Portrait of a Dutch Family

Perhaps more than any other artist, Frans Hals is responsible for the familiar image of the Dutch as cheerful, industrious, prosperous, and content with the world.

This group portrait, among the few works by Hals with figures on a scale smaller than life, represents a now-unknown Dutch family posed on a stone veranda with an elegant country house in the distance. The family is obviously wealthy, and Hals has painted them in his typical energetic fashion while filling the scene with symbolic references to family life. Roses represent the joys and trials of love, fruit symbolizes fecundity, and the foliage clinging to the architectural backdrop is probably an emblem of fidelity.

Seventeenth-century Dutch artists tended to specialize in a particular genre, such as portraiture or still life, and occasionally collaborated on more complex compositions. In this case the background was painted by another hand, perhaps the landscape specialist Pieter Molijn.