NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the most important collection of paintings in America by the celebrated Dutch artist Frans Hals (1582/83-1666), whose portraits and genre scenes were famous in his lifetime for their immediacy and dazzling brushwork. Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum—on view from July 26, through October 10, 2011—presents 13 paintings by Hals, including two lent from private collections, and several works by other Netherlandish masters. Frans Hals is one of the most familiar and accessible of the Old Master painters. His name is second only to Rembrandt’s in The Netherlands and equals Vermeer’s in its evocation of the Golden Age of Dutch art. After falling out of favor in the 18th century, Hals’s work was championed from the 1860s onward by Realist and Impressionist masters such as Courbet, Manet, and Sargent, and collected by several of the