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- Frans Hals (1582/3 - 1666)
- The Laughing Cavalier
- Netherlands
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- Date: 1624
- Object Type: Painting
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Image size: 83 x 67.3 cm
- Object size: 112.5 x 98 x 9 cm
- Inv: P84
- Location: This Object is currently on short term loan
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- Description
- Provenance
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- Further Reading
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- A highlight of Hals’s career, this portrait stands apart in its lively immediacy and in the intricacy of the costume depicted. Portrayed at age twenty-six, the life-size sitter wears the latest French fashions accessible only to the Dutch elite. His beautifully embroidered doublet is decorated with emblems associated with fortune, strength, love and virtue. He is most likely a bachelor due to his dashing attire and left-facing orientation (in paired portraits of married couples, men usually turned rightward to face their wives). The picture was given its catchy title around 1888 and, despite the fact that the sitter is neither laughing nor a ‘cavalier’, it has never been renamed.