From: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The celebrated portraitist and genre painter Frans Hals (1582-1666) has been placed second only to Rembrandt and, during the past hundred years, to Vermeer in the pantheon of great Dutch painters of the Golden Age.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Hals was actually the most admired artist in some quarters - especially in Paris, since Vermeer’s small oeuvre was still only beginning to be defined, and Hals' bourgeois subjects, his often colorful palette, and above all his bold brushwork became more inspiring to Realist and Impressionist painters than was the venerable model of Rembrandt.