Happiness, the comedic, and the sublime

In the work of Frans Hals (1582–1666), people laugh, abundantly. Yet, all these artfully, convincingly represented laughing people are not effective in making us laugh, as would be the case in different genres of the comic or the comical. In that context Hals’ laughing faces would have been ‘comic prompts’. Yet they are not, so what did, and do they do? The answer to this question can be sensed and tested by revisiting one of Hals’ more famous paintings: Young man and woman in an inn, from 1623, formerly known as Jonker Ramp and his sweetheart (see figure 9). Of late we have seen a shift in the scholarly analysis of works such as this; a shift that can be specified as a turn away from a moralizing-didactic approach and toward a festive or celebratory one, which affects the audience rather than teaching them something. The scholarly attraction of the moralizing approach is that it can specify so easily, or so it seems, what paintings mean. Even in some of the studies that acknowledge the festive and celebrating character of seventeenth-century Dutch art, one can trace the powerful echo of what most nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars would contend: that it always carried, even if ambiguously, a moralizing message. For instance, Barbara Haeger's paradigmatic reading of this painting by Hals held that it did not depict the prodigal son—a contention brought forward by others— but carried the message that the world can be enjoyed only if we restrict our passions, avoid frivolous places and company, and shun especially the excessive use of alcohol. Likewise, Gerlinde Lutke Notarp, in her study on the iconography of tempers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, noted that despite all the joy and exuberance, in the end such iconography is only meant to moralize and warn the audience against excess.

I find these moralizing readings, when presented as the end result of any meaning-making process, unconvincing. They are so, firstly, for historical reasons, as has been brought forward in Anna Tummers’ catalogue, Celebrating in the Golden Age, in an evident response also to the powerful echoes of Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches from 1987.