Frans Hals [antikvár]

Life and Times In reconstructing the life of an artist, it is only too easy to interpret the known facts in such a way that, instead of presenting a historically accurate account, they show him as a romantic figure, who reflects in his own life the particular quality of his work. This is obviously more likely with a pörtrait-painter — someone, that is, who has chosen to make other people the object of his attention and therefore passes judgment on their character and behav-iour. The case of. Frans Hals -ofiers a typical example of such a misinterpretation. One of his biographers, owing to a mis-understanding of a remark made by Houbraken, has described Hals as a drunjcard who beat his wife every night, merely because such a character seemed the most fitting for an artist whose portraits so frequently depicted the happy or melancholy figures of drinkers and merrymakers, and who, between one portrait of respectable citizens and the next, revealed at every step an instinctive sympathy for those who lead an irregular existence and take life as it comes. Of course, present-day criticism rejects attempts to establish supposed analogies between the life of the man and the work of the artist. Such categorizations always betray that entirely bourgeois manifestation, the tendency to cast the artist in the role of a peintre maudit, a damned soul, an accepted and foreseen element of disorder, acting as a safety-valve for society. But when, in their legitímate desire to 'correct this distorted view, biographers do all they can to show that Hals was one of the most highly respected citizens of his town, then they themselves seem not far removed from their romantic predecessors; as if the fact of being a great painter necessarily entailed all kinds of obligations. This would all be merely amusing, if it had not come to represent a method of criticism, the method of establishing spurious relationships between art and life.