The Portraitist cover art

The Portraitist

Frans Hals and His World

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Portraitist

By: Steven M. Nadler
Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the listener into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age.

Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.

Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.

Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

©2022 The University of Chicago (P)2023 Tantor
Art Art & Literature Artists, Architects & Photographers

Listeners also enjoyed...

Belonging and Betrayal cover art
The Da Vinci Women cover art
The House of Fragile Things cover art
Forgotten Women cover art
The Grandees cover art
Last Light cover art
The China Collectors cover art
Mr Horniman's Walrus cover art
Orphans of Empire cover art
"Our Crowd" cover art
The Judgment of Paris cover art
Salvador Dalí cover art
From Life cover art
The Burgundians cover art
Charles Darwin cover art
Mr Five Per Cent cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Great audiobook about a topic I knew nothing about. Great depth in the research and superbly narrated.

Great insight.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.