There are painters whose work lies on the surface (like Vermeer), and painters whose work lies in the subject (like Rembrandt).  I can’t figure out if Franz Hals is the former or the latter.  Walking into the Franz Hals exhibit at the Met, aptly called “Style and Substance,” the brushwork is what struck me first.  There’s a freedom in it and an understanding, almost modern, that a painting is just paint applied to canvas.  Especially when depicting mounds of cloth, which is what eighteenth-century people tended to wear, the paintings have an audacious physicality, with free-floating smears of oil everywhere.

But there are very real people captured here.  There’s a cliched view that Northern European painting is “photographic” because it captures light with a special primacy.  Hals’ portraits are “photographic” because they capture one very specific moment.  They’re not, like Rembrandt’s portraits, images that transcend time.  While enormously (and joyously) character-revealing, each of Hals painted portraits captures just one particular moment.  And, even in his commissioned portraits, it’s not an official moment, the most flattering and noble moment.  Instead it’s an off-kilter moment, when the subject is wrinkling her nose or smiling too broadly or about to straighten his collar.  I don’t think Hals’ intention is to satirize.  I think he simply found in these moments something more appealing, more stubbornly real, than what he found in conventional paintings.