Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum, New York - The Arts Desk | reviews, news, interviews

If one comes away with any certainty from the New York exhibition Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum (until 10 October) it is that the Golden Age Dutch master (1582/3-1666) keenly understood and sympathised with his fellow human beings. Whether Hals (beloved of Courbet, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Whistler and Sargent) was painting drunks and prostitutes in tavern scenes, humble fisher folk, or burghers and intellectuals and their wives, he unerringly captured the essence of his sitters. There is little sentimentalisation or disparagement in his work.

Painting from nature, he told the truth as he saw it. If a subject has a trace of pride, fecklessness or overweening gravitas, Hals allows it, but his generosity invariably shines through. Above all, he is fair.

Hals was not an anthropologist or much of a social commentator, but there is extraordinary psychological acuity in the work - he is, perhaps, the most insightful of all portraitists, more so than his revered countryman Van Dyck. His shrewdness is commensurate with the face of the avuncular-looking man with kindly eyes and a prominent beak who painted himself into The Officers and Sub-Alterns of the Saint George Civic Guard (1639, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem). He had served with different branches of this militia from 1612 to 1624 at the time he was establishing himself as a painter in Haarlem; and from 1616 to 1625 he was associated with an amateur dramatic society, the Vine Tendrils.