Dave Hickey, a maverick art historian and critic who lives in Las Vegas and who likes to provoke, compares Rockwell to Hogarth, Vermeer and Frans Hals.

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The exhibition, officially titled Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis at the de Young also features 34 other paintings by Dutch Golden Age masters, including works by Rembrandt, Peiter Claesz, Jacob van Ruisdael and Frans Hals.

BBC: Going Dutch in San Francisco

Frans Hals, with vivacious portraits, and Jacob van Ruisdael, with grand yet somehow confiding landscapes, are shown at their best, as is Jan Steen, if, unlike me, you relish his over-the-top bawdry.

NEWYORKER: New Amsterdam

Sotheby's, for example, has separated a husband-and-wife pair of portraits by Frans Hals in the hope that they will make more apart than together.

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