Frans Hals

Around 1585 a Protestant family fled Antwerp for Haarlem, in the young Dutch Republic, one of thousands of refugees pushed north by the war with Spain. Among the children was Frans Hals, who spent the rest of his working life painting the merchants, brewers and militia officers of that same booming town.

His breakthrough came in 1616, when Haarlem's Saint George civic guard commissioned him to paint its officers together, a group-portrait tradition Dutch cities used to honor the citizen-soldiers who had helped win their independence. Hals turned the usual stiff lineup into something that looked caught mid-toast, faces flushed, hands loose on sword hilts, built from quick, visible strokes instead of the smooth finish most portraitists favored. The style made him Haarlem's most sought-after painter for two decades, and centuries later painters including Edouard Manet studied that same loose brushwork as a model for catching a live moment on canvas.

Fashion moved on before he did. By the 1650s commissions had dried up, and in 1652 court records show him auctioning his furniture to cover a debt. He spent his final years on a small pension the Haarlem town council granted him in 1664, two years before his death, still painting occasional group portraits for the same kind of civic bodies that had first made his name.