Frans Hals or nor Frans Hals: Connoisseurship, Technical Analyses and Digital ToolsFrans Hals is hailed as one of the three greatest painters of the Dutch seventeenth century along with Rembrandt and Vermeer. Of all seventeenth-century Dutch painters, Frans Hals is also the most controversial in as far as the exact scope of his oeuvre is concerned. Hals’s popularity, the lack of technical reference material as well as the differing views among experts as to the exact scope of his oeuvre make works in his style prone to doubts and misattributions. It has led to fierce debates and legal battles about the attribution of paintings done in his style.
In this Open Access book, experts from Ghent University, Leiden University, Amsterdam University, Delft University of Technology, the Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem), the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), the Gemäldegalerie (Berlin) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) give surprising new insights into some of Hals’s most well-known paintings as well as into some of the most fiercely contested pictures in his style. Their insights result from in-depth study of a wealth of reference material: seventeenth-century sources, advanced technical analyses and newly developed digital visualisation tools.
