Object data
oil on panel
support: height 77.6 cm × width 135.7 cm
Dirck Hals
The Fête Champêtre
1627
Inscriptions
- signature and date, centre left (visible only with infrared reflectography): D HALS 1627
Technical notes
The support consists of three horizontally grained oak planks and is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1609. The panel could have been ready for use by 1620, but a date in or after 1626 is more likely. The ground layer is off-white and is visible in places at the reserves, in the modelling of the drapery and through the thin paint layers. All the figures were reserved apart from one in the background on the right. The reserves were followed except for some details, such as the collars and ruffs.
Scientific examination and reports
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 8 April 2002
- technical report: M. Chavannes, RMA, 11 January 2005
- infrared photography: A. Wallert / M. Chavannes / E. Korthals Altes, RMA, 27 January 2005
Condition
Good. There are fine shrinkage cracks, and small, local areas of paint loss.
Conservation
- L. Kuiper, 1976: discoloured retouchings and varnish reworked
- A. Krekeler, 2004: retouched, especially along the joins
- M. Chavannes, 2004: retouched, especially along the joins
Provenance
…; collection Mr Straeter, Rheine, early 19th century;1...; from Mrs P. Driessen-Hooreman, Delft, fl. 6,000, to the museum, 1899
Object number: SK-A-1796
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.2 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
A large group of young, fashionably dressed men and women are amusing themselves in the park of a country house on a summer’s day. The scene contains elements taken from reality, but as a whole it is not very realistic. The landscape is idealized, and the luxurious villa is a figment of the imagination.
Scenes of courting couples in a garden had been produced since the middle ages. Mostly they were allegories in which figures elegantly express their love for each other in cultivated natural surroundings.3 However, allegories of that kind generally contain fewer realistic details than are found in this scene. One traditional element in the iconography of the Garden of Love is the chained monkey, which is generally interpreted as a warning against becoming addicted to earthly pleasures. It is possible that the monkey in Hals’s painting was also meant to urge moderation.4
This is one of Dirck Hals’s most ambitious pictures, if only because of its size and the number of figures. The palette is bright and varied. The composition was carefully planned and elaborated, and is of a very different standard from the routine works produced by Hals and his studio.5 The artist has rendered the costumes in a highly efficient way. It is tempting to think that in some cases he deliberately left the ground layer exposed, as can be seen in the structure of the folds in the green dresses. Perhaps he was aiming to capture the fall of light on materials of different textures.6
There are some direct borrowings from Willem Buytewech, Hals’s fellow townsman, such as the woman with her hand on her hip on the far right.7 Harvesting motifs from the work of other artists was very common at the time. Perhaps there was some kind of artistic rivalry between Buytewech and Hals, with imitation and emulation being an important goal of Hals’s.8
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. 102.
Literature
Amsterdam 1976, pp. 124-25, no. 27; Kolfin in Haarlem-Hamburg 2003, p. 96, no. 11; Nehlsen-Marten 2003, p. 123, no. 8; Kolfin 2005, pp. 105-07, 154
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 115, no. 1082; 1934, p. 117, no. 1082; 1960, p. 120, no. 1082; 1976, p. 255, no. A 1796; 2007, no. 102
Citation
E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'Dirck Hals, The Fête Champêtre, 1627', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8604
(accessed 9 November 2024 18:10:22).