I love these group portraits. It's was common for each member of the guild, or military unit, or civic committee to commission these huge portraits and each member would pay a fair share. Generally an equal share with all others, and most artists, like Hals in this painting, took pains to give everyone equal treatment - no persons are given more emphasis over any others.
Rembrandt's painting, "The Nightwatch", was composed as a painting first, and a portrait commission second. Rembrandt assembled all the members of the the particular civic guard and "cast" them into a dramatic moment in a larger narrative, and consequently, some members were cast into very low-level, shadowed, and merely supportive figures, while the main individuals were set aglow with supernal light. Needless to say, not everyone paid the same "fair share" for the commission. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/The_Nightwatch_by_Rembrandt.jpg But what I love about "Banquet of Officers" is the wonderful sense of a larger zigzag composition of the heads and collars, like a "flock" of gulls dipping and diving above some tasty part of the ocean. And the larger zigzag echoes on that bigger scale with Hals own handling and application of paint on the level where the images are lost in the artistry of paint - all very lively and eccentric. Good stuff. *** --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Yifu" <yifuxero@...> wrote: > > Banquet of Officers at the St. Hadrian Civ Guard Company, 1627; by Frans Hals > > http://www.museumsyndicate.com/images/4/31771.jpg >
