Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 79.5 cm × width 66.5 cm
Frans Hals
c. 1637
oil on canvas
support: height 79.5 cm × width 66.5 cm
The support is a plain-weave canvas with an average of 14 horizontal (weft) threads by 15 vertical (warp) threads per centimetre which has been lined. There is deep cusping on the right and left sides and at the top. No cusping is present at the bottom. However, the bottom edge was left unpainted, indicating that the painting has not been cut down here. Relatively large areas of the pinkish beige priming layer were left exposed under the collar, the sleeve of the shirt and the cuffs. The blacks and greys of the doublet were painted wet in wet. The collar was reserved and has a thin grey first layer. The background was given a thin black wash underpaint followed by a layer of darker and somewhat thicker paint. The costume and chair were painted wet in wet with careful blending in the transitions, as well as areas of solid overlapping and scumbling. The face has a greenish brown underpaint with brownish red underpaint for the shadows around the eyes, and nostrils, and a rich red glaze parting the mouth. The upper layers were painted wet in wet. There is light brown underpainting in the hair, which was blended wet in wet with the face using small hatching strokes. The hair was finished with a dark brown layer with yellow accents. The solid darkest blacks were put on last to sharpen contours.
Good.
...; collection Jan van de Poll (1721-1801), Amsterdam;1 his grandson Jan van de Poll (1777-1858), Amsterdam, 1802 (stored with other family portraits in his aunt’s house, Herengracht 479 in Amsterdam); his son Jan Stanislaus Robert van de Poll (1805-88), Arnhem (stored with 25 other family portraits in his sister-in-law’s house, Herengracht 450 in Amsterdam); by whom donated to the museum together with 34 other family portraits, as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of a Woman, November 18852
Object number: SK-A-1246
Credit line: Gift of Jonkheer J.S.R. van de Poll, Arnhem
Copyright: Public domain
Frans Hals (Antwerp c. 1582/83 - Haarlem 1666)
Frans Hals was born in Antwerp, probably in 1582 or 1583, as the eldest son of Franchois Fransz Hals, a cloth dresser from Mechelen, and his second wife, Adriana van Geertenryck. He emigrated with his family to Haarlem sometime between the end of 1585 and July 1586. The earliest documentation of the family’s presence in Haarlem is the 19 March 1591 baptism of Frans’s younger brother Dirck into the Reformed Church there. Hals joined the Guild of St Luke in 1610, when he was about 28 years old. In 1644, he was appointed warden of the guild for one year. Nothing is known about his career before 1610, except that he might have been apprenticed to Karel van Mander. This information is supplied by the older artist’s anonymous biographer in the introduction to the second edition of the Schilder-boeck. Van Mander himself says nothing to this effect in the first edition, however. The hypothetical apprenticeship would have taken place before 1603, when Van Mander left Haarlem. Hals served as a musketeer in the St George Civic Guard from 1612 to 1624, and in 1616 he was listed as a friend (‘beminnaer’) of the Haarlem chamber of rhetoric, De Wijngaardranken.
Hals’s first marriage to Anneke Harmensdr was shortlived. They married around 1610 and Anneke died in 1615. In 1617, Hals posted the banns for his second marriage, to Lysbeth Reyniersdr (1593-1675). In the meantime, he had visited Antwerp for several months in 1616. His son Harmen (1611-69) from his first marriage and four of his seven sons from his second marriage, Frans the Younger (1618-69), Reynier (1627-72), Claes (1628-86) and Jan (c. 1620-54), also became painters. Hals was probably responsible for their training. According to Houbraken, he was also the teacher of Adriaen Brouwer (c. 1605/06-38) and Adriaen van Ostade (1610-85), and De Bie mentions Philips Wouwerman (1619-68) as a pupil. In 1635, Judith Leyster (1609-60), who had most likely been a pupil of Hals herself, accused him of luring away her pupil Willem Woutersen (dates unknown). None of Hals’s pupils were recorded as such by the guild.
Hals’s earliest dated painting, the Portrait of Jacobus Hendricksz Zaffius, is known from a copy dated 1611 and an engraving by Jan van de Velde II, dated 1630.3 His last dated works are from 1650, although he was certainly active after that year. The majority of his paintings are portraits of individuals, couples shown in pendants, and groups, both families and municipal bodies. Hals received several commissions for official group portraits, most notably for five militia pieces for the headquarters of the Haarlem St George civic guard and the arquebusiers’ civic guard executed between 1616 and 1639. In 1633, he was commissioned by the officers and guardsmen of the XIth District in Amsterdam to paint their portrait (SK-C-374). Hals, however, never completed the commission. In 1641, he portrayed the regents of the St Elisabeth’s Hospital as a pendant to Johannes Verspronck’s portrait of the regentesses.4 At the end of his career, Hals painted the regents and regentesses of the Haarlem Old Men’s Home.5 In addition to portraits, Hals painted several genre scenes, the subjects of which can sometimes be related to the chamber of rhetoric. The influence of the Utrecht Caravaggisti is apparent in the style and often the choice of subject matter of his genre scenes. Apart from supposed scenes of the Prodigal Son, Hals’s only known biblical paintings are a series of the four evangelists from around 1625.6 In addition to selling his own works, Hals occasionally sold those of other artists, cleaned and restored paintings, and made valuations.
Hals was in debt during most of his career, and in the last few years of his life could no longer make ends meet. In 1661, he was exempted from paying his annual guild dues on account of his age. In 1662, he received a subsidy from the town, and two years later was awarded a life pension of 200 guilders annually, three cartloads of peat and his rent was paid for him. Hals died in 1666 and was buried in the choir of St Bavokerk. In his own lifetime, he was eulogized by Samuel Ampzing and Theodorus Schrevelius, both of whom Hals immortalized in paint.7
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Van Mander 1618, fol. Siiir; Ampzing 1621, unpag.; Ampzing 1628, p. 371; Schrevelius 1648, p. 289; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 90-95; Van der Willigen 1866, pp. 116-23; Bredius 1913b; Bredius 1914; Bredius 1917; Bredius VI, 1919, p. 2216; Bredius 1921; Bredius VII, 1921, p. 281; Hofstede de Groot in Thieme/Becker XV, 1922, pp. 531-34; Bredius 1923a; Van Roey 1957; Van Hees 1959; Van Roey 1972, pp. 148-51; Van Thiel-Stroman 1989 (documents); Van Thiel-Stroman in Haarlem-Worcester 1993, pp. 234-35; Worm in Turner 1996, XIV, pp. 91-96; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 178-84
This bust-length pendant pair is remarkable for the nonchalant pose of the husband (shown here) in comparison to the more formal one of his wife (SK-A-1247). The man sits sideways in his chair with one arm resting on its back and the other planted in his side. Hals first used this pose in his 1626 Portrait of a Man, Probably Isaac Abrahamsz Massa.8 By association the viewer assumes that the woman in the pendant pair is, like her husband, seated, although no chair is to be seen. The husband’s informal pose is matched by the looser handling of the paint in his portrait. Similar to the sketchy treatment apparent in Hals’s genre paintings, the ground has been left visible in many places and the strokes with which the lace was rendered have a dashed-off quality. The spontaneity with which Hals seems to have rendered the man’s likeness is accentuated by the fact that his right hand is painted right up to the canvas edge. The deep cusping on this side of the canvas indicates that the painting has not been cut down here. It is, therefore, as if Hals was working so fast he temporarily lost track of his composition. Stylistically and on the basis of the sitters’ clothing the pendants can be dated to the mid-1630s. The woman’s cap, for example, and millstone ruff with neerstik (the lace fringe hanging below it) have a close parallel in Hals’s 1634 Portrait of Catharina Brugman.9
The Hals pendants were the most prized among the group of 36 portraits given to the Rijksmuseum by Jan Stanislaus Robert van de Poll in 1885. In a letter outlining the donation to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Obreen suggested, apparently as the first scholar to do so, an identification for the male sitter: ‘Portrait of a man (possibly Nicolaes Hasselaer)’.10 An Amsterdam citizen, Nicolaes Hasselaer (1593-1635) took part in a mission to Moscow in 1616 and is recorded as a brewer in Amsterdam in 1619. In 1622, he became a regent of the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage and in January 1626 took over as Captain-Major of the Amsterdam troops.11 The reason why Obreen did not identify the female sitter is probably because only the identity of Hasselaer’s first wife, Geertruid van Erp, was known at the time. Geertruid van Erp died in 1620 which would have excluded her as a potential candidate. This, at least, was the reason given by Hofstede de Groot in 1910 for rejecting the Nicolaes Hasselaer identification.12 Reiterating an identification of the couple that had already been made by Bredius in the 1887 catalogue of the Rijksmuseum’s collection, he put forward Nicolaes’s brother Dirck Hasselaer (1581-1645) and his wife as more likely candidates. Hofstede de Groot’s alternative suggestion, however, was equally untenable, as Dirck Hasselaer’s wife, Brechtje van Schoterbosch, died in 1618. Moreover, secure portraits of that couple by Cornelis van der Voort (SK-A-1242 and SK-A-1243), which were also donated to the Rijksmuseum by Jan Stanislaus Robert van de Poll in 1885, rule that possibility out beyond a shadow of a doubt.
A year prior to Hofstede de Groot’s suggestion Moes had already tentatively identified the female sitter as Nicolaes Hasselaer’s second wife, Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen (1594-1667).13 With the exception of Hofstede de Groot, the sitters have been regarded in the literature since Moes as Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen, albeit sometimes only tentatively. One of the major stumbling blocks is the couple’s age; Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen were in their late 30s, early 40s during the first half of the 1630s, but the couple depicted here seems to be significantly younger. The male pendant can be compared to a secure likeness of Nicolaes Hasselaer in Abraham de Vries’s 1633 group portrait of the regents of the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage.14 Hasselaer is shown in profile in De Vries’s portrait, which makes comparison difficult, but he seems to be more rotund and more mature than the man in the Rijksmuseum painting, and he seems to lack that man’s broad nose. Both men hold batons, but these were common to men in a variety of military positions.
The notion entertained by Middelkoop that the portraits were executed after Nicolaes Hasselaer’s death in 1635 does not provide a very satisfactory solution to the problem.15 Hals’s sketchy portrait of Hasselaer, according to Middelkoop’s hypothesis, was meant as an idealized representation of the sitter at a younger age. But it is not just the man who appears younger than Hasselaer was in the early 1630s. The female sitter, too, is unlikely to be a woman in her late 30s. One of the questions that arises, then, is why Hals would depict Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen in a more finished painting, if she too were being idealized. Although the male portrait is somewhat rougher than usual, Hals often rendered his male sitters in a sketchier fashion than their spouses. The loose handling of the man’s portrait therefore provides insufficient grounds to assume this work was executed after the sitter’s death.
In addition to the sitters’ ages, the line of inheritance is problematic were these portraits to show Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen.16 Were this the case, they would have been inherited by Aegje Hasselaer (1617-64), a daughter of Nicolaes Hasselaer’s brother Dirck. The portraits would have entered the Van de Poll collection by way of Aegje Hasselaer’s daughter Brechje Hooft (1640-1721), who was married to Harmen van de Poll (1641-73). Rather than going to a daughter of his half-brother, such pendant portraits would more likely have been inherited by Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen’s own children, in the first place most likely by their eldest son Gerard Hasselaer (1620-73). While an inventory of his estate has not survived, or was never made, the inventory of his sister, Anna Hasselaer (1626-89), does survive, and lists a portrait of her father.17
The traditional identification of the couple in this pendant pair as Nicolaes Hasselaer and Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen is not convincing. A number of the other portraits in the 1885 Van de Poll gift show citizens of Haarlem. The sitters in the present pair may well have been related to them. But while there are a few potential candidates among their number, there is a lack of documentation in the way of substantiated portraits with which to compare the likenesses, or estate inventories, rendering identification of the sitters impossible for the time being.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 106.
Moes I, 1897, p. 391, no. 3254:2 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer?); Moes 1909, nos. 42, 43 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer? and Portrait of Sara van Diemen?); Hofstede de Groot 1910, pp. 56-57, nos. 186, 187 (as Portrait of Dirck Pietersz Hasselaer and Portrait of Brechtje van Schooterbosch); Six 1916, pp. 94-95, note 1 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaar and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); Valentiner 1921, pp. 63-64 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); Trivas 1941, p. 45, nos. 60, 61 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); Slive I, 1970, pp. 117, 118, 120, III, 1974, pp. 52-53, nos. 86, 87 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); Grimm 1972, pp. 91, 141, 155, 202, nos. 70, 71 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); Van Eeghen 1974, pp. 137-38 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer? and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen?); Smith 1978, pp. 102-04, 106-07, 109-10 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); Grimm 1989, p. 276, no. 73 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); Middelkoop 1999, pp. 179-81 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); Middelkoop in Amsterdam 2002, p. 124, nos. 25a, 25b (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen)
1887, p. 56, nos. 446, 447 (as Portrait of a Man, probably Dirck Pietersz Hasselaer and Portrait of Bregje van Schoterbosch); 1903, p. 116, nos. 1089, 1090 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Geertruyt van Erp); 1934, p. 118, nos. 1089, 1090 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); 1960, p. 122, nos. 1089, 1090 (as Portrait of Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); 1976, p. 256, nos. A 1246, A 1247 (as Portrait of a Man, possibly Nicolaes Hasselaer and Portrait of a Woman, Possibly Sara Wolphaerts van Diemen); 2007, no. 106
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1637', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8606
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