The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World - Hardcover

by Steven Nadler (Author)

A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age.

Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.

Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.

Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

Author Biography

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor, the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and affiliate professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die; Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam; A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age; Spinoza: A Life, Second Edition, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award; and Rembrandt's Jews, which was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author, with his son Ben Nadler, of the graphic book Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.