Frans Hals Connoisseurship

Of all seventeenth-century Dutch painters, Frans Hals is the most controversial in as far as the exact scope of his oeuvre is concerned. The most prominent twentieth-century Hals experts, Harvard Professor Seymour Slive (1920–2014) and his German peer Professor Claus Grimm (born 1940) disagreed about no less than a third of Hals’s oeuvre. Moreover, some of the fiercest public debates and legal battles about attributions in this field concern paintings in the style of Frans Hals. This chapter provides an overview of the evolving insights in this field, both in theory and in practice.