All works in Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum

Frans Hals

Portrait of a Man, possibly a Clergyman

c. 1657 - c. 1660

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 37.1 cm × width 29.8 cm
outer size: depth 7 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, in ligated monogram, centre right: FH

Technical notes

The support is a single vertically grained oak panel that has been bevelled on all sides. Narrow strips of wood were added at a later date to the bottom and both sides of the panel. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1640. The panel could have been ready for use by 1651, but a date in or after 1657 is more likely. The ground is probably composed of two layers. A first, white layer is visible in the grain of the panel. A second, light grey layer is visible at the reserves, such as that left for the collar. The background was underpainted with a grey wash, which was followed by a greenish layer and finally a yellow layer. The hair has a grey underpaint and the face and costume have grey, black and brown underpaint. The painting was built up from dark to light. The paint was applied wet in wet and with spontaneous, angular brushstrokes.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: M. Zeldenrust, RMA, 17 January 2005
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 15 March 2007

Condition

Good.

Conservation

M. van de Laar, 2000 - 2001: complete restoration

Provenance

...; ? anonymous sale, Amsterdam (H. de Winter and J. Yver), 7 August 1776, no. 64 (‘Op Paneel, hoog 14 en een half, breed 12 duim [37 x 31 cm]. Een Mans Portret, zijnde een Borststuk met twee Handen, verbeeldende een Predikant. Fix geschilderd’), fl. 3.15;...; from J.B. Luyckx, Hilversum, fl. 30,000, to the museum, with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt, 1916

Object number: SK-A-2859

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

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 1630.¹ 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.² At the end of his career, Hals painted the regents and regentesses of the Haarlem Old Men’s Home.³ 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 1625.⁴ 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.⁵

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

Entry

While the majority of Hals’s supports are canvas, about a quarter of his output was executed on panel. A number of those works are small-scale portrait sketches designed as models for engravings, such as the very fine Portrait of Jean de la Chambre in the National Gallery, London, which measures approximately 20 by 17 centimetres.⁶ Another group of portraits painted on panels more or less twice the size as those that served as models for engravings are independent works. The present portrait belongs to this latter group.

When the painting was ‘rediscovered’ in 1916 under a perpetual calendar while in the collection of J.B. Luyckx it was published by a number of scholars as a work dating around 1645.⁷ Slive rightly pushed this dating up to the second half of the 1650s; the painting has the predominantly sober palette and free brushwork of Hals’s late life-size works on canvas, but then in miniature.⁸ Slive’s dating is supported by the dendrochronology, which indicates the painting was probably executed in or after 1657.

There are two stylistically related portraits, also of unidentified sitters, on panels of similar dimensions in the Mauritshuis and a private collection.⁹ In the Rijksmuseum painting and the Portrait of a Man in the private collection, bright red and yellow accents in the faces enliven the otherwise monochrome rendering of clothing and backgrounds.

Although scholars and magistrates also wore them, the anonymous sitter’s skullcap in the Rijksmuseum portrait might indicate that he was a cleric. There are a number of identified preachers in Hals’s oeuvre, all of whom wear skullcaps, but only one secular sitter has one, the Haarlem burgomaster and brewer Cornelis Guldewagen.¹⁰ Hofstede de Groot pointed out that the sitter in the present portrait might have been the Haarlem preacher Jan Ruyll (Johannes Rulaeus, 1609-76), whose portrait by Hals was celebrated in a 1680 poem by Arnold Moonen.¹¹ This poem, however, does not offer any specific information on the painting that could lead to a conclusive identification. Other portraits by Hals of men wearing skullcaps could equally be the one showing Jan Ruyll. Indeed, Hofstede de Groot had earlier suggested the man with a skullcap in a private collection is Ruyll, and Moes identified him as the man in the Mauritshuis picture.¹²

There is a good chance that the Rijksmuseum portrait can be identified with one auctioned in Amsterdam in 1776 as a bust-length showing a preacher with two hands visible.¹³ Like that painting, the Rijksmuseum one has a wooden support and the dimensions given in the catalogue (approximately 37 x 31 cm) are quite comparable. The paintings in the Mauritshuis and a private collection are of a similar size, but their sitters are shown without hands or with only one hand.

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. 111.

Literature

Hofstede de Groot 1915b, p. 322; Valentiner 1921, p. 254; Trivas 1941, p. 53, no. 88; Slive I, 1970, p. 198, III, 1974, pp. 106-07, no. 208, with earlier literature; Grimm 1972, pp. 113, 206, no. 151; Slive in Washington etc. 1989, p. 346; Grimm 1989, p. 283, no. 138

Collection catalogues

1934, p. 119, no. 1090a; 1960, p. 122, no. 1091 A1; 1976, p. 257, no. A 2859; 2007, no. 111

Citation

J. Bikker, 2007, 'Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, possibly a Clergyman, c. 1657 - c. 1660', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8610

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