Frans Hals's Fisherboys : Exemplars of Idleness

Abstract

Frans Hals's fame is justly founded on his portraits of the aggressive Dutch burghers whose indomitable spirit freed them from the repressive yoke of Spain and whose inimitable business acumen placed the Republic of the United Netherlands in the forefront of seventeenth-century commercial development. The pride of these men and women is candidly represented by Hals, who did not submerge his sitter's individuality in the conventions of a genteel languor so fashionable outside the Dutch Republic. A speaking likeness and direct confrontation with an accessible, often passionate personality are hallmarks of Hals's portraiture. These characteristics similarly mark his much smaller, but equally brilliant genre production. Hals produced his essays in this category sporadically during some fifteen to twenty years, and they are conceptually and technically innovative. Their brushwork prefigures the bravura handling of the best late portraits while the seemingly uncalculated disposition of their forms endows them with a vitality missing in the more conscientiously contrived compositions of his Haarlem contemporaries. Among Hals's genre paintings, the fisherchildren have occupied a prominent, secure position until recently, when Grimm severed them from the master's oeuvre and attributed them to a Halsian painter active after 1640, whom he dubbed the Master of the Fisherchildren.1 Though the authorship of specific works is likely to be contested for some time, including the two paintings considered in this paper, it seems to me unquestionable that Frans Hals and not a minor master so obviously dependent upon him should be credited with the invention of this enormously popular type.

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