Van Dyck and Frans Hals
Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) and Frans Hals (1582/3-1666) were both born in Antwerp, in Flanders. Both their fathers worked in the clothing industry, Van Dyck’s father as a rich silk merchant and Hals’s father as a humble cloth weaver. But Van Dyck and his parents remained in Antwerp, while Hals and his parents emigrated to Haarlem, in Holland, either to improve their economic prospects or as religious refugees. To compare the paintings of Van Dyck and Hals is also to illustrate the split between Flanders, where most patrons were aristocratic and Catholic, and Holland, where most patrons were middle-class and Protestant. Van Dyck in Flanders painted some religious and mythological pictures; but there was less demand for that kind of art in a Protestant country like Holland, where Hals worked as a specialist portrait painter. Van Dyck painted full-length portraits of his aristocratic clients, but Hals’s patrons were mostly middle-class people – brewers, cloth merchants, and professional...