Frans Hals: The Male Portrait

Frans Hals is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time and, together with Rembrandt and Vermeer, is one of the most eminent Dutch seventeenth-century artists. Publishing to coincide with the The Wallace Collection exhibition of the same name, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artist's highly innovative approach to male portraiture in particular, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666.

Through pose and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals completely revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters' characters like no one else before him. The book includes the first in-depth study of Hals's great masterpiece, The Laughing Cavalier, from 1624. The extravagantly-dressed young man, confidently posed with his left arm akimbo in the extreme foreground of the picture and seemingly penetrating into the viewer's space, has been charming audiences for over a century.

Richly illustrated, this book situates The Laughing Cavalier within the artist's larger oeuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve his greatest masterpiece.