New from the University of Chicago Press: The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World by Steven Nadler.
About the book, from the publisher:
A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age.The Page 99 Test: The Best of All Possible Worlds.
Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.
Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter’s animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.
Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals’s life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.
The Page 99 Test: A Book Forged in Hell.
Writers Read: Steven Nadler (April 2013).
The Page 99 Test: The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
