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Frans Hals, 'The Laughing Cavalier', 1624

 


The Laughing Cavalier is a man on the cusp of unseriousness. His eyes follow a viewer around the room, his curled moustache twitches endearingly as if he struggles to maintain composure, whilst his lip is pursed to stop laughter escaping. The pose, meanwhile, is proud and monumental, filling the canvas with a foreshortened elbow and shoulder pushing into a viewer's world, serving to emphasise the silks and expensive dress against the monochromatic background. 

Frans Hals was first and foremost a portrait painter. His oeuvre includes wedding portraits of solo male and female sitters, multifigure works including The Banquet of Officers from 1627, yet his depictions often turned to peasants or comical characters, notably his Jester with a Lute now in the Louvre, proving that portrait painters also had range. The Laughing Cavalier remains an equally intriguing work: despite being Hals' most famous piece, the sitter remains anonymous. Yet, the smile is so familiar to a viewer, and an unusual addition to portraiture of the time where faces were normally more emotionally difficult to penetrate. By bringing the sitter down to earth through his face, despite his affluent costume, Hals creates a knowing figure and a recognisable one. With narrowed eyes, The Laughing Cavalier tries to work a viewer out, which happens to be exactly what we are doing when investigating the canvas for ourselves. 

Behind the genteel, welcoming smile of the unknown sitter, however, is a wealth of painterly precision. Hals invites a viewer to survey the sumptuous fabrics, the rich textures and the tactility of the brushwork so expertly conveyed: the thick slashes of paint across the sitter's sash, the delicate pinpricks of white which construct his ruff, the impasto application on the golden sleeve and glinting buttons to establish a three-dimensionality to the canvas. This level of detail is continued on the face of the figure, in the strands of hair spilling out from beneath the wide-brimmed hat, which also reflects the gentle curve of the smile, as well as the delicacy of his facial hair. Hals' use of a spotlight on the figure, supported by a looming dark shadow disappearing off to the right of the painting, furthers the extravagant nature of the costume, glistening before a viewer's eye. This is a painting which shows Hals' mastery not only of human emotion, but of the brush, bringing the painted and real together in a fusion of free-spiritedness. 

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