Did Frans Hals hate the bourgeoisie?

How ideology determines what we see

Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse

You would never guess it from the organisers’ bland commentary but the Frans Hals exhibition at the National Gallery asks a hard ideological question: does what you know determine what you see?

The gallery has one of Hals​' last great works, a group portrait of the Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse in Haarlem. To the romantics of the 19^th century and the Marxists of the 20^th the painting is an act of defiance against the bourgeois do gooders who governed the lives of poor and elderly men.

When his work was rediscovered in the 1860s, Frans Hals (1582-1666) was acclaimed as a genius, who anticipated the impressionists, and like all geniuses the public wanted him to be misunderstood.

To give you an idea of the excitement Hals generated, Theophile Thoré, champion of the impressionists, announced: “Frans Hals, c’est un moderne.” At a sale in Paris in 1865: the Marquess of Hertford outbid Baron James de Rothschild for “The Laughing Cavalier”. It fetched 51,000 francs — six times the estimate. Vincent Van Gogh declared that Hals may only have painted portraits, “nothing nothing nothing but that. . . But it is worth as much as Dante’s Paradise and the Michelangelos and Raphaels and even the Greeks.” 

The legends about Hals were formed in the excitement about his work. Here is what we know for sure. By the end of his life Hals had lost his money in fruitless speculations. His last two major commissions were for group portraits of the regents and regentesses (governors and governesses) of the home for poor old men.

Nineteenth century commentators said that Hals covertly skewered the governors.  He showed one woman as a hard-faced puritan.

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​He told us that a male regent was clearly a drunk, who laid down rules for the poor to abstain from alcohol​ that he never obeyed himself.

In 1972, the Marxist critic John Berger produced Ways of Seeing for the BBC, one of the most influential pieces of art criticism of the period. Berger introduced the notion of the “male gaze” that we now take for granted – nudes in supposedly great art were presented for the pleasure of men as surely as they were in low-status pornography.

After dealing with the art world’s respectable sexism, Berger laid into the mystification of “bourgeois” art academics. Hals was destitute when he received the commission to paint the regents, Berger said.