Laughing Fisherboy

Frans Hals painted this laughing boy around 1628, in the young Dutch Republic where a newly prosperous merchant class wanted lively pictures for the home. Fishing was part of that prosperity, the herring catch off the coast near Haarlem, where Hals worked, and he made a small group of grinning fisher children set against the dunes, a basket carried on the back and the sea behind. It was a fairly new kind of subject, ordinary working children caught mid-laugh rather than stiffly posed. He worked fast and loose, and that speed is exactly what collectors came to prize in him, then and now.