Lecture 5
Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Preacher (ca. 1660): Virtuosity and the Rough Style
Friday, February 20, 2015, 1:30 pm
Frans Hals usually painted life-size portraits, but he also made a number of tiny likenesses. Among the loans from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo collection is a painting hardly bigger than a sheet of paper, in which Hals’s celebrated brushwork, loose and suggestive, is scaled down to breathtaking effect. It is a masterpiece of virtuosity and intensity. In this lecture, Walsh surveys the careers of Hals and his competitors.