A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes us into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age.

Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed the ideas and expectations of what a portrait can offer and how a painting should look.

He was part of the great triumvirate of Dutch baroque painters along with Rembrandt and Vermeer, and was the portraitist of choice for businessmen, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, soldiers, and even fellow artists in the Golden Age. His works, with their visible brushstrokes and bold execution, lacked the detail and smooth finesse that were common among his contemporaries, and some dismissed them as rough and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, full of a sense of the sitter's living presence, captured with energy and immediacy.

Steven Nadler offers us the first complete biography of Hals in many years and gives us a picture of 17th-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He explores not only Hals's life but also the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.