(c. 1581-1666) Flemish-born painter of lively portraits. His work includes the Laughing Cavalier 1624 (Wallace Collection, London), and large groups of military companies, governors of charities, and others (many examples in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands). In the 1620s he experimented with genre scenes.
He settled in Haarlem, where his brother Dirck was born, being trained in the studio of the painter and biographer of art, Karel van Mander, and became, next to Rembrandt, the greatest of the Dutch portrait painters, developing a broad and fluent method of painting, disciplined by great economy of color, with which he inimitably rendered liveliness of expression, as in his Laughing Cavalier. His work comprises the group portraiture of the Military Guilds, composed with remarkable skill to provide variety of interest while paying equal attention to each person represented; individual commissioned portraits; and the studies of Bohemian types which appealed to him (La Bohémienne—Louvre, Hille Bobbe—Berlin). Late works in which he was most penetrating and nearest to Rembrandt were the groups of 1664 depicting the regents, male and female, of the Old Peoples’ Almshouse. He and his wife in old age were inmates of the almshouse which is now the Frans Hals Museum. It contains his great groups and is mainly a memorial
to him, though including other works by Haarlem artists. His seven sons were all minor painters.