The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World

Steven M. Nadler

Jun 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Paul Heitsch

About this audiobook

A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the listener into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy. Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

About the author

Steven Nadler is a professor of philosophy and director of the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Spinoza: A Life, which won the 2000 Koret Jewish Book Award for biography, and Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind.

Paul Heitsch has been narrating audiobooks since 2011, after having worked as a pianist, composer, recording engineer, producer, and sound designer for many years. His work is often cited for the authenticity he brings to the narrative and characters he portrays, as well as his versatility, and clear, smooth delivery.