A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age.      Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.   Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter’s animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.   Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals’s life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.   "Little is known about the Dutch painter Frans Hals: no letters or diaries survive, and the only contemporary documents are unrevealing. But Nadler manages to construct a satisfying quasi-biography by using the milieu of seventeenth-century Haarlem. . . . Though Hals has long been overshadowed by his contemporary Rembrandt, Nadler demonstrates why his peers held him to be 'the modern painter par excellence.'" ― New Yorker “Hals may have become famous for his lifelike portraits, but the only way to depict his own life, Nadler suggests in The Portraitist , is to paint a picture of the social world in which he was embedded. As Nadler acknowledges, this is a book whose subject ‘all too often . . . disappear[s] from view.’” ― New York Review of Books "Nadler laments the absence of biographical material about Hals, but does a wonderful job of bringing the social context of his art to life in intricate and lively detail. In so doing, he brings this incomparable artist to life as well." ― Literary Review Named one of the best books of 2022. ― New Yorker "Splendid." -- Ian Buruma ― Times Literary Supplement "In The Portraitist , [Nadler] closes in on his subject, as it were. By sketching the artistic, social, political and religious milieus and the elite subjects who came to Hals for portraits and civic guard pieces, Nadler sketches a sharp picture of the politically turbulent first half of the seventeenth century and Hals’ position therein. This results in a quasi-biography which brings Hals to life in a refined way." ― NRC Handelsblad "Nadler’s biography of Frans Hals discusses the life and legacy of the Dutch 17th-century painter against the backdrop of his thriving adopted city of Haarlem, delving into the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds of the time." ― The Art Newspaper "[ The Portraitist ] is stylistically much like a portrait by the master: broadly sweeping strokes situate the geopolitical context and are embellished by microhistorical details relating to the art market and to Hals’s family and his patrons. The paintings serve as focal points along the way. Though much about Hals’s life remains unknown, Nadler’s portrait of the age in which he worked is clearly and astutely evoked. . . . Recommended." ― Choice "Nadler is particularly adept at illuminating the details of the lives of Hals’s sitters and how they connect to the ebbs and flows of religious power struggles, inside and outside the Dutch Republic. The resulting image is one of a flexible artist willing to work for individuals of different faiths. At the same time, Nadler casts Hals as an artist who had to navigate a complex, and frequently shifting, religious environment in a never-ending search for commissions and sales. Nadler’s illumination of Hals’s network is particularly useful in the various passages related to the painter’s family. Nadler expertly gathers information about Hals’s grandparents, parents, and their relations in Antwerp before the young Hals relocated to Haarlem by 1591. . . . Nadler’s book is an informative volume crafted in engaging prose. " ― Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews "Framed by the religious upheavals of the era, situated solidly in the art world of the Dutch Republic, and defining Hals’ accomplishments, Nadler’s accessible and convincing portrait presents a politically pliant and religiously ambiguous man with loose narrative brushstrokes similar to those used by the genius himself." ― Booklist “Nadler has made 17th-century Holland his own special province. This polymath historian of philosophy has already built onto his expertise about Spinoza and Descartes with truly interdisciplinary studies, including  Rembrandt’s Jews  and Menasseh Ben Israel