[9] There were two quite distinct schools of portraiture in 17th-century Haarlem: the neat (represented, for example, by Verspronck); and a looser, more painterly style at which Frans Hals excelled.

Hals was born at Antwerp in the Spanish-occupied southern Netherlands, but because of the chaos wrought there by the Spanish at that time, his family moved to Haarlem when he was little.

[10] Like many, Hals's parents fled during[11] the Fall of Antwerp (1584–1585) from the south to Haarlem in the new Dutch Republic in the north, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

In 1610, Hals became a member of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and he started to earn money as an art restorer for the town council.

The council had confiscated all Catholic religious art in the Haarlemse Noon, although it did not formally possess the entire collection until 1625, when the city fathers had decided which were suitable for the town hall.

The remaining art, which was considered too Roman Catholic, was sold to Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, a fellow guild member, on condition that he remove it from Haarlem.

[13] As biographer Seymour Slive has pointed out, older stories of Hals abusing his first wife were confused with another Haarlem resident of the same name.

[16] The Dutch nation fought for independence during the Eighty Years' War,[16] and Hals was a member of the local schutterij, a military guild.

Hals is best known for his portraits, mainly of wealthy citizens such as Pieter van den Broecke and Isaac Massa, whom he painted three times.

His pictures illustrate the various strata of society: banquets or meetings of officers, guildsmen,[16] local councilmen from mayors to clerks, itinerant players and singers, gentlemen, fishwives, and tavern heroes.

Hals was fond of daylight and silvery sheen, while Rembrandt used golden glow effects based upon artificial contrasts of low light in immeasurable gloom.

The only record of his work in the first decade of his independent activity is an engraving by Jan van de Velde copied from the lost portrait of The Minister Johannes Bogardus.

Early works by Hals show him as a careful draughtsman capable of great finish yet spirited, such as Two singing boys with a lute and a music book and Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia (1616).

One simple way to observe this change is to look at all of the portraits that he painted through the years with his trademark pose leaning over the back of a chair: Later in his life, his brush strokes became looser, fine detail becoming less important than the overall impression.

[16] This tendency coincides with the period when Hals gained fewer commissions from the wealthy, and some historians have suggested that a reason for his predilection for black and white pigment was the low price of these colors as compared with the costly lakes and carmines.

In these, he generally sets upon the canvas the fleeting aspect of the various stages of merriment, from the subtle, half ironic smile that quivers round the lips of the curiously misnamed Laughing Cavalier to the grin of the Malle Babbe.

The soft curling lines of Hals's brush are always clear upon the surface: "materially just lying there, flat, while conjuring substance and space in the eye.

"[30] Lively and exciting, the technique can appear "ostensibly slapdash"[29] – people often think that Hals 'threw' his works 'in one toss' (aus einem Guss) onto the canvas.

[31] Hals did occasionally paint without underdrawings or underpainting (alla prima), but most of the works were created in successive layers, as was customary at that time.

Haarlem resident Theodorus Schrevelius was struck by the vitality of Hals's portraits which reflected 'such power and life' that the painter 'seems to challenge nature with his brush'.

[36] Roestraten was not only a student (the Haarlem archives contain a notarised document, which supports this fact), but he also became a son-in-law of Hals when he married his daughter Adriaentje.

In the 19th century, his technique influenced the work of impressionists and realists including Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Charles-François Daubigny, Max Liebermann, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Gustave Courbet, and in the Netherlands, Jacobus van Looy and Isaac Israëls.

[37] The Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: 'What a joy it is to see a Frans Hals, how different it is from the paintings – so many of them – where everything is carefully smoothed out in the same manner.'

Hals chose not to give a smooth finish to his painting, as most of his contemporaries did, but mimicked the vitality of his subject by using smears, lines, spots, large patches of color and hardly any details.

In his Groote Schouburgh (1718–1721), Arnold Houbraken recorded Hals's life and praised his style, adding that the figures in one of the large group portraits: ... zoo kragtig en natuurlyk geschildert zyn, dat zy de aanschouwers schynen te willen aanspreken ("... are painted so powerfully and naturally, they seem to want to talk to us").

At the Royal Academy in London, Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) lectured on Hals in 1774, praising his handling of faces and the consequent remarkable individuality of his portraits.

Reynolds's biographer James Northcote (1736–1831), who was a fellow portraitist, remarked that Hals could have caught a bird in flight, grasping it, as it were, from life – something he said Titian would not have been capable of.

[40][41] With his rehabilitation in public esteem came the enormous rise in value, and, at the Secretan sale in 1889, the portrait of Pieter van den Broecke was bid up to 4,420 francs, while in 1908 the National Gallery paid £25,000 for the large family group from the collection of Lord Talbot de Malahide.

[44] The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616 appears on the restaurant wall in the 1989 Peter Greenaway film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.