Book excerpt: "In the seventeenth century some of the most advanced painting in Europe was produced in the Netherlands. Rembrandt dominated the radical progress of painting in Amsterdam, and Vermeer did so in Delft. Frans Hals led the vanguard in Haarlem where he painted some of the most animated, individualized portraits of the era, or of any era, for that matter. Now, Steven Nadler has produced the first biography of this elusive Dutch artist to be published in many years. Hals left behind no letters or other personal papers, though luckily a wealth of other sources offer details of his life and personality. Nadler has fleshed out Hals's biography by casting it against the drama of Holland's revolution against Spanish rule, the acute struggles between Protestantism and Catholicism in the Low Countries, and the rise of Holland as a colonial power and center of industry and commerce. The result is an authoritative picture of Hals and life in his studio and a robust work of seventeenth-century social and cultural history. Nadler serves up the sights, smells, and sounds of life in Haarlem. He takes us into cloth factories, taverns, busy studios, and bustling markets. He takes us behind the scenes of the picture trade. He leads us along the newly invented shorelines where weavers laid out large, billowing lengths of cloth to bleach in the sun. He takes us into new Protestant churches and into old Catholic ones. We witness the bloody politics of the long Reformation and the 1635 plague that devastated the Dutch Republic. What emerges is a deftly written story of a complex artist and the tumultuous world he inhabited. Accented with images of life in seventeenth-century Holland and a color gallery of works by Hals and his peers, The Portraitist is a work of great charm and importance and will stand as the first full biography of one of Europe's most important artists for many years"--