Frans Hals

This is the first book to concentrate on Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Halss highly innovative approach to male portraiture. Frans Hals is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time and, together with Rembrandt, is one of the most eminent seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Published to coincide with the Wallace Collections exhibition of the same name, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artists highly innovative approach to male portraiture, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666. Through pose, expression and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters characters like no one else before him. This book includes the first in-depth study of Halss great masterpiece, The Laughing Cavalier, from 1624. The extravagantly dressed young man, confidently posed with his left arm akimbo in the extreme foreground of the picture and seemingly penetrating into the viewers space, has been charming audiences for over a century. Richly illustrated, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait situates The Laughing Cavalier within the artists larger oeuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve this great masterpiece.