The governors' portraits
Painted in his eighties inside this very building.
Mcke โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท This Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author and send me a message. This image is not in the public domain. Please respect the copyright pr โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท GodeNehler โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Unknown authorUnknown author Heemskerck, Maarten van (1498-1574) โ CC0
Yes, and it is among the best short day trips: twenty minutes by train, a central Grote Markt with the vast St Bavo church and the organ Mozart played as a child, and the Teylers Museum โ the oldest museum in the Netherlands โ alongside the Frans Hals. The town is quieter than Amsterdam and cheaper, and Bloemendaal beach and the Zuid-Kennemerland park are minutes away.
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The Frans Hals Museum is in Haarlem, about twenty minutes by train from Amsterdam, and it is the only place in the world where Hals's major works can be seen together โ the third of the Dutch golden age's great three after Rembrandt and Vermeer. The building is part of the story: a seventeenth-century almshouse for old men, and Hals himself spent his last years poor and dependent on the city's relief. His final paintings โ portraits of the almshouse's governors and governesses โ were made in his eighties for an institution whose charity he was living on, and they hang today in the very building they depict. His manner is what sets him apart: rapid visible brushstrokes he made no attempt to conceal, and figures who laugh, turn and are caught mid-movement, against the stiff formal portraiture of his time. He was neglected for two centuries, then rediscovered by the Impressionists in the nineteenth, who saw in him a forerunner.
Painted in his eighties inside this very building.
A visible speed that preceded Impressionism by two centuries.
Groot Heiligland 62, 2011 Haarlem