Description
Book SynopsisThis is the first book to concentrate on Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals’s 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 Collection’s exhibition of the same name,
Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artist’s 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 Hals’s 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 viewer’s space, has been charming audiences for over a century. Richly illustrated,
Frans Hals: The Male Portrait situates
The Laughing Cavalier within the artist’s larger
oeuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve this great masterpiece.
Trade Reviewbeautifully presented and lavishly illustrated catalogue [...] as accessible and exciting for the general reader as for specialist conservators. -- James Innes-Mulraine
this lavishly illustrated paperback shows how Hals was able to achieve a masterpiece at a relatively early stage in his career. * Arts & Collections *
This book you can treasure forever. * Historical Association *
The catalogue, by Lelia Packer and Ashok Roy, is a brilliant book that’s concise, detailed, and informed. Its treatment of iconography is, to me, a feast. -- Brian T. Allen * National Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Director's Foreword Sponsor's Foreword Frans Hals: A Short Biography 1. Frans Hals and the Male Portrait 2. Hals's Masterpiece:
The Laughing Cavalier 3.
The Laughing Cavalier and the Revival of Frans Hals 4. The Making of
The Laughing Cavalier 5. Frans Hals and Portraiture: Style and Painting Techniques Interwoven Appendix: Provenance of
The Laughing Cavalier Bibliography Endnotes Index Picture Credits
