Frans Hals painted the wealthiest citizens of Holland, yet in 1652 the authorities seized his mattresses, an armoire, a table, and five paintings to settle a debt to a baker. This episode reconstructs the life of the Dutch Golden Age master, from his family's flight from Antwerp to Haarlem, through his early job restoring confiscated Catholic art for the city council, to the 1616 militia banquet portrait that made his subjects look like they were breathing while competitors painted frozen statues.

We dismantle the centuries-old myth of the drunken wife-beater, a case of mistaken identity with a weaver of the same name, and explore his real life as a devoted father of many children who stubbornly refused to travel to clients, even walking away from a lucrative Amsterdam commission. Modern X-ray fluorescence and infrared imaging reveal that h ...