Reserve Number: E14 Name: Spitz, Ellen Handler Course: HONR 300 Date Off: End of semester Rosenberg, Jakob and Slive, Seymour . Chapter 4: Frans Hals . Dutch Art and Architecture: 1600-1800 . Rosenberg, Jakob, Slive, S.and ter Kuile, E.H. p. 30-47 . Middlesex, England; Baltimore, MD . Penguin Books . 1966, 1972 . Call Number: ND636.R6 1966 . ISBN: . The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or electronic reproductions of copyrighted materials. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or electronic reproduction of copyrighted materials that is to be "used for...private study, scholarship, or research." You may download one copy of such material for your own personal, noncommercial use provided you do not alter or remove any copyright, author attribution, and/or other proprietary notice. Use of this material other than stated above may constitute copyright infringement. http://library.umbc.edu/reserves/staff/bibsheet.php?courseID=5869&reserveID=16583[8/18/2016 12:48:14 PM] f t FRANS HALS: EARLY WORKS 1610-1620 '1;i no. l6II, destroyed in the Second World War; Plate 76n) is now generally accepted 1 as one of Hals' earliest known works. 1 Ifit was really painted by Hals - and it is difficult CHAPTER 4 to name another Dutch artist who used sucli juicy paint and fluent brushwork around li this time - it suggests that at the beginning of his career Hals painted pictures related FRANS HALS i to Van Mander's genre scenes (The Kennis, 1600, Leningrad, Hermitage; Plate 4n) ~ and late religious paintings (Dance round the Golden Calf, 1602, Haarlem, Frans Hals ·1 Early Works: 1610-1620 Museum), as well as pictures of the Prodigal Son by David Vinckboons. In our dis­ '\ I cussion of genre painting we shall see that Willem Buytewech, Esaias van de Velde, FRANS HALS, second only to Rembrandt in making seventeenth-century Dutch and Dirck Hals soon developed outdoor banqueting scenes into a special category, but painting famous, was probably born in Antwerp between 1581 and 1585, the son of as far as we know Hals never painted another pictm·e of small figures in a landscape. Franchoys Hals, a cloth worker from Mechelen, and Adriaentgen van Geertenryck of His metier was portrait painting, and during the rest of his long career all his genre Antwerp. Most likely his parents, like thousands of other Flemings, immigrated from pictures, and even his rare religious pictures,2 keep a portrait character. The crowded, Flanders to the North Netherlands after Antwerp fell to the Spanish in August 1585. lifesize Merry Company (New York, Metropolitan Museum; Plate ron), painted about The earliest reference to Hals' parents in Haarlem, where the family settled, is of 1591, 1615-17, shows the direction his genre painting was to take. when the baptism of Frans' brother Dirck is recorded. Dirck made a name for himself In Hals' hands genre painting became a kind of portraiture, but of a freer, bolder, as a painter of small genre pictures of figures in landscapes and interiors. Joost, a third and more revealing character than that of the commissioned portraits of his day. In brother, who was presumably born in Antwerp, was also a painter (d. before 16 these works he was independent of the conventions of formal portraiture. No painter October 1626); none of his works have been identified. Frans studied under Karel van before Hals had ever approached simple folk with the same sympathetic feeling and love Mander. A probable date for the contact between teacher and pupil is 1603, when Van for an unadulterated expression of the joy of life. Hals' genius was to introduce the Mander retired from Haarlem to a house near by, where he wrote most of his Schilder­ vitality and spontaneity perfected in his genre pictures into his commissioned portraits. boek; he died three years later. As far as we can tell, he did not have much influence on Pieter Bruegel the Elder is often called the originator of gay life and low life genre in his most famous pupil. Frans certainly did not follow the advice given to young artists Flemish and Dutch painting. As we have noted, Hals' teacher Van Mander formed a by his teacher in Het Schilderboek to distinguish themselves by becoming history link between the Late Renaissance and the Baroque masters; but Van Mander's rare painters. genre paintings are closer to Bruegel's than to Hals'. Bruegel is still far from the kind In l6IO Hals joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke, and his earliest extant dated of immediate expression of instantaneous life found in Hals' work. His approach to picture, the Portrait ofJacobiis Z0;ffius, archdeacon of St Bavo, the principal church of human beings continues an intellectual coldness which was typical ofthe Late Renaissance Haarlem (Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum; Plate IOA), was painted during the following and resulted in more abstract forms and more severe stylization. There are, of course, year. This portrait is a fragment. The original composition showed Zaffius seated in an additional intermediary stages between the genre painting of Bruegel and that of Hals. armchair with his left hand resting on a skull. What did Hals paint before he portrayed However, the fact remains that it was Hals who first gave an explosive vitality to genre Zaffius accompanied by a commonplace symbol of the transitory nature of man's life? subjects and that he expressed them in the most sympathetic spirit. Students of Dutch art, who have assiduously searched for Hals' juvenilia, have found l The merrymakers in the Merry Company in New York are not ordinary revellers. virtually nothing. What one of the most talented artists who ever lived did before he Among them arc some stock characters from theatrical companies of the period - the was about twenty-five or thirty years old - the age depends upon the birth-year one entire group is probably celebrating Shrove Tuesday. The man on the right can be accepts - remains an unsolved riddle. Perhaps Hals spent his early years travelling, or identified as Hans Worst, a well-known figure in the farces of the period, whose perhaps, like some other great artists who lived long, he was a slow starter. When Hals' character resembles Brighella of the Co111111edia dell'arte. The cramped composition and hand is finally recognized around 1610-rr, a debt to late-sbcteenth-century Dutch the over-exuberance of the details, as well as the loud, gay colours, indicate a compara­ portraitists (Dirck Barendsz., Cornelis Ketel, and Hendrick Goltzius) is evident in the tively youthful work. Hals' love of diagonals does not yet lead to a very spacious arrange­ roundness, the rigid poses, and the sharp delineation of his figures. The pasty pink and meilt, and the fat painting in the ruddy faces is still far from the master's later lightness rose colour of the flesh in the Zaffius portrait recall hues used by the Haarlem Man­ ,\ of touch. Yet the essence of his vigour and vitality is already in the work. As the Portrait nerists, but the archdeacon's keen glance, the daylight cast on his face, and the parallel of a Nurse and Child (c. 1620, Berlin-Dahlem, Staatliche Museen; Plate IIA) shows, in brush strokes, which were soon to work in combination with zigzag touches, are indi­ I his early commissioned portraits Hals adhered more closely to the old technique and to cations of Hals' immediate future. accepted conventions than in his genre works. During the first decades of his career he The problematic Banquet in a Park (c. l6IO, formerly Berlin, Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, continued to follow the ancient idea of adjusting his style to his subject. Only after 1640, 30 31 PART ONE: PAINTING 1600-1675 FRANS HALS: EARLY WORKS 1610-1620 when he virtually stopped painting genre pictures, did he begin to use the technique Braspenningmaaltijd by Cornelis Anthonisz. (or Teunissen) of 1533, now on loan at the once reserved for genre pieces for commissioned portraits of respectable burghers and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, is one of the earliest examples of a group portrait of guards­ their wives. Of course it is appropriate that the gestures and expressions of the nurse men seated round a banquet table. It shows' a rather primitive juxtaposition of single and the elegantly dressed child are more refined than those nsed by a boisterous group portraits. The stiff, somewhat geometrical composition is characteristic of the early celebrating carnival. The double portrait is an excellent early example of Hals' subtle group pictures, and so is the bird's-eye view of the table. The arrangement is simple. invention. The nurse, it seems, was about to present an apple to the child when both Fifteen of the seventeen guardsmen have been lined up in two rows, with only a weak were diverted by the approach of a spectator, to whom they appear to turn spon­ attempt to bind them together. Some of the men are looking towards the spectator, taneously. This is only one of the many ingenious devices used by Hals to give the some of them elsewhere. This variety of movement slightly relieves the monotony of impression of a moment of life in his pictures. The colour scheme still shows the dark the setting, but it endangers the unity. The relief-like arrangement in planes parallel to tonality characteristic of his early commissioned portraits, and the minute execution of the surface plane is characteristic of the Renaissance style. So is the accentuation of the the child's richly embroidered costume is set off by a delightful vivacity in the brush­ straight horizontal and vertical directions, both giving a certain architectural firmness work on the faces and hands.