Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 140 cm × width 166.5 cm
Frans Hals
c. 1622
oil on canvas
support: height 140 cm × width 166.5 cm
The original support is a plain-weave canvas with an average of 14.5 horizontal threads by 19 vertical threads per centimetre which has been lined. Stylistically, the composition seems complete and the picture is thus probably very close to its original dimensions though only shallow cusping is present at the top and on the right side and very shallow cusping on the left side. None is evident at the bottom. The tacking edges were cut off during the lining procedure. The light beige ground layer is especially evident in the rocks at lower left, where a thin brown paint layer that once covered it has been largely removed. Hals laid his composition in from background to foreground beginning with the trees and landscape and generally reserving the figures and within the figures also the hands. The man’s left cuff, however, was painted over the woman’s bodice, indicating a change of mind, and the woman’s right hand was also not reserved. Its placement on the man’s shoulder, reflects another deviation from the initial concept. The painting was worked up with thin, dark brown underpaint washes in the dark passages, and a thin, olive-grey underpaint to lay-in the shadows of the flesh tones. This initial paint layer was allowed to dry before more layers were added, and at times it was left uncovered and used to define dark areas and shadows. The hair and face were painted wet in wet over the dried underpaint. Visible brushmarking is apparent throughout, yet each layer of oil paint was applied only after allowing the previous layer to dry, in accordance with the traditional method. For example, the various strokes of pink, white and red in the female sitter’s scarf were painted over a layer of thin, dried purple paint. The contour lines of black clothing were reinforced in a late stage of painting.
Groen/Hendriks 1989, p. 117
Fair. The paint layers are locally very abraded.
...; sale, Jan Six (1618-1700), Lord of Vromade and Wimmenum, Amsterdam (J.P. Zomer), 6 April 1702, no. 89 (‘Man en Vrouw, leevensgroote van Frans Hals’), fl. 32, to his widow Margaretha Tulp (1634-1709);1 ? estate inventory, Jan Six (1618-1700) and Margaretha Tulp (1634-1709), Amsterdam, 6 January 1710, in the large side room (‘Beelden in een lantschap van F. Hals, fl. 18’);2 by descent to Jonkheer Hendrik Six, Lord of Hillegom (1790-1847); his sale, Amsterdam (De Vries et al.), 25 November 1851, no. 15, fl. 600, to Roos, for the museum
Object number: SK-A-133
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
The informal seated poses and joyous demeanour of the couple in this portrait make it one of the most captivating in 17th-century Dutch art. The wife affectionately rests her right hand on her husband’s shoulder, and both regard the viewer with infectious smiles. Hals’s inspiration to show his life-size sitters at full-length seated in a garden may have come from Rubens’s Self-Portrait with Isabella Brandt in a Honeysuckle Bower from around 1609-10 (fig. a), which the Haarlem painter could have seen when he visited Antwerp in 1616. The composition of this, Frans Hals’s only double portrait of a husband and wife, is unusual, however, in that the sitters have been placed off to one side rather than in the centre of the painting. While the potential inspiration from Rubens’s portrait cannot be denied, the sitters’ poses in the present painting, their tender intimacy and left of centre placement probably developed out of Hals’s Family Portrait in a Landscape from a few years earlier.8
Not mere vegetation, the plants surrounding the couple probably had a symbolic function, alluding to their status as newly-weds.9 The central motif is the sparkling vine clinging to the tree behind and between the couple. In 16th- and 17th-century love poetry and emblematic literature this motif served as a metaphor for the steadfastness of friendship or love that could even survive past death. Just as the vine leans on the tree for support, the woman in Hals’s portrait leans on her husband. The clay pots on the right of the composition are symbols of life’s fragility and reinforce the notion that love can endure past death. Because of its clinging nature, the ivy to the right of the woman was also a familiar symbol of steadfast love and faithfulness, as well as fertility. The thistle shown prominently beside the man evolved from being considered an aphrodisiac in antiquity to a symbol for fidelity in marriage in the Renaissance, especially male fidelity as the German word for the plant, Männertreu, suggests. The placement of the man’s hand over his heart in this context takes on the meaning of swearing an oath of fidelity.
The landscape in the middleground to the right of the couple has rightly been associated with the Garden of Love. It is significant that the space occupied by the married couple in the double portrait appears separate from the garden behind. The heraldic position of the portrayed couple differs too from that of the two couples seen promenading in the distance, and while the man in the foreground wears black, the men around the fountain in the middleground wear coloured doublets. The latter are obviously still in the courtship phase of their relationships. The married couple in the foreground, on the other hand, have left this part of the garden behind them.
When the present painting was put up for sale in 1851, the sitters were identified as Frans Hals himself and his second wife, Lysbeth Reyniersdr.10 This identification was rightly dismissed by Hofstede de Groot in 1910.11 A few years later Binder suggested Frans Hals’s younger brother Dirck (1591-1656) and his wife Agneta Jansdr as possible candidates.12 They probably married in 1620 or 1621, which would make this suggestion a possibility as the portrait can be dated to the early 1620s stylistically and on the evidence of the sitters’ dress. There is, however, no undisputed portrait or self-portrait of Dirck Hals with which a comparison could be made.
This is not the case with the identification of the couple first tentatively put forward in the Rijksmuseum catalogue of 1934, once again in the 1960 catalogue and most extensively argued in a 1961 article on the painting by De Jongh and Vinken.13 Their candidates were Isaac Abrahamsz Massa and Beatrix van der Laen. The son of Flemish immigrants, Massa was baptized in Haarlem on 7 October 1586.14 From the age of 14 or 15 he spent eight years in Moscow, becoming an authority on Russia. Later he often travelled to Moscow again as a merchant and representative of the States-General. He was apparently also in Swedish service as a diplomatic agent, for which he was ennobled by King Gustav II Adolf in 1625. On 25 April 1622, Massa married Beatrix van der Laen (1592-1639), a daughter of a former Haarlem burgomaster.
While the date of this couple’s wedding also corresponds to the dating of the present painting, the husband has been identified as Isaac Massa on the basis of other portraits. The only substantiated portrait of Massa is a small oil sketch by Hals now in San Diego (fig. b) that served as the model for a 1635 engraving by Adriaen Matham.15 On the basis of the San Diego painting, the sitter in a 1626 portrait by Hals in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, has also been identified as Massa (fig. c).16 Complicating matters is the fact that yet another portrait by Hals was mistakenly identified as Massa’s in the past on the basis of the San Diego work.17 The Toronto portrait, however, also carries the sitter’s age of 41 years, which was the same as Massa’s in 1626. By 1626, Isaac Massa had had close personal contact with Frans Hals for at least three years as he was a witness at the baptism of Hals’s daughter Adriaentje in 1623.18 Not all scholars, however, have accepted the identification of the couple in the Rijksmuseum painting as Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen. Gudlaugsson, for example, did not find that the man resembles Massa.19 Nor did Slive, Hals’s principal modern biographer, consider the identification as Massa compelling, and questioned whether the woman looks old enough to be the 30-year-old Beatrix van der Laen.20
Oddly, the painting’s provenance has not been taken into consideration in assessments of the identification. The earliest provenance for the portrait is the mention in the 1702 sale catalogue of Jan Six’s collection as ‘Man and woman, life-size, by Frans Hals’.21 The question why the Amsterdam patrician Jan Six should have a portrait of a Haarlem couple in his collection arises. This early provenance, however, actually lends support to the Massa/Van der Laen identification. It is well known that from 1642 Jan Six owned the estate of Elsbroek in Hillegom, a village about halfway between Haarlem and Leiden. The village to the south of Hillegom is Lisse, where Beatrix van der Laen was born and apparently spent much of her life. In the 1640s, Jan Six’s mother, Anna Wijmer purchased not only Elsbroek in Hillegom for her son Jan Six, but also properties in nearby Lisse and Noordwijkerhout. The homestead, Knappenhof in Lisse, that Anna Wijmer purchased at auction in 1640 was later inherited by her son Pieter Six (1612-80).22 Knappenhof bordered on the estate of Ter Specke, which was owned by Beatrix’s father, Gerard van der Laen (1552-1635) and later by her brothers Nicolaes (1597-1644/46) and Adriaen (1598-1681).23 Beatrix herself owned property on Speckerlaan, bordering the Ter Specke estate, until her death in 1639.24 It was also at Ter Specke that Beatrix van der Laen and Isaac Massa married in 1622.25 Anna Wijmer also acquired property in Noordwijkerhout in 1644 from Beatrix’s heirs.26
There is a distinct possibility therefore that Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen’s wedding portrait was acquired by Jan Six in Lisse, perhaps by way of his brother, Pieter. The painting may have hung in Lisse since it was executed. Isaac Massa may have left it there after Beatrix’s death in 1639, as he remarried less than a year later in 1640. Given Isaac Massa and especially Beatrix van der Laen’s strong ties to Lisse, one wonders as well whether the garden depicted in the Rijksmuseum painting, as fanciful and iconographically laden as it is, might not also refer to the idyllic country life that the pair led there.
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. 104.
Hofstede de Groot 1910, p. 123, no. 427 (as Portrait of a Couple); Valentiner 1921, p. 21 (as Portrait of a Young Couple, Dirck Hals and his wife?); Haarlem 1937, p. 32, no. 10 (as Portrait of a Couple); Trivas 1941, p. 28, no. 13 (as Young Couple in a Landscape); De Jongh/Vinken 1961; Slive in Haarlem 1962, pp. 32-34, no. 10; Slive I, 1970, pp. 25-26, 51, 53-54, 63, 66-68, 179, III, 1974, pp. 11-12, no. 17, with earlier literature; Grimm 1972, pp. 20, 83-85, 124-25, 137, 201, no. 34 (as Double Portrait of a Married Couple); De Jongh in Haarlem 1986, pp. 124-30, no. 20; Slive in Washington etc. 1989, pp. 162-65, no. 12, with earlier literature; Grimm 1989, p. 272, no. 26 (as Double Portrait of a Married Couple before an Arcadian Landscape)
1853, p. 12, no. 97 (as Portrait of the Painter and his Wife; fl. 1,000); 1880, p. 116, no. 111 (as Portrait of Frans Hals and his Second Wife Lijsbeth Reiniers); 1887, p. 56, no. 441 (as Portrait of Frans Hals and his Second Wife Lijsbeth Reiniers); 1903, p. 115, no. 1084 (as Portrait of a Couple at Full Length in the Garden of a Country Estate); 1934, p. 118, no. 1084 (as Portrait of a Couple at Full Length); 1960, pp. 120-21, no. 1084 (as Portrait of a Married Couple); 1976, p. 256, no. A 133; 2007, no. 104
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Frans Hals, Portrait of a Couple in a Landscape, probably Isaac Abrahamsz Massa (1586-1643) and Beatrix van der Laen (1592-1639), c. 1622', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8608
(accessed 8 November 2024 22:51:56).