Frans Hals Museum From 11 November Seldom have more humorous paintings been made than in the Dutch Golden Age. Prosperity and a new buying public encouraged painters to think up an enormous variety of visual jokes. Naughty children, stupid peasants, foolish dandies and drunkards, quack doctors, pimps and procuresses, lazy serving maids and lusty ladies–they appear in large numbers in Golden Age masterpieces. The humour implicit in the works would have been evident to contemporary viewers. Frans Hals is often called ‘the master of the laugh’. More than any other painter in the Golden Age, he was able to bring a vitality to his portraits that made it appear as if his models could just step out of the past into the present. Hals was one of the few painters in the seventeenth century who dared portray his figures – often common folk – with a hearty laugh and bared teeth. Merriment and jokes are prominent features in his genre paintings...