Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 81 cm × width 66.5 cm
Frans Hals
A Civic Guardsman Holding a Berkemeijer, known as ‘The merry drinker’
c. 1628 - c. 1630
Inscriptions
- signature, ligated monogram, centre right: FH
Technical notes
The support is a plain-weave canvas that has been lined. Cusping is present on all sides, but the tacking edges have been cut off. The light beige ground layer is visible under the figure’s left cuff and the collar. A thin underpainted layer in varying earth tone washes is visible here and there. The hands and jerkin were underpainted in brown, while there is a grey underpaint in the collar, over which the white was painted and then the final dark accents. The hat was laid in with a reddish brown first layer and the face has a dark olive green underpaint, which was left visible as the shadow. There is much visible brushmarking throughout. A few of the hairs on the right side of the figure’s moustache were scratched in. Rivulets of oil paint in the figure’s right sleeve were made by thinning with excess turpentine and not corrected.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: M. Zeldenrust / G. Tauber, RMA, 12 March 2007
- infrared reflectography: J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer, RKD, 11 June 1997
Literature scientific examination and reports
Groen/Hendriks 1989, p. 120
Condition
Fair. The canvas is bulging at the top. The paint layers have been flattened through lining, and there is some moderate abrasion. The varnish is extremely discoloured.
Conservation
- H.H. Mertens, 1970: complete restoration; canvas relined
Provenance
…: sale, Baroness Hermina Jacoba van Leyden van Warmond, née Comtesse de Thoms (1744-1814), Warmond Castle, sold on the premises (P. van der Schley et al.), 31 July 1816, no. 13 (‘un guerrier ayant un visage riant et tenant un verre à la main [...] sur bois; haut 2 pieds 7 pouces, longue 2 pieds 2 pouces’ [74.6 x 61.8 cm]), fl. 325, to De Vries, for the museum
Object number: SK-A-135
Copyright: Public domain
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
An icon of 17th-century Dutch painting, the so-called Merry Drinker is one of Hals’s most animated single-figure compositions. With his lips slightly parted and gesticulating open right hand, the man appears to engage the viewer directly, while wine sloshes in the berkemeijer precariously balanced on the tips of the fingers of his left hand. The criss-cross pattern of short brushstrokes that render the lace collar, the seemingly unfinished elements, such as the sleeves, cuffs and medallion that appear blurry, and the flicks of paint used in the hair contribute to the spontaneous effect. The sketchy technique compares best to two tondos by Hals of a boy drinking and a boy holding a flute in Schwerin,6 as well as the life-size, half-lengths of Peeckelhaering7 and the so-called Mulatto.8 Although none of these works, including the Merry Drinker, are dated, they can be placed in the late 1620s.
Half-length, single-figure compositions executed by the Utrecht Caravaggisti in the 1620s, specifically Honthorst’s Merry Violinist (SK-A-180), have quite rightly been viewed as a potential source of inspiration for Hals’s Merry Drinker. Unlike Honthorst’s figure, however, Hals’s does not wear a fanciful 16th-century costume, and the question arises whether it should be regarded as a single-figure genre piece or a portrait.9 The collar and cuffs worn by Hals’s figure are consistent with the fashion of the late 1620s, while the yellow sleeveless buff coat, called a kolder in Dutch, was typical military apparel. This costume element and the medallion worn by the figure identify him as a soldier, possibly a civic guardsman. A number of sitters in Hals’s civic guard pieces wear such buff coats, and medallions were given to civic guardsmen in recognition of special service, such as the Haarlem civic guard’s expeditions to Hasselt in 1622 and Heusden in 1625 to bolster the troops of the States-General.10 It has been suggested in the past that the portrait on our soldier’s medallion is that of Prince Maurits, but the sketchy treatment makes this difficult to verify.11
The impressionistic treatment of the medallion, as well as the figure as a whole, are potential arguments for an identification of the picture as a genre piece. Kauffmann interpreted the figure as a personification of the sense of taste,12 but this does not take into account the military apparel. In the late 1620s a new subject emerged in Dutch painting, featuring drinking, gambling and smoking soldiers in guardrooms.13 Such paintings were produced, however, mostly after Hals executed the present work and, for the most part, in towns other than Haarlem. These are, moreover, multi-figure scenes, and as a genre painting Hals’s life-size, half-length depiction of a contemporary soldier would form an anomaly. On the other hand, his oeuvre contains two portraits of soldiers wearing buff coats.14 The treatment of the Portrait of a Member of the Haarlem Civic Guard in Washington (fig. a) – especially the cuffs and the figure’s left sleeve – is as sketchy as in the present painting. The pose of the Rijksmuseum soldier cannot be compared to those of the guardsmen portrayed by Hals in the paintings now in Washington and São Paulo. The gesticulating right hand and parted lips do, however, appear in other portraits by Hals, such as the modello he painted for Adriaen Matham’s 1635 portrait engraving of Isaac Abrahamsz Massa.15 As Slive has amply demonstrated, wine glasses feature in a number of late 16th and early 17th-century portraits. One example is Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy’s 1627 Portrait of Maerten Rey (SK-A-698) in the Rijksmuseum.16 On the basis of this evidence, Slive argued that the man in the Rijksmuseum picture might be, like Maerten Rey, a wine merchant or wine-gauger, and suggested the Haarlem innkeeper Hendrick den Abt as a possible candidate.17 While there is nothing to indicate that Den Abt was a civic guardsman, the man in the Rijksmuseum painting – assuming it is, indeed, a portrait – perhaps had nothing professionally to do with wine. Officers drinking wine – and making lively hand gestures – were often depicted in Haarlem portraits of banqueting civic guardsmen, including three by Hals himself.18
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. 105.
Literature
Hofstede de Groot 1910, pp. 17-18, no. 63; Valentiner 1921, p. 59; Trivas 1941, p. 35, no. 32; Slive I, 1970, pp. 110-11, III, 1974, pp. 38-39, no. 63, with earlier literature; Grimm 1972, pp. 64, 74, 76, 147, no. 43; Smith 1978, pp. 102-04, 106-07, 109-10; Grimm 1989, p. 274, no. 51; Slive in Washington etc. 1989, pp. 212-15, no. 30, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1816, p. 27, no. 103 (as Portrait of a Man); 1853, p. 12, no. 98 (fl. 200); 1880, p. 117, no. 113; 1887, p. 56, no. 443; 1903, p. 116, no. 1091; 1934, p. 119, no. 1091; 1960, p. 122, no. 1091; 1976, p. 256, no. A 135; 2007, no. 105
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Frans Hals, A Civic Guardsman Holding a Berkemeijer, known as ‘The merry drinker’, c. 1628 - c. 1630', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8609
(accessed 19 September 2024 18:03:19).