After its recent blockbuster exhibits of work by Rembrandt and then Vermeer, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has turned to Frans Hals, a painter with a reputation for jolly paintings and comic scenes that sometimes leads to his more serious side being overlooked.
The exhibit, with 48 paintings on display including The Lute Player, above, lets the other side through as well, with paintings of a ‘mad’ woman in a workhouse, prostitutes, young fishermen with rotten teeth and a family group portrait in which a young black enslaved boy is visually placed behind the family but is clearly looking of of the frame.
A second exhibit, at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, has 17 more Hals paintings, where the museum director told local press that “If you really want to get to know Frans Hals, his city, his life, his time, you must come to Haarlem,” the city where he mainly lived and worked after his family fled political turmoil in Antwerp when he was a child.
The Rijksmuseum exhibit will continue until June 16, and will then be on view from July 12 to November 3 at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.
