Art: HIDDEN MASTERPIECES: Hals’s Laughing Child

A MASTERPIECE need not lie behind locked doors to be effectively hidden from the public at large. The Laughing Child, one of Frans Hals’s most engaging pictures, hangs on public view the year round in Cincinnati’s Taft Museum. The museum in itself is a small masterpiece of selection and display, should be a mecca for the entire Midwest —yet only about 100 people visit it on an average day. (Out-of-towners automatically head for the more famed Cincinnati Art Museum instead.)

Newspaper Publisher Charles Phelps Taft (half brother of the President) and his wife built their collection to fit the museum when it was still their own home, a gem of early Federal architecture on Cincinnati’s Lytle Park. In 1927 they presented it intact to Cincinnati. The quiet spacious rooms are adorned but not crowded with Duncan Phyfe furniture, 200 Chinese porcelains, a top-rank selection of French Renaissance enamels, and more than 100 canvases, from Hieronymus Bosch to John Singer Sargent, all of extraordinary quality. In fact, Hals’s Laughing Child is only one of a dozen absolute masterpieces in the museum.

Frans Hals has been called a wife-beater, a tosspot, a congenital bankrupt and an angel with a brush. The first three charges rest on the petty court records of Haarlem, Holland, the last on about 300 paintings scattered throughout the world. The court records show a sorry existence, the paintings a radiant one. Hals’s life was both. He fathered 14 children, often went cold and hungry with his brood, died penniless (in 1666) at the age of 86. In good times he would march off to the club, being fond of music, beer and jolly company. His canvases show mainly sunny people, as if reflected in the elbow-polished wood of a tavern table.

Hals’s fellow citizens found him “talented” only, and his latter-day reputation has suffered at the hands of art lecturers, who used to discuss his work as a foothill below the summit that Dutch art reached in Rembrandt. In reality, Hals stands halfway between Rembrandt’s brooding darkness and Rubens’ brilliant dash, also takes his place with them, in retrospect, as one of the best painters that ever lived.