Dutch Golden Age painter / SAT 12-2-23 / Stuff in microdots / Boastful Eminem title with the Guinness world record for "most words in a hit single" (1,560) / Loudly lachrymates / Air pollution portmanteau / Constantly posting pictures and news about one's kids on social media

Constructor: Royce Ferguson

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Frans HALS (6A: Dutch Golden Age painter) —

Frans Hals the Elder (UK: /hæls/, US: /hɑːls, hælz, hɑːlz/, Dutch: [frɑns ˈɦɑls]; c. 1582 – 26 August 1666) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, chiefly of individual and group portraits and of genre works, who lived and worked in Haarlem.

Hals played an important role in the evolution of 17th-century group portraiture. He is known for his loose painterly brushwork. [...] Hals is best known for his portraits, mainly of wealthy citizens such as Pieter van den Broecke and Isaac Massa, whom he painted three times. He also painted large group portraits for local civic guards and for the regents of local hospitals. He was a Dutch Golden Age painter who practiced an intimate realism with a radically free approach. His pictures illustrate the various strata of society: banquets or meetings of officers, guildsmen, local councilmen from mayors to clerks, itinerant players and singers, gentlemen, fishwives, and tavern heroes. In his group portraits, such as The Banquet of the Officers of the St Adrian Militia Company in 1627, Hals captures each character in a different manner. The faces are not idealized and are clearly distinguishable, with their personalities revealed in a variety of poses and facial expressions.

Hals was fond of daylight and silvery sheen, while Rembrandt used golden glow effects based upon artificial contrasts of low light in immeasurable gloom. Hals seized a moment in the life of his subjects with rare intuition. What nature displayed in that moment he reproduced thoroughly in a delicate scale of color and with mastery over every form of expression. He became so clever that exact tone, light and shade, and modeling were obtained with a few marked and fluid strokes of the brush. He became a popular portrait painter and painted the wealthy of Haarlem on special occasions. He won many commissions for wedding portraits (the husband is traditionally situated on the left, and the wife situated on the right). His double portrait of the newly married Olycans hang side by side in the Mauritshuis, but many of his wedding portrait pairs have since been split up and are rarely seen together.

Almost destroyed by not knowing what "microdots" were ("Are they like Dippin' Dots?" I naively wondered) (8D: Stuff in microdots). But my salvation came, as it so often does, from OOXTEPLERNON, the God of Crosswordese, who descended from the clouds or rose from the mud or otherwise came from wherever he comes from, and bestowed upon me ... a painter. A painter named HALS (6A: Dutch Golden Age painter). Without HALS, I don't know what would've happened to me. WithHALS I was stuck looking at a "finished NW corner that I did not understand. This is because, if I am admiring your impressive feat, I am way (way) more likely to exclaim "WHAT A BEAUT!" than I am "WHAT A BEAST!" (14A: Statement of admiration after someone's impressive feat). I mean, I'm not likely to exclaim either, but I feel like we've even had a version of "WHAT A BEAUT!" in the puzzle recently (yes, we have), so it seemed highly likely as an answer here. This left me with the mysterious "microdots" ingredient: LUD! Me: "Hmm, well, I don't know what 'microdots' are, so I guess it's plausible I wouldn't know what's in them either ... but LUD!?!? Why would you go HALS / LUD when you could've gone SAMS / MUD!? I do not get it." At some point the world's biggest "D'oh!" came crashing upon my head as I realized "Ohhhhhhhhhh, microdots! Microdots! It's LSD!" (Funny that ACID(S) is also in the grid). And that was that. Disaster averted. I went down to the SE, finished up the last bit ("EASY DOES IT..."), discovered the world's stupidest neologism (SHARENTING—seriously, first time hearing it), and that was that. I wonder if there are any fellow LUDdites out there today. Anyone? Also, for OOXTEPLERNON's Origin Story, see this write-up from 14 years (!) ago.

["There's too much LUD in our microdots! It ain't good for the children!"]