Frans Hals (ca. 1581-1666) is one of the most admired masters of the great age of Dutch painting because of the spontaneity of his style and the vitality of his portrayals.

Frans Hals was probably born in Antwerp. It is likely that his parents were among the Protestants who fled from Catholic Flanders to the northern Netherlands after the Spanish took Antwerp in 1585. The earliest evidence of the presence of the Hals family in Haarlem is the record of the baptism in 1591 of Frans's brother, Dirck Hals, who also became a painter.

Between 1600 and 1603 Hals was a pupil of the Haarlem mannerist painter Karel van Mander. In 1610 Hals became a member of the Haarlem painters' guild. His earliest surviving dated portrait, of Jacobus Zaffius, is dated 1611. There must have been earlier works that either have not come down to us or have not yet been identified. Some scholars...