Frans Hals usually painted life-size portraits, but he also made a number of tiny likenesses. Among the loans from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo collection is a painting hardly bigger than a sheet of paper, in which Hals’s celebrated brushwork, loose and suggestive, is scaled down to breathtaking effect. It is a masterpiece of virtuosity and intensity. In this lecture, Walsh surveys the careers of Hals and his competitors.

Recorded on Friday, February 20, 2015, 1:30 pm.

1. Abraham Bloemaert’s Deluge and the Dawn of the Golden Age
2. Jan Steen’s Card Players and Dutch Genre Painting
3. Jacob van Ruisdael’s Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede and Dutch Landscape
4. The Night Watch: Rembrandt, Group Portraiture, and Dutch History
5. Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Preacher: Virtuosity and the Rough Style
6. Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft: The Prose and Poetry of View Painting

In January and February 2015, John Walsh offered a series of six lectures that explores the Golden Age of Dutch art.

John Walsh, B.A. 1961, is Director Emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and a specialist in Dutch paintings. He was a paintings curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught history of art courses at Columbia and Harvard and currently teaches at Yale.