Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [40]
RUISDAEL: “BIG SKY” PAINTINGS. The most versatile landscape artist was Ruisdael (1629-82). Although he painted sharply defined details, he emphasized great open stretches of sky, water, and fields and used dramatic contrasts of light and shadow and threatening clouds to infuse his work with melancholy. This expansiveness and somber mood distinguished him from hundreds of other landscape artists working at the time.
HALS: MASTER OF THE MOMENT. Frans Hals’s (1580 — 1666) contribution to art was his ability to capture a fleeting expression. Whether his portraits depicted musicians, gypsies, or solid citizens, he brought them to life, often laughing and hoisting a tankard. His trademark was portraits of men and women caught in a moment of rollicking high spirits.
Hals’s most famous painting, “The Laughing Cavalier,” portrays a sly figure with a smile on his lips, a twinkle in his eyes, and a mustache rakishly upturned. Hals achieved this swashbuckling effect chiefly through his brushstrokes. Before Hals, Dutch realists prided themselves on masking their strokes to disguise the process of painting, thereby heightening a painting’s realism. Hals put his own “signature” on his images through slashing, sketchlike brushstrokes.
In this “alla prima,” technique, which means “at first” in Italian, the artist applies paint directly to the canvas without an undercoat. The painting is completed with a single application of brushstrokes. Although Hals’s strokes were clearly visible at close range, like Rubens’s and Velázquez’s, they formed coherent images from a distance and perfectly captured the immediacy of the moment. Hals caught his “Jolly Toper” in a freeze-frame of life, with lips parted as if about to speak and hand in mid-gesture.
Hals transformed the stiff convention of group portraiture. In his “Banquet of the Officers of the Saint George Guard Company,” he portrayed militiamen not as fighters but feasters at an uproarious banquet. Before Hals, artists traditionally painted group members as in a class picture, lined up like effigies in neat rows. Hals seated them around a table in relaxed poses, interacting naturally, with each facial expression individualized. Although the scene seems impromptu, the composition was a balance of poses and gestures with red-white-and-black linkages. The Baroque diagonals of flags, sashes, and ruffs reinforced the swaggering, boys-night-out feeling.
Hals’s outgoing, merry portraits of the 1620s and ’30s reveal his gift for enlivening, rather than embalming, a subject. Sadly, at the end of his life, Hals fell from favor. Although he had been a successful portraitist, the love of wine and beer his paintings celebrated spilled over into his personal life. With ten children and a brawling second wife who was often in trouble with the law, Hals, “filled to the gills every evening,” as a contemporary wrote, died destitute.
Hals, “The Jolly Toper,” 1627, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Hals used sweeping, fluid brushstrokes to freeze the passing moment in candid portraits of merry tipplers.
Ruisdael, “Windmill at Wijk-bij-Duurstede,” c. 1665, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Ruisdael’s landscapes convey a dramatic mood through the wind-raked sky, mobile clouds, and alternating sun and shadow streaking the low horizon.
REMBRANDT: THE WORLD FAMOUS. Probably the best-known painter in the Western world is Rembrandt van Rijn ( 1606-69). During his lifetime, Rembrandt was a wildly successful portrait painter. Today his reputation rests principally on the probing, introspective paintings of his late years, their subtle shadings implying extraordinary emotional depth.
EARLY STYLE. For the first twenty years of his career, Rembrandt’s portraits were the height of fashion, and he was deluged with commissions. Although his output was prolific, he was difficult to deal with. “A painting is finished,” he said, “when the master feels it is finished.