PRESS RELEASE Frans Hals Eye to Eye with Rembrandt, Rubens ...

PRESS RELEASE
Haarlem, January 2013
Frans Hals – Lute Player, c. 1625 Jacob Jordaens – Bagpipe Player, Dirck van Baburen – Lute Player, 1622,
Musée du Louvre, Paris 1640/45, The Rubens House, Antwerp Centraalmuseum, Utrecht
Frans Hals
Eye to Eye with Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian
23 March to 28 July 2013
In Frans Hals Year 2013, key works by the artist will be shown amidst paintings by such
famous predecessors as Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens in Frans Hals:
Eye to Eye with Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian. This extraordinary confrontation of old
masters is essential to the understanding of seventeenth-century art. Famous painters often
produced their works in response to one another, seeking to outdo the other artist and create
something exceptional. The best way to assess the results of their efforts is to look at
comparable works side by side. Visitors can see for themselves the artistic challenges Hals
must have faced and what makes him unique. The paintings come from some of the world’s
greatest museums, among them the National Gallery in London, the Prado in Madrid and the
Louvre in Paris, and from various private collections.
A New View of Frans Hals
This first major Frans Hals exhibition in almost twenty-five years will shed new light on the artist. It was long
thought that Frans Hals’s name was almost unknown outside Haarlem in the seventeenth century and that
he did not achieve fame until the nineteenth, when the French art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger
rediscovered him, and artists like Vincent van Gogh and Edouard Manet expressed their admiration for him.
New research has revealed, however, that he was highly regarded by some of the most eminent painters and
art lovers in Europe in the seventeenth century.
Confrontations
Visitors will be able to see the choice that the sixteenth-century art theoretician Karel van Mander,
Hals’s teacher, presented to painters at that time—whether to paint in a ‘neat’ manner (like
Brueghel) or with ‘rough’ brushstrokes (like Titian and Tintoretto). It will also be possible to

compare swift oil sketches by Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens with work by Hals and Rembrandt
and see how closely Hals and his colleagues in Antwerp approached one another in formal
portraiture. A vibrant selection of genre paintings will set Hals’s masterly brushwork and the
expressions of his laughing figures side by side with comparable works by Van Baburen, Jordaens
and Van Dyck. Hals’s great group portraits also engage in a dialogue with contemporaries. The
most spectacular is perhaps the confrontation between Hals’s last group portraits and the late
portraits by Rembrandt, the only other seventeenth-century master who dared to paint with such
bravura at that moment.
Catalogue
A full-colour catalogue edited by Anna Tummers (curator of Old Masters at the Frans Hals Museum, who put
the exhibition together) is being published to coincide with the exhibition. International specialists will
provide insights into Frans Hals’s virtuosity, his directness, his artistic relationships with fellow artists from
Antwerp and Amsterdam and his importance in his own time. (160 pages, full colour, Dutch and English
editions, nai010 publishers, price € 25).
Audio Tour and Events
There will be an audio tour (Dutch, English and French) providing more in-depth information
about works in the exhibition. A wide range of activities and events are also being organized around
the exhibition. See www.franshalsmuseum.nl. There will be a short introductory film on the
website and at the exhibition.
Sponsorship
The exhibition has been made possible by the financial support of the Dr Marijnus Johannes van
Toorn & Louise Scholten Stichting, Stichting Zabawas, J.C. Ruigrok Stichting, Aon, the SNS
REAAL Fonds, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and Haarlem City Council. The museum is
supported by the BankGiro Loterij.
Title
FRANS HALS
Eye to Eye with Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian
Period 23 March to 28 July 2013
Location
Frans Hals Museum, Groot Heiligland 62, Haarlem
Telephone +31(0)23 511 57 75
Opening times
Tuesday – Saturday 10.00 a.m. – 5.00 p.m.
Sundays and public holidays 11.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m.
For press information, image material and package deals please contact Monique van Royen,
m.vanroyen@franshalsmuseum.nl, T +31(0)23 511 57 83
See also www.franshalsmuseum.nl