Portraitist

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor, the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and affiliate professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die; Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam; A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age; Spinoza: A Life, Second Edition, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award; and Rembrandt's Jews, which was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author, with his son Ben Nadler, of the graphic book Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction1. Exile2. Haarlem3. Master Painter4. Citizen Hals5. In a Rough Manner6. "Very Boldly Done after Life"7. Debts and Disputes8. Pandemics9. "A Pleasing, Good and Sincere Peace"10. DenouementAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesIndex

"Little is known about the Dutch painter Frans Hals: no letters or diaries survive, and the only contemporary documents are unrevealing. But Nadler manages to construct a satisfying quasi-biography by using the milieu of seventeenth-century Haarlem. . . . Though Hals has long been overshadowed by his contemporary Rembrandt, Nadler demonstrates why his peers held him to be 'the modern painter par excellence.'"