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Home , Frans Hals, Frans Hals Museum, Meagre Company

Case 16 2010-11 : A painting by , Family Portrait in a Landscape

Expert Adviser’s Statement

Reviewing Committee Secretary’s note: Please note that the illustrations referred to have not been reproduced on the MLA website

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Frans Hals (ca.1582/3-1666) and (1597-1664) Family Portrait in a Landscape, ca. 1621-22, 1628 Signed with monogram, left: FH ; signed and dated, lower left: S. de Bray / 16(2)8 Oil on canvas, 151 x 163.6 cm

CONDITION The painting is in very good condition overall. The canvas has been lined. There are no significant losses to the paint layer, just some scattered areas of retouching most notable in the apron of the girl at lower left. The varnish layer is somewhat discoloured.

PROVENANCE [possibly] sale J. de Nooy, (de Nooy), 30 April 1811, lot 7 (‘De Portraiten van negen Personen ten voeten uit, zijnde een Heer en Dame, met Kinderen van verschillende groote, allen in een bevallige Houding, en een der beste stukken’ [‘The Portraits of nine Persons, full length, a Man and a Woman, with Children of varying sizes, all in attractive poses, and one of the best pieces (of the artist)’]; 59 x 65 duim [c. 151.8 x 167.3 cm]) Sale J. A. Bennet, Leiden (van der Hoek), 10 April 1829, lot 57 (fl. 45, bought in) Collection Gustavus William Hamilton-Russell, 9th Viscount Boyne (1864– 1942), Bridgnorth, Shropshire (by 1929) On extended loan to the National Museums and Galleries of Wales (1971- 2004)

EXHIBITIONS , Royal Academy, Exhibition of Dutch Art 1450-1900 , 1929, no. 369 Brussels, Musée des Beaux-Arts, et son temps , 1971, no. 43a Washington, of Art; London, Royal Academy; and Haarlem, , Frans Hals , 1989-90, no. 10, pp. 156-160 (exhibited London and Haarlem only)

LITERATURE C. Hofstede de Groot. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century . 8 vols Translated by Edward G. Hawke. (London, 1908-27), vol. 3 (1910), p. 131 no. 444 C. Hofstede de Groot, ‘Twee terruggevonden Schilderijen door Frans Hals’, Oud Holland 39 (1921), pp. 65-68 Seymour Slive, ‘A Proposed Reconstruction of a Family Portrait by Frans Hals’, in Miscellanea I. Q. van Regteren Altena ( 1969), pp. 114- 116 Gregory Martin, ‘The Inventive Genius of Frans Hals’, Apollo 94 (1971), p. 243 Seymour Slive, Frans Hals , 3 vols (London 1970-74), vol. 1 (1970), pp. 61-66; vol. 3 (1974), pp. 10-11, no. 15 Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: Das Gesamtwerk (Stuttgart and Zurich, 1989), pp. 61-62, 119-121, 272 no. 11

The above-named painting, Family Portrait in a Landscape by Frans Hals and Salomon de Bray, meets Waverly criteria 2 and 3. It is the earliest of the very few (four) family portraits Hals painted, a sparkling demonstration of bravura brushwork and an innovative and remarkably informal take on the traditional group portrait. The conspicuous addition to the painting by Hals’ colleague Salomon de Bray (the figure of the youngest child at lower left) is a fascinating instance of artistic collaboration—or rather, intervention—and a testament to the contemporary regard for portraiture as a lively, dynamic record of individuals and relationships. Frans Hals (ca.1582/3-1666) and Salomon de Bray (1597-1664) Family Portrait in a Landscape, ca. 1621-22, 1628 Signed with monogram, left: FH ; signed and dated, lower left: S. de Bray / 16(2)8 Oil on canvas, 151 x 163.6 cm

DETAILED CASE

Born probably in , Frans Hals arrived in Haarlem as a boy and spent his entire career in the city. Apart from a handful of genre paintings produced mostly in the 1610s and , he was principally active as a portrait painter. Hals’s portraits, both individual and group, have an immediacy and brilliance that bring his sitters to life in a way previously unknown in Netherlandish painting. Informal poses, spontaneous interactions and a sense of unfinished movement animate his compositions, enhanced by a rapid alla prima technique and loose brushstrokes that capture the fleeting effects of light on form. Hals’s group portraits—among them his remarkable portrayals of various civic guard companies and the governors of Haarlem’s charitable institutions—are among the most innovative of their kind, and his fluent, unbridled brushwork had a profound impact on painters of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Family Portrait in a Landscape depicts a man and woman seated on the ground before a thicket of trees, surrounded by a tight cluster of seven children. The figures are refreshingly animated, thanks to their relaxed, informal poses, and the varied glances, gestures and expressions that do not connect, but dart speedily around the composition. Family Portrait in a Landscape is the earliest of Hals’s four family portraits, probably painted about 1621-22. 1 In terms of style and general conception, it is quite similar to his dynamic double portrait of and Beatrix van der Laen, painted in about 1622 (Amsterdam, ). It has been observed that the composition of the Family Portrait in a Landscape is cramped and a bit staid, but it is important to realize that the canvas has undergone two major alterations since it left Hals’s studio. In 1628, the youngest child depicted here, a cheerful little girl plopped in the lower left corner like a discarded doll, was added to the painting by Hals’s Haarlem colleague Salomon de Bray. Although Hals did occasionally collaborate with other painters, 2 it is evident from the signature and date here

1 Others are in the (c. 1635; oil on canvas, 113 x 93.4 cm), The National Gallery, London (c. 1647-50; oil on canvas, 148.5 x 251 cm ), and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid (c. 1648; oil on canvas, 202 x 285 cm) 2 The background in the Cincinnati family portrait has been attributed to the landscape painter Pieter de Molijn; The ‘’, a portrait of an Amsterdam civic guard company, was begun by Hals but completed by Pieter (on the sole of the girl’s shoe) that de Bray added this figure well after the main portrait was completed. He made little attempt to accommodate his habitually polished style to Hals’s fluent brushwork. It was actually not uncommon for a later artist to update a portrait by sprucing up costumes, or by adding or deleting family members as the need arose. In this instance it was surely done because the child was born after the painting was finished, but why Hals himself—still very much active in Haarlem—was not approached to make the addition is not known. It may have been for purely pragmatic reasons. Hals was not always the most cooperative when it came to completing commissions; indeed, in the early 1630s, after waiting over three years for him to produce the group portrait they had commissioned and paid for, officers of the Amsterdam Voetboogsdoelen (crossbowmen’s civic guard) were forced to find another artist to finish the work. A more significant change concerns the format of the picture. The composition was originally much broader (and possibly a bit taller), and included the likenesses of at least three other family members to the right. In 1969, Slive identified a painting of Three children with a goat cart in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, as the right-hand portion of Hals’s large composition (fig. 1). A proposed reconstruction uniting the two portions shows that the landscape backgrounds match up precisely, and that the incomplete glances and gestures of the figures in the present painting are very logically answered by the addition of this second group of figures (fig. 2). Grimm has conjectured that the original canvas was larger still, with an additional figure at the centre and three more at the far right, but his proposal has found little support. 3 It is not known precisely when the canvas was cut apart. The earliest history of Family Portrait in a Landscape is not known—the first mention of the picture is in the early nineteenth century—and the sitters have not yet been identified. If, as seems likely, the portrait can be identified with the painting that appeared in the de Nooy sale in Haarlem in 1811 (see Provenance ), the two halves of the picture were already separated by that date. Just a few days before the de Nooy sale, a painting of ‘two [sic] young children in a little wagon, with a goat in front’ [‘Twee Kindertjes in een Wagentje, met een Bok daarvoor’] was included in anonymous sale also in Haarlem. This brief description roughly corresponds to the painting now in Brussels. Both paintings were in the collection of the Leiden physicist J. A. Bennet, and were apparently separated following the sale of his collection in 1829. It is not

Codde; and there are documented collaborations with Willem Buytewech and the painter Claes van Heussen. 3 Grimm 1989, pp. 119-121. Examination of the Brussels canvas as part of the painting’s current restoration has thus far found no trace of the additional figures that might support Grimm’s thesis (communication from Liesbeth De Belie). known when or from where the painting entered the collection of the Viscounts Boyne.

As one might expect, there are a number of paintings by Frans Hals in public and private collections throughout the UK. The National Gallery owns six portraits of individuals, as well as the Family Portrait of about 1647-50 and Young Man holding a Skull , painted in about 1626-28. There are also paintings by Hals in the ( The ‘’ , 1624); (1); Guildhall Art Gallery, Samuel Collection ( The Merry Lute Player , c. 1624-28); The Barber Institute, Birmingham (1); , Cambridge (1); National Gallery of Scotland (3); Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (1); and Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford (1). Among the more significant works in private collections are paintings at Chatsworth House (2) and in the (1). Ranging in date from about 1611 (Birmingham, Chatsworth) to the (Oxford), they cover the entire span of the artist’s career, but with the exception of those noted, are all portraits of individuals. Of the few works by Salomon de Bray in the UK, his portrait of The twins Clara and Albert de Bray of about 1648 (, on loan to NG Scotland) is most closely related to his depiction of the young girl in the Family Portrait . Family Portrait in a Landscape is an important work by one of the most innovative and influential Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. Hals’s fast and fluid brushwork—so brilliantly in evidence here—captures the likenesses of his subjects with engaging vivacity. Although there are several paintings by Hals in public and private collections throughout the UK, Family Portrait in a Landscape would add a unique facet to the presentation of his work in this country. It represents an early foray into the dynamics of group portraiture, executed just as the artist was creating his most remarkably vivid civic guard portraits—all of which are permanently housed in museums in the . While it stands undeniably strong on its aesthetic merits, the painting is also a fascinating and unusual palimpsest of the sorts of alterations and modifications that a painting can undergo.