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RCEWA – Portrait of a Lady by

Statement of the Expert Adviser to the Secretary of State that the painting meets Waverley criterion two.

Further Information

The ‘Applicant’s statement’ and the ‘Note of Case History’ are available on the Arts Council Website: www.artscouncil.org.uk/reviewing-committee-case-hearings

Please note that images and appendices referenced are not reproduced.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Brief Description of item(s)

Frans Hals (1582/3–1666) Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Cunera van Baersdorp, 1600–1640) c.1625 Oil on canvas, 116.7 x 91.5 cm

Condition: the lined canvas appears to have a large triangular inlay extending from the top edge, to the left of the sitter’s head. This could be a tear and/or fold repair, or an insert of new canvas. The painting appears to have been conserved and is in good condition. There are numerous areas of restoration, particularly in the background and substantial in places. Visually these areas of restoration are very good.

2. Context

Provenance: By inheritance via the 9th child (Josijntje) of Michiel de Wael and the sitter, Cunera van Baersdorp, to Kornelis Johannes de Vriese (1768–1803), in whose collection it was seen and described by the lawyer and antiquarian Jacobus Scheltema (1767– 1835), who probably bought it (together with its pendant) after the death of Kornelis Johannes de Vriese; sale Hendrik Adriaan van den Heuvel et al. (supplementary, anonymous part, including works brought in by Jacobus Scheltema), Utrecht, 27 June 1825 and following days (Lugt 10935), lot 153 (together with its pendant); Dealer C. Sedelmeyer, (catalogue 1899, no.19); Marquis de Ganay, Paris; dealer Duveen, New York; Sir Ernest Joseph Cassel (1852–1921); thence by descent.

Exhibitions: , Eugene Slatter, Masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish painting : loan exhibition in memory of Ralph Warner, 1949, no.10 , , Drie eeuwen portret in Nederland: 1500–1800, 1952, no.47 London, , Dutch pictures 1450-1750, 1952–53, no.64

Selected literature: S. Slive, Frans Hals, 3 vols., London 1970–74, vol. 3, p.64, no.120; C. Grimm, Frans Hals, The Complete Work, New York 1990, no.50; M. de Winkel, ‘Frans Hals’s Portraits of Michiel de Wael and Cunera van Baersdorp and of Jan de Wael and Aeltje Dircksdr. Pater indentified’, in: Face Book: Studies on Dutch and Flemish Portraiture of the 16th–18th Centuries, Liber Amicorum Presented to Rudolf E.O. Ekkart on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, Leiden 2012, pp.141–50.

3. Waverley criteria

This painting meets Waverley criterion 2 because it is a rare example of a particularly fine and characteristic life-size, three-quarter-length portrait by Frans Hals, widely acknowledged to be one of the most important portrait painters in Western art.

DETAILED CASE

1. Detailed description of item(s) if more than in Executive summary, and any comments.

Although the painting is officially described in these papers as Portrait of a Lady, it is important to note here that the sitter has in fact been identified in an article published by Marieke de Winkel in 2012. De Winkel convincingly established that she represents Cunera van Baersdorp (1600–1640), while she was also able to reconstruct the painting’s provenance going back to the family of the sitter. Cunera van Baersdorp was the wife of the prominent merchant Michiel de Wael (1596–1659), who was also painted by Frans Hals in a picture now preserved at the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati (Fig.1). Michiel de Wael is also one of the main figures portrayed in Frans Hals’s Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Guard of Haarlem (c.1627; , Haarlem; Fig.2). This identification made it possible to establish with certainty that the Cincinnati portrait is the pendant of the painting under discussion here. They were most probably painted to commemorate the marriage of Michiel de Wael and Cunera van Baersdorp in 1625.

Although De Winkel’s article reconstructs the picture’s provenance in the running text of her article, above it is for the first time summed up in its conventional form, making it more readily understandable how the painting’s provenance goes back to the family of the sitter.

2. Detailed explanation of the outstanding significance of the item(s).

Cunera van Baersdorp’s pose echoes that of her husband (Fig. 1), who also has his left arm akimbo. Her right arm hangs down beside her body and she holds her gloves between two fingers. The imitation or mirroring of gestures is a device that Hals frequently employed in pendant portraits to great effect, with a daring that makes him stand apart from his fellow portrait painters. Cunera van Baersdorp is wearing the typical dress of a married woman of the civic elite: a vlieger, consisting of an ample overgown of flowered velvet (caffa) over a skirt and a borst (stomacher) embroidered with coiling stems and birds in black silk on a satin ground. These details are depicted in exquisite detail but without ever looking stiff, thanks to Frans Hals’s unique bravura brushwork. Especially the stomacher, but also the exact shape of her cap, can be specifically dated to the middle of the , as not long after the appearance of both changed significantly. Michiel de Wael was a successful merchant in Haarlem, where he owned two breweries and also served as captain in the St George civic guard company (between 1625 and 1637) and as its treasurer from 1655 to 1657. He married Cunera van Baersdorp in St Bavo’s Church in Haarlem on 22 April 1625, and it would make perfect sense for them to have commissioned their portraits to mark the occasion. Less is known about Cunera van Baersdorp, but we do know that she was born in Leiden in 1600 as a younger daughter of the Leiden burgomaster Jan Jansz van Baersdorp and Dirckje Claesdr van Heemskerck. Her mother was born in Amsterdam and came from an influential and cultured family. After the death of her father in 1614, the mother and her children, among them Cunera, moved back to Amsterdam. Cunera and Michiel de Wael had 10 children, although only three of them survived into adulthood. The portrait confirms how Hals received commissions from the most prominent citizens of the .

The portrait was made when Frans Hals was at the height of his powers and popularity, and its exceptional attraction partly derives from the unorthodox pose; it is the only existing portrait by Hals showing a lady with her arm akimbo, a pose we find in many male portraits by Hals and is something of a trademark of the painter. The pose is in fact highly unusual in female portraits throughout the seventeenth century. Moreover, she wears a resplendent dress, with the various subtle gradations in the blacks of the costume unusually well preserved. In that respect she is perhaps only matched by a three-quarter-length portrait of a woman in the in the United States (Fig.5 below).

Although there are some outstanding works by Frans Hals in British collections, there is only one other three-quarter-length female portrait in a British public collection (Fig.3). There is another, privately owned, female three-quarter-length in the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth House, Derbyshire (Fig.4).