The Lute Player

c. 1623 - c. 1624

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 67 cm × width 60 cm

Technical notes

The support is a plain-weave canvas that has been lined. Cusping is present only on the right side and the tacking edges have been cut, although approximately one centimetre of the tacking edges at the top and bottom are still present. The white ground layer is visible at the edges of the painting and the abraded passages. The composition was painted directly, without the use of underpaint. The paint was applied in a rough manner with coarse impasto highlights.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 1 March 2007

Condition

Fair. The paint layers are moderately abraded and the varnish is strongly discoloured.

Conservation

H. Heijdenrijk, 1901: canvas lined

Provenance

...; sale, Josephus Augustinus Brentano (1754-1821), Amsterdam (J. de Vries et al.), 13 May 1822, no. 133, as Frans Hals (‘hoog 6 palmen, 6 duimen; breed 5 palmen, 9 duimen [66 x 61 cm]. Doek. Een vrolijke Knaap, in Spaansche Kleeding op de Luit spelende.’), fl. 111, to De Lelie;...; collection Johannes Rombouts (1772-1850), Dordrecht; his nephew, Leendert Dupper Willemsz (1799-1870), Dordrecht, 1850; by whom bequeathed to the museum, as Frans Hals, 12 April 1870

Object number: SK-A-134

Credit line: Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht

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

This painting is a copy of Hals’s Lute Player in the Louvre (fig. a). The original has more vibrant colours and a greater sophistication of modelling. It is especially the crude application of white highlights in the figure’s face and left hand that leave no doubt that the Rijksmuseum version is not an autograph replica. A number of small details, such as the figure’s hair and the shadows, differ from the prototype. The buffoon’s right hand has also been placed much closer to the lute’s sound hole than in the original. A pentimento shows that the little finger of the left hand was originally placed in the same position as in the Louvre painting. That little finger was painted out and a new, extended one painted beside it. This minor difference and others indicate that the present painting and not the original served the Leiden artist David Bailly as the model for two drawings he executed in 1624 and 1626 (RP-T-1886-A-562, see fig. b).⁶ Like the Rijksmuseum painting, too, the buffoon in Bailly’s drawings looks less askance than in the Louvre picture. The figure in the Rijksmuseum painting has more hair on the left side of his face, which was also followed in Bailly’s drawings.

While the materials used to create the present painting confirm that it was executed in the 17th century, the fact that Bailly copied it in a 1624 drawing provides a terminus ante quem. A terminus post quem of circa 1623 is indicated by Slive’s convincing dating of the Louvre prototype.⁷ This replica was executed, therefore, almost immediately after Hals’s prototype in the Louvre was finished. After being initially considered an original by Frans Hals,⁸ the Rijksmuseum painting was attributed consecutively to Dirck Hals,⁹ one of Frans Hals’s sons,¹⁰ and to Judith Leyster.¹¹ None of these attributions are tenable, however. A slightly larger copy of the present painting on a wooden support was in a German private collection in 1989.¹²

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. 113.

Literature

Davies 1902, p. 102 (as Dirck Hals); Moes 1909, p. 37 (attributed to one of the sons of Frans Hals); Trivas 1941, p. 61, app. 4 (as a copy, possibly by Judith Leyster); Bruyn 1951, pp. 219, 222; Slive I, 1970, pp. 85-86, III, 1974, p. 13; Slive in Washington etc. 1989, p. 170; Grimm 1989, p. 236; Hofrichter 1989, p. 37, no. 1 (as Judith Leyster); Kortenhorst-von Bogendorf Rupprath in Haarlem-Worcester 1993, pp. 350-55, no. 39

Collection catalogues

1870, p. 228, no. XX (as Hals); 1880, p. 116, no. 112 (as Hals); 1887, p. 56, no. 442 (as Hals); 1903, p. 116, no. 1088; 1934, p. 119, no. 1093; 1960, p. 176, no. 1455 (as Judith Leyster); 1976, p. 257, no. A 134; 2007, no. 113

Citation

J. Bikker, 2007, 'copy after Frans Hals, The Lute Player, c. 1623 - c. 1624', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8615

(accessed 13 November 2024 02:39:27).

Figures

fig. a Frans Hals, *The Lute Player*, c. 1623. Oil on canvas, 70 x 62 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. R.F. 1984-32. Photo: RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux

fig. b David Bailly, drawing after *The Lute Player*, 1626. Pen and brush in brown, black chalk, 219 x 172 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-T-1886-A-562.