Art Appreciation Lecture Series 2015 Meet the Masters: Highlights from the Scottish National Gallery

Frans Hals: Verdonck Michael Hill 1 / 2 April 2015

Lecture summary: made a career portraying men and women of the middle and upper classes. Verdonck, however, is no bourgeois man, but a dolt destined for the poorhouse. We know this because of a contemporary print made after Hals’s painting, and because of the way Hals observed genre conventions of low subjects. That Hals nevertheless invested life in such an abject man – and in others like him – is the one of the wonders of art history.

Slide list: 1. Frans Hals, Verdonck, 1627, Nat Gall of Scotland 2. Frans Hals, Nurse and Child, 1620, 3. Hals, Portrait of a Woman aged 60,1633, Washington 4. Hals Regentesses of Old Men’s Home, 1663, , Frans Hals Mus 5. Hals, , 1624, Wallace coll. 6. Hals, Abraham Massa, 1626, Toronto 7. Hals, Willem Coenraetsz Coymans, 1645, Washington 8. Hals, Man with Slouch Hat, 1663 9. Jan van der Velde II, Verdonck, after Hals, engraving 10. Frans Hals, Johannes Acronius, 1927, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin 11. Jan van der Velde II, Johannes Acronius after Hals, c. 1627 12. Hals, Regents of St Elizabeth Hospital (workhouse), 1641, Haarlem, Frans Hals Mus 13. Frans Hals, Pickled Herring, c. 1628 14. Hals, The Merry Drinker, 1620s, Amsterdam 15. Hals, Gipsy Girl, 1628, Louvre 16. Hals, , 1630s, Berlin

Reference: Seymour Slive, ed., Frans Hals, Munich: Presel Verlag, 1989 Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, New York: Harry Abrams, 1990 Hessel Miedema, “Realism and Comic Mode: The Peasant”, Simiolus: Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 9 n. 4 (1977), 205-219 Svetlana Alpers, “Taking Pictures Seriously: A reply to Hessel Miedema”, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 10, n. 1 (1978-79), 46-50.

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