One of the greatest portrait-painters of all time, the Dutch artist Frans Hals (c.1580-1666) remains a mysterious personality, whose life can be traced only in outline but whose prolific output suggests various possibilities for interpretation. Looking in detail at a succession of Hals's most accomplished and intriguing portraits, this film draws the viewer in to a complex appreciation of his art and its place in the social and cultural context of his times. His mastery of the alla prima technique (painting direct on to the canvas without making preliminary drawings or gradually building up the painted surface) is demonstrated by focusing on brushstroke details, eloquently revealing why he was so admired by later artists as diverse as Reynolds and Van Gogh. Hals's popular reputation rests on the so-called Laughing Cavalier and other exuberant individual portraits, but his emotional range is seen here to be far wider. This film sheds new light on an artist who has traditionally been perhaps the most popular but least well understood of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century.