Frans Hals Portrait Exhibition at the Wallace Collection
October 15 2020
Picture: The Wallace Collection
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Wallace Collection in London has announced that it will be putting on an exhibition next year entitled Frans Hals: The Male Portrait.
As their website explains:
In the first ever show to focus solely on Hals’s portraits of men posing on their own, The Laughing Cavalier will be showcased alongside other great male portraits by Hals in order to explore his 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.
This exhibition will bring together a careful selection of the artist’s best male portraits from Europe and North America. In doing so, the show will aim to demonstrate how, 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. It will also showcase the evolution of Hals’s style, which is especially evident in his male portraits, from finely painted works to those demonstrating increasingly free and loose handling in his later years.
This exhibition is made possible due to the recent overturning of Lady Wallace's bequest which expressly stated that the collection " shall always be kept together unmixed with other objects of arts...". It is exciting to see what loans will be secured for the show, which one images have been negotiated with reciprocal arrangements. I wonder when The Laughing Cavalier will make his first trip abroad in 155 years? It's only a matter of time I suppose.
The planned dates for the ticketed exhibition are 23rd September 2021 - 30th January 2022.
