Artistic taste is forever changing and there's obviously no such thing as a balanced opinion within the arts, where judgment in personam and preference are the sole currencies. then styles come and go, bodies of labor pass in and out of favour. The works of JS Bach were forgotten until revived a century on by Mendelssohn. Shakespeare was once derided as dense and difficult. And a Dutch painter called Frans Hals thankfully didn't witness, a century after his death, his works changing hands for next to zilch . And, since taste continues to vary , it's always informative to read the critical opinions of former eras, because it'd be possible that critics really did see things differently.
Published in 1904, Frans Hals by Gerald S. Davies was written quite a century on from the low point of the artist's stature, and therefore the better a part of two and a half centuries after the painter's death in 1666. Copiously illustrated with glossy black and white plates, the book formed a part of a series called Great Masters in Painting and Sculpture. We must thus anticipate the text to be of the skimping quality we usually expect once we perhaps reluctantly open up a populist publisher's 'Great Artists' series.
But this 1904 volume is beautifully written. And what really does surprise is that the uncluttered, modern sort of the prose. There are not any great condescending or judgmental passages about the artist or his character. there's considerable fact about his life, about which actually we all know remarkably little. But in particular the book contains some inspired writing on and analytical observation of the paintings, a number of which, incidentally, have since been reattributed. This adds another aspect to the experience, since it illustrates how our appreciation of the humanities is extremely much conditioned by what we expect we'd realize the context or source of the thing .
Frans Hals, it appears, was something of a rake. He was never rich, was actually often in debt and, more often than not, on the brink of penniless. He spent much of his time within the pub, where he drank to excess. He married early, and therefore the union endured, but we now next to zilch about his domestic life. And yet, the respectable gentlemen of the St. Joris Shooting Guild regularly employed him to depict the club members altogether their proud finery, full face or three-quarter front, counting on what proportion each sitter had contributed to the funding of the project.
Gerald Davies's text is particularly successful in its identification and outline of the detail within the pictures. He identifies and locates elements of the artist's style that the casual observer would simply not see, and throughout he approaches his subject with an enthusiasm that pulls the reader into the discussion and isn't didactic. In several sections of the book, the author draws parallels and cites contrasts with Rubens, Vandyke and Rembrandt, all of whom, of course, achieved significantly more fame in their lifetimes than Hals did in his. Their work, perhaps, never did leave of favour, but that of Frans Hals certainly did. Painted largely in greys and black, the paintings of Frans Hals often appear to be more puritan in spirit even than their strait-laced sitters.
But then, as Davies means , there's a young man bearing a typical , a coloured sash, an item of painting that adds dramatic statement by introducing contrast. And, of course, there are the chuckling wenches, the singing drunks and therefore the other low life subjects that Hals chose to color where, with arguably unique skill and talent, he captured an instant expression as if it had been photographed.
Davies also insists that the paintings of Hals need an outsized viewing space. For the author, close-up viewing is just too revealing of a way that always approaches complete abstraction. And here we do find a difference from today's critical taste, where such free brushwork would be cited as evidence of an inventive strength. Davies doesn't criticise it, but his era preferred to not scrutinise it in search of the psychological dimension that's now so completely essential to any critical appraisal of an artist's work.
Tastes may change and artists may are available and out of favour. Frans Hals continues to be seen together of the best of painters and within the intervening years much has been written about him. But great art endures because it summarises the sensibilities of its era, a minimum of those we enforce imposing upon it. Great writing works an equivalent way and allow us to still include therein category critical works like this Davies book on Hals, purely on its contemporary relevance and not merely because it offers an historical perspective on the work.
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