The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the most important collection of paintings in America by the celebrated Dutch artist Frans Hals (1582/83–1666), whose portraits and genre scenes were famous in his lifetime for their immediacy and dazzling brushwork. This exhibition will present thirteen paintings by Hals, including two lent from private collections, and several works by other Netherlandish masters.  

Frans Hals is one of the most familiar and accessible of the Old Master painters. His name is second only to Rembrandt's and equals Vermeer's in its evocation of the Golden Age of Dutch art. After falling out of favor in the 18th century, Hals's work was championed from the 1860s onward by Realist and Impressionist masters such as Courbet, Manet, and Sargent, and collected by several of the Metropolitan Museum's major benefactors.

Several of the Museum’s paintings by Hals are famous, especially the early Merrymakers at Shrovetide (ca. 1616) and the so-called Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart (1623, see left image), both bequeathed to the Museum by Benjamin Altman in 1913. Also included in the exhibition will be two loans from private collections in New York—the small, exquisite Portrait of Samuel Ampzing (1630), on copper, and the well-known Fisher Girl (1630–32).

A selection of other Dutch paintings from the Museum’s collection and a few engravings will set Hals’s work in the context of his native Haarlem and will help clarify how exceptional his animated poses and virtuoso brushwork were at the time. The exhibition is organized by Walter Liedtke, Curator in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of European Paintings.