It closes in Washington Dec. 31.