RKD STUDIES

Irrespective of Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy’s (1588-1650) fascination for Hals’s militia pieces, these two very different artists are also linked in another way, through a common sitter. Both Hals and Pickenoy portrayed Catharina Hooft (1618-1691), the daughter of a family of Amsterdam regents. The first instance was Hals’s portrait of the infant Catharina and her wet nurse, featuring the girl at approximately one and a half years of age [71]. Pickenoy followed many years later, and depicted her at age eighteen in 1636 [72]. The two portraits, which are today both preserved in Berlin, are particularly characteristic creations by their respective painters. Due to the difference in age, the face of the sitter in either portrait is difficult to compare. But both artists were highly accurate observers of facial features, and the present opportunity for direct comparison is rare. Even a first glance prompts considerations about the development from a happy toddler to the barely eighteen-year-old woman with some experience of life, the wife of a powerful politician at the helm of the town of Amsterdam in the 17th century. Furthermore, the skill of each painter makes an impression, with Pickenoy’s costume rendered as brilliantly as the subtly captured facial features. The commission of this and many other lavish portraits to Pickenoy provide an insight into the expectations of society at the time. Their noble representatives did not wish to be captured in character portraits but rather through parading their regalia of status and property. Both portraits, by Hals as well as Pickenoy, showed the most precious fabrics and lace available at the time.

Catharina Hooft’s parents had moved to Haarlem shortly after her christening in January 1619. The woman with the friendly gaze who holds the merry little girl in Hals’s portrait is identified in an inventory of 1709 that lists the property of Pieter de Graeff (1638-1707), Hooft’s son. There, the painting is described as ‘a nurse with a young child by Frans Hals’.¹ The modest and slightly old-fashioned clothing of the woman also confirms her lower status, even though she nevertheless appears as an especially intimate contact of the child. The nurse presents the child an apple – probably a connotation of personal fate and Christian hope of redemption. The higher status of the girl is emphasized by the sumptuous costume, the cap made of lace and gold brocade, the golden bracelet, the gold chain with a ruby, and a golden rattle - which hardly stands out against the elaborate pattern of the fabric. On the back of the dress there are two leashes, indicating that the child is just about to start walking. Based on this fact and the facial features, the girl’s age can be estimated at between twelve to eighteen. At that age, children can already sit up for portraits – with some effort and multiple attempts perhaps. This must have also been the case for this portrait, as it is impossible to paint such a coherent and lively portrait without first hand observation. Slive – giving rise to a fundamental assessment – commented on the representation of the two individuals as follows: ‘The woman could have posed in the position Hals gave her, but certainly not the child’. He referred to the ‘seemingly uncorrectable popular notion that Hals and many of his contemporaries merely painted what they saw before their eyes’, and followed up by writing ‘The fleeting expressions of warmth and smiling contentment had to be observed and then fixed’.² But this can certainly not have been the case, as there is no independent visual form of expression for such complex emotions, which would allow them to be captured, preserved and then fixed. It is only possible to record an emotion in the movement of facial features which is captured in an image. In order to do so, the face must be observed in a suitable perspective and lighting, which requires a sitter. This alone is hard enough and needs a skilled portraitist. Looking at the history of portraiture, it is Frans Hals’s specificity that he was able to convincingly capture animated faces even in their most nuanced expressions. He was only able to do so through the observation of many different moments in facial movements within the desired position of the face. The sensitive modelling in his adaptable brushwork technique permitted the quick fixing and suggesting of details.

In the case of the double portrait of Catharina Hooft and her wet nurse, Hals needed to determine the position of the two sitters in the picture plane, which he was able to do with a few quick outlines. The portrait is based on a characteristic composition in which the child is being held while standing or – more likely – sitting on a big cushion in the woman’s lap. It would not have needed to endure this position in full regalia, since the dress, the lace bonnet etc. could have been arranged without it as needed and executed by the painter in every detail without interruption. The main concern however was to capture the facial features, for which the child could also be dressed informally. In order to hold its head in the desired direction it would need to be comfortable and have a fixed point of attention to hold its gaze steady. Children of such young age can certainly do this, though not for long and only intermittently. The nurse holds the object of attention in her hand; all she needs to do is raise it in the right direction. If everything else is in place, the painter can also swiftly render the child’s eyes which will keep drifting towards him. Such a turn of gaze to the stranger and his activity will be made by any child, distracting it from the line of vision which it is admonished to hold. A child of only one-and-a-half years old cannot be left alone with a stranger. To get it to play along in such an unfamiliar situation and even show a friendly expression, it needs a close contact for comfort. For this role, a nurse was certainly often better equipped than anybody else. When we acknowledge this role-play, the visual narrative of the double portrait unfolds naturally. We are looking at little Catharina, bribed with treats and carefully placated to sit for her portrait. Hals’s emphasis is less on the representation of this precious small puppet and more on a description of the demeanor of the two protagonists. The child is smiling cheekily and a little curiously at the painter, while the nurse maintains her assistant position patiently and humbly. For Hals, the elaborate presentation is only the occasion for his observation of the pair. Sadly the circumstances leading to this rare composition are unknown. Perhaps the child was originally intended to be painted on its own or with its mother, who may have given up in exasperation.

When studied up close, very fine lines of underdrawing can be observed in Catharina Hooft’s face, shining though the upper paint layers [73]. This suggests that Hals had fist made a separate preparatory facial study that was to be inserted into the final composition. The traces of underdrawing are most obvious along the bridge of the nose, on the nostrils, in the corners of the mouth, on the left eyelid, and at the contours of the cheeks and chin. The use of a ruler to draw the structures in the lace of the bonnet and collar is evidence of the painting being carefully built up in various stages. The serious expression on Catharina’s face in the portrait by Pickenoy – which was not painted directly from the sitter onto the canvas either – corresponds to the model patiently holding her position whilst sitting for the artist [74].

In the portrait of Catharina Hooft, Hals captured a typical shift in attention. The sitter turns away from the normal alignment of body, head, and eyes towards a new focus. In a brief moment of transition, the eyes are already directed towards the new target and the head has followed to some extent, while the rest of the body remains in the original position still. The facial features show a hint of a smile as a visible comment on this change. Characterizing this facial expression requires a subtle rendering of the small creases and bulges appearing in the face. In this constellation, the mental impulse becomes apparent which was recognized as ‘liveliness’ by the viewers of this and other works by Hals. The psychological approach to observing this manner of expression involves giving particular consideration to the crucial area of development. The focal point of attention is therefore the face, which is perceived brighter and with greater contrasts than the surrounding area, as if standing out from the dark dress. But this central field is in motion. Hals acknowledged this by creating soft contours everywhere in the face except around the eyes and by ensuring that individual zones of color and light reflexes remain recognizable as loose brushstrokes. As ‘first’ impressions, these belong to an initial moment of perception which is as yet not quite in focus and incomplete. Consequently, reading Hals’s style of painting as unfinished, ‘rough’ or arbitrary does not accurately describe its unique character. Hals’s deliberately transient brushwork was able to convey suggestions of quickly fleeting and momentary facial and body movements while indicating at the same time that the overall pictorial reality was fluid and a momentary impression. The facial expression of the small child would have turned into a rigid mask in any elaborate surface rendering. Examples for such failed representations of expression can easily be found in the history of painting, starting with imitators of Hals in his own workshop or the doll-like, frozen laughter of the child inserted by Salomon de Bray (1597-1664) in Hals’s early group painting of the Van Campen family [75]. In its porcelain-style smoothness and the too white teeth, this face has been recorded more cerebrally than visually. It feels impossible to linger on the rigid area of the mouth, which is intended to convey a smile. This child’s face differs strongly with that of its brother – featured on a fragment that was cut off from the family portrait (A2.4) – in which the lighting clearly generates colors and shapes on its own accord, such as edgy light streaks and bands of shadow [76].³

Laughter, smiles or grins are emotional expressions with a fleeting character by their very nature, and this is how Hals understood them. He captured these suggestions of movement in a carefully structured but seemingly sketchy manner of painting. This technique had a mediating function for the subjects he represented. It was an individual form of expression without a direct model, but certainly not an artificial ‘style’, a ‘logo of the Hals brand’ which would have assisted his profile as an artist or his positioning on the art market, as was suggested recently.⁴ Such assumptions belong to the modern world of ‘art marketing’ and not to the 17th century. At that time, nobody purchased a ‘Frans Hals’ and clearly nobody considered it a sacrilege for another painter to add something to a picture by Hals. Rather, representations had to be suitable for the importance of a subject, be it commissioned portraits, intellectually reflected history paintings, or symbolic images of everyday subjects which were bought on the open art market.

Hals first adopted his sketchy, out-of-focus perception in his representations with more pronounced movement, such as in areas of the 1616 Banquet of the officers of the St George civic guard (A2.0), in the hand area of ‘Piero’ – a humorous take on a portrait also done in 1616 (A1.3)– and in his depictions of children. This style of painting can be found fully formed in study heads of laughing children created in the first half of the 1620s. Many of these representations were executed by Hals as head studies and complemented by workshop assistants from the neck and collar down to become finished pictures. This is the case for the two pictures of children in Los Angeles and Washington (A3.6, A3.31), as well as for the Laughing boy [77], which, unlike the facial features of Catharina Hooft, was painted from nature, but ‘alla prima’ – that is in a swift application of paint directly onto the panel, wet on wet. This is particularly obvious in the accents that determine the shape of the eyes and nose. A sketchy technique of depicting faces can be observed here, which Hals adopted brilliantly in representations of musicians and singers, actors and drunkards. In the anonymous sitters for his genre portraits he found unrestrained temperament. These ‘tronies’ – as they were known at the time – were studies of character and type which had reached an independent standing since the late16th century and had originally been used as preparatory material for larger scenes.

71
Frans Hals (I)
Portrait of Catharina Hooft (1618-1691) with her wet nurse, 1620
Berlin (city, Germany), Gemäldegalerie (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), inv./cat.nr. 801G
cat.no. A1.12

72
Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy
Portrait of Catharina Hooft (1618-1691), dated 1636
Berlin (city, Germany), Gemäldegalerie (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), inv./cat.nr. 753B

73
Detail of fig. 71
Frans Hals (I)
Portrait of Catharina Hooft with her wet nurse, 1620
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

74
Detail of fig. 72
Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy
Portrait of Catharina Hooft, 1636
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

75
Detail of cat.no. A2.3
Salomon de Bray, 1628
Portrait of Ghijsbert Claesz. van Campen, Maria Joris and their children, c. 1623-1624
Toledo Museum of Art

76
Detail of cat.no. A2.4
Frans Hals (I)
Portrait of three children of Ghijsbert Claesz. van Campen and Maria Joris, c. 1623-1624
Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts
photo: J. Geleyns

77
Detail of cat.no. A3.4
Frans Hals (I) and workshop
Laughing boy, c. 1624-1626
The Hague, Mauritshuis

Most unusual among the tronies by Hals is that of Malle Babbe (A1.103), which combines momentary observation with an unprecedented, outrageous autonomy of brushstrokes. This gripping study of a drunkenly laughing woman combines the precise observation of outstanding light and shadow effects with a movement driven diagonally towards the left in a sequence of falling lines of color, mostly in shades of grey and brown. The hasty execution also contributes to the impact of the representation which illustrates the fleeting character of what was observed. This is a mental image, a ‘screenshot’ of impressions which left a significant impact in memory. Similar to Verdonck (A1.34), who had already been taken to the workhouse, the probably alcoholic Barbara Claes had disgraced herself in Haarlem at the time so that she was referred to as ‘malle’ (crazy) and was incarcerated in the workhouse in 1646 due to ‘immoral behaviour’.⁵ The public disgrace made a household name of the woman, and her provocative demeanor became potentially worthy of a painting by Hals and his assistants. Whoever may have asked her to sit for a picture, Hals used her for a portrait-like character study, followed by several variants that were created in his workshop. If we compare the first version today in Berlin [78] with the workshop variant in New York [79], the impact of coordinating the painting technique with the depiction of the facial muscles becomes evident. The staccato of sloping streaks of color correlates to the creases in the face and the shadow of the mouth [80]. One almost hears the rough laughter of the drunkard turning to the side and away from the viewer. While the shapes of Malle Babbe’s face emerge from the half-light in the autograph version, the workshop variant copies her pose in reverse and turns it into a brightly lit frontal view [81]. The latter is painted more thickly overall, with numerous strokes of color in multiple directions. It lingers on the variegation of brightly lit reflecting lines, where the first version only offers casual hints at shapes. This is especially visible in the collar area [82] [83]. These examples demonstrate that Hals’s autograph manner of painting can be characterized as simpler, sparser and more precise in setting accents.

Like planes and corners left untouched by a sculptor, the edges and stripy movements of the brush were used in the Berlin Malle Babbe to contour the face. Hals never used the brush in a jittery manner and always applied paint sparingly. He only knew precisely targeted, often diagonally rising or falling accents which convey an impression of movement in what was perceived. A quality of perception in the two-dimensional picture is used here to create an impression of movement in the three-dimensional image space. There are sometimes just slight exaggerations of contours, edgy emphasized contrasts of color or brightness, which seem to follow an overall direction of movement. Sometimes the edges of paint that was applied still protrude without blurring as in a hasty, rough sketch. In Hals, both effects seem to follow the same joint rhythm. Instead of carefully designed surfaces with smooth transitions, there are gradations of fewer modelling levels of brightness and color. This visual reading pattern gives a uniform structure to Hals’s painting. It is subject to a logic of perception where the facial features of his sitters are in focus and determine certain directions like a dominant motif, while everything else is just captured summarily. At the same time, it qualifies the image impression as a semblance whose contours are co-shaped by the viewers’ perception.

80
Detail of fig. 78
Frans Hals (I)
Malle Babbe, c. 1639-1646
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

81
Detail of fig. 79
workshop of Frans Hals (I), possibly Frans Hals (II)
Malle Babbe, c. 1640-1646
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

82
Detail of fig. 78
Frans Hals (I)
Malle Babbe, c. 1639-1646
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie

83
Detail of fig. 79
workshop of Frans Hals (I), possibly Frans Hals (II)
Malle Babbe, c. 1640-1646
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art