Object data
oil on panel
support: height 17.9 cm × width 21.2 cm
outer size: depth 4.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Dirck Hals (attributed to)
An Outdoor Party
c. 1620 - c. 1630
Technical notes
The support is a single oak panel with a vertical grain and is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1547. The panel could have been ready for use by 1558, but a date in or after 1564 is more likely. The ground is grey, followed by several paint layers. The use of impasto in many areas is remarkable. The reflection of the red cushion on the breeches at lower left was applied as a negative; in other words the artist first painted a red layer and then put touches of brown on top of that. The tree was altered at a late stage and made more sinuous. The shape of the hat was very precisely reserved in the sky. The artist occasionally toned down the sharp transitions of the reserves, for example in the hat and the bushes.
Scientific examination and reports
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 8 April 2004
- technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 1 February 2005
Condition
Good. The varnish is discoloured.
Provenance
…; sale, P.C. Haemacher (†) and F.L. Berré (Leiden), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 30 November 1897, no. 41, fl. 287.50, to the museum
Object number: SK-A-1722
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Dirck Hals (Haarlem 1591 - Haarlem 1656)
Dirck Hals, the youngest brother of Frans Hals, was baptized in Haarlem on 19 March 1591. He was a son of Franchois Fransz Hals of Mechelen and Adriana van Geertenryck of Antwerp, who had moved to Haarlem after the fall of Antwerp in 1585. Dirck Hals spent most of his life in his birthplace, where he married Agneta Jansdr in 1620 or 1621. Anthonie (1621-91), their only son, became a portraitist and genre painter in Amsterdam. Dirck Hals only joined the Guild of St Luke in 1627, very late in his career. He served in the Haarlem civic guard from 1618 to 1624, and was a member of the Haarlem’s De Wijngaardranken chamber of rhetoric. He lived in Leiden from 1641 to 1648, when he returned to Haarlem, where he was buried in the Begijnhofkerk on 17 May 1656.
There is a distinct possibility that Frans Hals was Dirck’s first teacher. His influence is very apparent in Dirck’s first oil sketches on paper, which he made between 1616/18 and 1629. However, his paintings are by and large closer to those by other Haarlem artists like Willem Buytewech and Esaias van de Velde. All of them painted merry companies out of doors or in an interior – paintings with ‘moderne beelden’, that is to say scenes with figures in contemporary dress. That, at least, is what is said about paintings by Dirck Hals on a valuation list of works in a lottery of 1634. He produced his earliest merry companies around 1618-20, and continued making them until the end of his life.1 Hals had a great influence on both Judith Leyster and Jan Miense Molenaer.
Everhard Korthals Altes, 2007
References
Ampzing 1621, unpag.; Ampzing 1628, p. 371; Schrevelius 1648, p. 383; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 92-93; Hofstede de Groot in Thieme/Becker XV, 1922, pp. 530-31; Bredius 1923b; Schatborn 1973, pp. 107-16; Van Thiel-Stroman in Haarlem-Worcester 1993, pp. 256-57; Kolfin 2005, pp. 105-07; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 176-78
Entry
This small, unsigned panel is attributed to Dirck Hals, and that attribution is supported by Nehlsen-Marten.2 It was painted briskly, but not all the faces are successful. It is possible that Dirck Hals had a studio with one or two assistants who turned out production-line work, and this painting may belong in that category. It was probably made in the 1620s. Esaias van de Velde painted similar companies in that period, one example being his Open-air Banquet of 1621.3
Hals suggested recession into depth with the diagonal placement of the table. His brother Frans had used the same device back in 1605-10 in one of the most important early merry companies from Haarlem, Banquet in a Park.4
Everhard Korthals Altes, 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. 103.
Literature
Nehlsen-Marten 2003, p. 264, no. 14
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 115, no. 1083; 1934, p. 117, no. 1083 (as Dirck Hals); 1960, p. 120, no. 1083; 1976, p. 255, no. A 1722; 2007, no. 103
Citation
E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'attributed to Dirck Hals, An Outdoor Party, c. 1620 - 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.8605
(accessed 13 November 2024 02:00:21).