Claes Hals

For a long time the old sources could not place Claes Hals correctly even in his own family. Arnold Houbraken, the early 18th-century biographer of Dutch painters, called him a grandson of Frans Hals. He was in fact a son, born in Haarlem in 1628 to Frans and his second wife, Lysbeth Reyniers. The confusion is easy to understand, since his half-brother Harmen was 17 years older and several of the Hals sons painted.

Claes learned the trade in his father's workshop, alongside Pieter van Roestraten, a pupil who later married Claes's sister Adriaentje. He took the craft from that studio more than its subjects. Frans was above all a portraitist, while Claes turned far more often to landscapes, village scenes, views of Haarlem streets and small scenes of everyday life.

In 1655 he married a well-off widow from Haaksbergen, a village in the east of the country, and the couple had no children. His pictures are still sometimes confused with those of Claes Molenaer, another Haarlem painter of village scenes who shared his first name. He died in his home town in 1686.