Portrait Artist of the Decade and Frans Hals' Netherlands
Portrait Artist of the Decade Wednesday 8.00pm Sky Arts
MICHAEL HODGES - 29 September 2023
As the spotlight turns on Frans Hals, painter of The Laughing Cavalier, why not discover his happy hunting ground? The reopening of the National Portrait Gallery in June after a three- year makeover caused an outbreak of public enthusiasm and a Martha Kearney series on Radio 4. Now Portrait Artist of the Year returns to our screens with a new run that marks its tenth anniversary on Sky Arts. It’s all proof that the British love portraits – dark disturbing portraits from Freud and Bacon, enigmatic portraits by Hockney, haughty portraits by Gainsborough. But there is one portrait we cherish above all others: Frans Hals’s 1624 The Laughing Cavalier, possibly the jolliest oil painting in existence and star of this autumn’s Frans Hals show at the National Gallery.
Naturally, the moustachioed and rosy-cheeked Dutchman has featured previously on Portrait Artist, when the team went to the painting’s usual home, at London’s Wallace Collection, for a 400-year-old masterclass in portraying the human likeness. But why is he so jolly? The answer is to be found in Hals’s hometown, Haarlem – just a few kilometres to the west of Amsterdam. The Netherlands is famously dotted with terrific cities and delightful towns associated with great artists – Amsterdam and Rembrandt, Delft and Vermeer, Leiden and Jan Steen, Amersfoort and Mondrian – but Haarlem contrives to combine all the best bits of all the others.
The canals are as pleasant as Leiden’s, the medieval city square, the Grote Markt, knocks Amsterdam’s Dam Square into a Dutch hat (and is untroubled by rampaging British stag parties) and Haarlem’s huge cathedral, the Grote Kerk, is bigger and better than Delft’s. Plus, if you are avoiding flying, Haarlem is fantastically easy to get to. After taking the Eurostar to Amsterdam you’ll find 132 trains a day travelling the 15 minutes to Haarlem (from £5.42 if you book on Trainline.com). The station is just inside the circle of canals and waterways that contain the core of the city that Hals knew: once you’ve disembarked, simply stroll down Kruisweg then over the Nieuwe Gracht canal and you’ll be walking through gorgeous streets of bakeries, cafés and boutiques laid out as Hals would have found them.
Many Dutch Golden Age buildings survive, including the city’s famed almshouses with courtyard gardens known as hofjes. Among them you’ll come across occasional curved Art Deco buildings in brick, but what you won’t find is Frans Hals’s house. Hals was born in Antwerp, then forced north by war with Spain, but no one knows which street number became his home.
Walk across the medieval expanse of Grote Markt to the Grote Kerk and you’ll find two Frans Hals tombs inside the huge vertical interior. You’re not seeing double – though the towering building gives a clue to what inspired the painter of portraits such as The Merry Drinker. Haarlemers could afford a spectacular cathedral in the Middle Ages because they were making so much money from beer. There were 60 breweries in Haarlem and it has been calculated that Haarlemers each drank one litre of beer a day. There are fewer breweries now but they are still very good at it. Yards from the Grote Kerk you can sample the creations of the city’s Uiltje brewery at their craft beer bar on Zijlstraat (if you’re homesick they do a knockout English IPA). Or, two minutes away, drink in the magical Jopenkerk brewery in an old church on Zuiderstraat, which locals will tell you is the best brewery in the Netherlands.
They may be right: drink enough beer and it’s possible to believe you’re best at everything. Haarlemers claim local man Laurens Janszoon Coster invented printing in 1430 – his statue is on the Grote Markt holding up a letter “A” – before Germans pinched the idea and the credit. Similarly, they are proud to have developed the ball-and- stick game kolf on nearby dunes, which they say unscrupulous Scottish onlookers rebranded as golf.
There is evidence to further that ancient claim at the Pieter Teyler House museum, a restored 18th-century mansion where the blue-on-white wall tiles show a small Dutch man hacking angrily at something in the long grass with a stick. Next door you’ll find the strange and wonderful Teylers Museum, housing a compendium of 17th- and 18th-century science exhibits. The period is too late for Hals to have visited but there is one building we can be sure he knew: the former almshouse where he died and which now houses the Frans Hals Museum.
Inside you’ll find the Civic Guard room, one of the most moving spaces in Western art, hung with a series of group portraits of sturdy Dutch merchants who are ready to take up arms against the Spanish. You will never be in a room with so many wonder- ful pictures of the human face by one artist; the sensation of their presence is so strong you might think you hear their voices. They were painted in an astounding run, between 1616 and 1639, a period when, in Haarlem, Frans Hals was portrait artist of the year – 23 times in a row.
As the spotlight turns on Frans Hals, painter of The Laughing Cavalier, why not discover his happy hunting ground? The reopening of the National Portrait Gallery in June after a three- year makeover caused an outbreak of public enthusiasm and a Martha Kearney series on Radio 4. Now Portrait Artist of the Year returns to our screens with a new run that marks its tenth anniversary on Sky Arts. It’s all proof that the British love portraits – dark disturbing portraits from Freud and Bacon, enigmatic portraits by Hockney, haughty portraits by Gainsborough. But there is one portrait we cherish above all others: Frans Hals’s 1624 The Laughing Cavalier, possibly the jolliest oil painting in existence and star of this autumn’s Frans Hals show at the National Gallery.
Naturally, the moustachioed and rosy-cheeked Dutchman has featured previously on Portrait Artist, when the team went to the painting’s usual home, at London’s Wallace Collection, for a 400-year-old masterclass in portraying the human likeness. But why is he so jolly? The answer is to be found in Hals’s hometown, Haarlem – just a few kilometres to the west of Amsterdam. The Netherlands is famously dotted with terrific cities and delightful towns associated with great artists – Amsterdam and Rembrandt, Delft and Vermeer, Leiden and Jan Steen, Amersfoort and Mondrian – but Haarlem contrives to combine all the best bits of all the others.
The canals are as pleasant as Leiden’s, the medieval city square, the Grote Markt, knocks Amsterdam’s Dam Square into a Dutch hat (and is untroubled by rampaging British stag parties) and Haarlem’s huge cathedral, the Grote Kerk, is bigger and better than Delft’s. Plus, if you are avoiding flying, Haarlem is fantastically easy to get to. After taking the Eurostar to Amsterdam you’ll find 132 trains a day travelling the 15 minutes to Haarlem (from £5.42 if you book on Trainline.com). The station is just inside the circle of canals and waterways that contain the core of the city that Hals knew: once you’ve disembarked, simply stroll down Kruisweg then over the Nieuwe Gracht canal and you’ll be walking through gorgeous streets of bakeries, cafés and boutiques laid out as Hals would have found them.
Many Dutch Golden Age buildings survive, including the city’s famed almshouses with courtyard gardens known as hofjes. Among them you’ll come across occasional curved Art Deco buildings in brick, but what you won’t find is Frans Hals’s house. Hals was born in Antwerp, then forced north by war with Spain, but no one knows which street number became his home.
Walk across the medieval expanse of Grote Markt to the Grote Kerk and you’ll find two Frans Hals tombs inside the huge vertical interior. You’re not seeing double – though the towering building gives a clue to what inspired the painter of portraits such as The Merry Drinker. Haarlemers could afford a spectacular cathedral in the Middle Ages because they were making so much money from beer. There were 60 breweries in Haarlem and it has been calculated that Haarlemers each drank one litre of beer a day. There are fewer breweries now but they are still very good at it. Yards from the Grote Kerk you can sample the creations of the city’s Uiltje brewery at their craft beer bar on Zijlstraat (if you’re homesick they do a knockout English IPA). Or, two minutes away, drink in the magical Jopenkerk brewery in an old church on Zuiderstraat, which locals will tell you is the best brewery in the Netherlands.
They may be right: drink enough beer and it’s possible to believe you’re best at everything. Haarlemers claim local man Laurens Janszoon Coster invented printing in 1430 – his statue is on the Grote Markt holding up a letter “A” – before Germans pinched the idea and the credit. Similarly, they are proud to have developed the ball-and- stick game kolf on nearby dunes, which they say unscrupulous Scottish onlookers rebranded as golf.
There is evidence to further that ancient claim at the Pieter Teyler House museum, a restored 18th-century mansion where the blue-on-white wall tiles show a small Dutch man hacking angrily at something in the long grass with a stick. Next door you’ll find the strange and wonderful Teylers Museum, housing a compendium of 17th- and 18th-century science exhibits. The period is too late for Hals to have visited but there is one building we can be sure he knew: the former almshouse where he died and which now houses the Frans Hals Museum.
Inside you’ll find the Civic Guard room, one of the most moving spaces in Western art, hung with a series of group portraits of sturdy Dutch merchants who are ready to take up arms against the Spanish. You will never be in a room with so many wonder- ful pictures of the human face by one artist; the sensation of their presence is so strong you might think you hear their voices. They were painted in an astounding run, between 1616 and 1639, a period when, in Haarlem, Frans Hals was portrait artist of the year – 23 times in a row.
MICHAEL HODGES