In the seventeenth century some of the most advanced painting in Europe was produced in the
Netherlands. Rembrandt dominated the radical progress of painting in Amsterdam and Vermeer did
so in Delft. Frans Hals led the vanguard in Haarlem where he painted some of the most animated
individualized portraits of the era or of any era for that matter. Now Steven Nadler has
produced the first biography of this elusive Dutch artist to be published in many years. Hals
left behind no letters or other personal papers though luckily a wealth of other sources offer
details of his life and personality. Nadler has fleshed out Hals's biography by casting it
against the drama of Holland's revolution against Spanish rule the acute struggles between
Protestantism and Catholicism in the Low Countries and the rise of Holland as a colonial power
and center of industry and commerce. The result is an authoritative picture of Hals and life in
his studio and a robust work of seventeenth-century social and cultural history. Nadler serves
up the sights smells and sounds of life in Haarlem. He takes us into cloth factories taverns
busy studios and bustling markets. He takes us behind the scenes of the picture trade. He
leads us along the newly invented shorelines where weavers laid out large billowing lengths of
cloth to bleach in the sun. He takes us into new Protestant churches and into old Catholic
ones. We witness the bloody politics of the long Reformation and the 1635 plague that
devastated the Dutch Republic. What emerges is a deftly written story of a complex artist and
the tumultuous world he inhabited. Accented with images of life in seventeenth-century Holland
and a color gallery of works by Hals and his peers The Portraitist is a work of great charm
and importance and will stand as the first full biography of one of Europe's most important
artists for many years--
