Every painter in the exhibit entitled The Age of Rembrandt, which is currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is essential to the history of western art. Indeed the exhibit itself is a kind of compendious catalog of 17th century Holland's true greatness. The exhibit shows every Dutch painting that the museum possesses from the time of Rembrandt, so the art is out of this world.

An aspect of the exhibit I've never seen before, though, is the attention it pays to the wealthy contributors who in the last century and a half amassed all these paintings. If you like Vermeer, you'll find the reason his painting "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" is in the Met's collection is that a man named Henry G. Marquand gave it to the museum. If you care for Vermeer's "Study of a Young Woman," you'll learn about the gift that Mr. And Mrs. Charles Wrightsman made of it to the museum in 1979. Rembrandt? Well, all sorts of people gave paintings by him to the Met. This is interesting because these people are interesting, and by studying them you get a short course in how great art gets preserved and protected, and how it becomes available to a public that would otherwise be unable to see it.

The reason you're here is really the art itself.

You're going to see many very special things in this exhibit, and one of my favorites is Franz Hals. Hals' brushwork is justifiably famous. Every book you read about him, every article, and every museum catalogue at least mentions it, and more often than not a substantial portion of whatever it is you're reading will be devoted to it. His brushwork is famous in part because it appears so savage.

Frans Hals: "Young Man and Woman in an Inn"
(aka "Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart"), 1623

He was a painter quite capable of great care. In the faces of Yonker Ramp and his sweetheart, his brushwork is precise, chiseled and even delicate - at least by Hals' own standards. No pedestrian artist could portray with such skill the emotions that Hals' gives to his subjects, and very often these are fun-loving emotions. Hals painted hilarity better than anyone, and laughter and joy abound in his work.

Elsewhere in his paintings, though, the brushwork seems to splatter and lurch. The clothing that many of his subjects wear appears almost slap-dash, with blurred pigments indicating the way a coat sleeve folds at the elbow when an arm is bent or the manner in which one of those starched Dutch lace collars weaves in and out of itself as it circles the subject's neck. I imagine the brush in Hals' hand literally flying about the canvas, quick and harried by his intensities.