Haarlem showstoppers.
Was Frans Hals a Catholic or a Protestant? It’s a question which Steven Nadler fretted about in The Portraitist: Frans Hals and His World, which he brought out last year with the University of Chicago Press. Hals’s father had been raised in the Faith, and young Frans is likely to have received baptism at the hands of a Catholic priest. His marriage to his first wife only appears in the Haarlem city registers, rather than in any Protestant record books, suggesting it was a Catholic service. However, pragmatism triumphed in the end.
