Frans Hals

de Anna Tummers

2013 is officially Frans Hals Year, marking exactly 100 years since the Frans Hals Museum opened its doors. The most important exhibition in this jubilee year is 'Frans Hals: Eye to Eye with Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian', in which key works by Frans Hals are presented amid paintings by such famed colleagues as Titian, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Jordaens and Rubens. In this eponymous publication, all the works in the exhibition are presented side by side, enabling the reader to compare the masterpieces and see how the artists inspired one another. These unique confrontations of master painters are essential to an understanding of seventeenth-century art. Famous painters, after all, often produced their works in response to one another, with the aim of surpassing the other and creating something unique. (Exhibition: Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands (23.3.-28.7.2013)).