RKD STUDIES

Oil on canvas, 69.7 x 54 cm
Private collection

The appearance of this man in a frontal position and with a steady demanding gaze indicates an essential sense of entitlement and emphasizes the sitter’s phlegmatic and ponderous disposition. Revealing his original forehead and restoring the angular shade of the hat has done much to enhance the overall impression. While Hals’s compositions are often based on dynamic diagonals, in this case there is a framework of mostly vertical and horizontal directions. The area of the arm is well preserved in its shades of grey and can be regarded as a benchmark for Hals’s style in the 1640s, which was both abstract and confidently sculptural in shape. The clothing areas in workshop executions of portraits that are apparent from the 1640s onwards can convincingly be held against the present portrait.

In 2012, Marieke de Winkel suggested an identification of the sitter as Johan de Wael (1594-1663), whose portrait was listed Hofstede de Groot under no. 240.¹ As a pendant, she considered the 1638 Portrait of a woman in Cleveland (A1.88). Even though the cataloguing of both pictures mentioned a panel support, the posture, visible area and tonality do not match: the man is sitting at a lower level and further back than the woman. A portrait of Johan de Wael painted by Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck (c. 1600/1603-1662) appeared at auction in the United States in 2013, and offers a detailed comparison [1]. Clearly, there is a notable difference in the facial features when compared to the present work by Hals, especially in the shape of the nose and the eyebrows.²

A1.101

Oil on canvas, 153 x 252 cm
Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, inv.no. OS I-114

The present group portrait is probably the only work by Hals that is still in its original 17th-century frame.⁴ With a slightly differing profile, this frame resembles that of the pendant of the Regentesses of St Elisabeth’s Hospital, signed and dated 1641 by Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck (c. 1600/1603-1662) [2].

Among the honorary positions in Holland’s communities were those of the principals of hospitals, orphanages and homes for the elderly, as well as the leaders of craft guilds and trading companies. Members of upper-class families were engaged in these roles, and were in turn repeatedly honored by group portraits. The terminology of the ‘principals’ or ‘Regents’ became synonymous with the urban upper class, whose clothes were called ‘Regents garb’. The earliest Dutch group portrait of regents of a charitable institution was created in 1617 by Cornelis van der Voort (1576-1624) in Amsterdam.⁵ For Haarlem, Hals’s picture of the five regents of the St Elisabeth’s Hospital is one of the earliest examples, together with Verspronck’s depiction of four regentesses from the same year. Overall, twelve regents’ portraits were painted in Haarlem between 1640/1641 and 1682. Apart from Hals and Verspronck, these commissions were executed by Jacob van Loo (1614-1670), Pieter van Anraedt (c. 1635-1678) and Jan de Braij (1626/1627-1697).

The St Elisabeth’s Hospital provided healthcare for the town’s poor, who were sometimes treated, cared for and accommodated in the building without charge. The two group paintings were important public commissions; the reason why they were divided among Hals and Verspronck is not recorded, but may have to do with workshop capacity as well as a certain distributive balance between the two established painters. In addition, the characteristics of Hals’s portraits may have played a part, as it favored men. The women may have preferred a smoother style of painting. This is even more evident in the commission for the portraits of Cornelis Guldewagen (1599-1663) (A4.3.54) and Agatha van der Horn (1603-1680) where the female portrait commission went to Jan de Braij.⁶ Furthermore, the two group portraits were not intended to be hung as pendants, but were meant to furnish separate rooms. Both paintings followed the traditional Amsterdam model of placing the sitters around a table, with Hals taking the position of the two figures on the right from an engraving by Jonas Suyderhoef (1614-1686), after an oil sketch by Thomas de Keyser (1596-1667), which depicts the four Amsterdam mayors sitting together.⁷

Hals’s sitters are, from left to right:

1. Sivert Sem Warmont (* 1614)
2. Salomon Cousaert (1608-1655)
3. Johan van Clarenbeek (1601-1642)
4. Dirck Dircksz. Del († after 1646)
5. François Wouters (1600-1661)

Norbert Middelkoop pointed to the hierarchy of the sitters, which can be inferred from their positioning within the composition, decreasing in rank from front to back and from left to right.⁸ The hint of movement in the faces and hands indicates a thoughtful pause in the joint discussion. The perspective of the observer is striking, as it only leaves a very short distance between the viewer and the sitters. The format of heads and hands is graduated in this case, as in later regents’ paintings; in spite of the limited spatial depth the size notably decreases.

The loose composition shows an arrangement of rising and falling diagonals. The lighting emphasizes heads and hands, while the source of light seems to be a window just to the left of the depicted scene, so that its intensity decreases towards the back of the pictorial space. Biesboer pointed out that the portrait was probably intended for the regents’ room that is still in place today and that had direct afternoon sunlight.⁹ This realistic lighting arrangement probably also contributed to alterations in the colors and the darkening of the halftones in the background, so that in spite of the emphasized lighting the visible wall in the picture now appears dark grey. It is likely to have been as light as in Verspronck’s contemporary depiction of the regentesses. A reduction in coverage in the mixed-in lead white has made the wall color transparent now, so that the brownish-grey ground has become more visible. As Hals’s later regents’ pictures also demonstrate, the light-dark contrasts were most likely not as sharp as they are now, even in the shaded area of the faces. Also, the dark areas in the regents’ clothing were not only the black surfaces that they are now. Rather, they were presented three-dimensionally in nuances of grey, as can be concluded after comparison with two drawn copies by Wybrand Hendriks (1744-1831) (D30, D31).

The relatively large hands in all regents’ groups – most clearly visible in the present picture – are in keeping with a situation where the painter observes his sitters from a short distance and perceives objects nearer to him as enlarged. There are few indications of how exactly the scene was composed, whether the canvas was painted directly with the sitters in front, or whether there were smaller separate studies on canvas or paper that were then transferred in the correct size into the large composition. The size of the present canvas and the difficulty in obtaining sufficient lighting make a sweeping gaze from the sitter back to the canvas hard to imagine. This would suggest the use of individual preparatory studies which were then transferred into the final composition. Slive had already noted that the sitter on the far right, François Wouters, is also depicted in Hals’s guardsmen’s portrait of 1639 (A2.12).¹⁰ In the latter example, the transfer of features from individual studies is visible – an intermediate step which can be attributed to the hand of an assistant – through the pattern of lines and the consistently soft application of paint. When comparing Wouters’ facial features in the 1639 portrait with those in the present painting of 1641, we see that the latter is characterized by both loose and thin paint application, and an ease of brushwork [3][4]. The half-shades are thinly applied here and appear grey and black due to the loss of coverage in the lead white. Also, the craquelé is structured differently. This means that the entire passage was executed by Hals – perhaps directly from the sitter on both outer edges, the sitters in the center were probably based on separate studies.

A1.102

2
Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck
Regentesses of St Elisabeth's Hospital in Haarlem, dated 1641
Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum, inv./cat.nr. OS I-622

3
Detail of cat.no. A1.102

4
Detail of cat.no. A2.12
Frans Hals (I) and workshop
Officers and sergeants of the St George civic guard, 1639
Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum

Oil on canvas, 78.5 x 66.2 cm
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, inv.no. 801C

After an erroneous reading of the inscription on the painting’s old stretcher, the sitter was referred to in earlier publications as ‘Hille Bobbe’. Read correctly, the 17th- or 18th-century inscription can be transcribed as: ‘Malle Babbe van Haerlem ... Fr[a]ns Hals’. Until recently, only one contemporary reference to this person was known, which is the payment of 65 guilders in 1653 for ‘Malle Babbe in the workhouse’, paid by the municipal leper house. The ‘werkhuis’ (workhouse) was an asylum and prison at the same time. Frans Hals was in contact with this institution himself, as his mentally handicapped son Pieter († 1667) was housed there in 1642, as well as his daughter Sara (* 1617), who was admitted there for a shorter period in the same year on account of ‘fornication’.¹² At the beginning of 2013 Floris Mulder, curator of the Museum van de Geest | Dolhuys in Haarlem, found a record in the Haarlem archives that a certain Barbara Claes had been imprisoned in the workhouse in 1646 because of ‘immoral behaviour’.¹³ This fact points to a public nuisance caused by the woman, who was referred to as ‘malle’ (crazy). As neither a day release nor a portrait session in the asylum are likely, the group of depictions of Malle Babbe was probably executed in Hals’s workshop prior to 1646.¹⁴

The character of this kind of half-length depictions indicates that they were created for the free market and not as a commission. As there are several closely related executions by different hands, there seems to have been a particular demand. Similar to Verdonck (A1.34), who was also taken to the workhouse, the probably alcoholic Malle Babbe seems to have become an exemplary figure in contemporary Haarlem. Whoever made her sit for a portrait, Hals used her for a portrait-like character sketch. In a recent publication, this was condemned too harshly: ‘Frans Hals borrows the mask of genre [painting] to subvert the conventions of portraiture. […] he takes a madwoman from Haarlem's lower class and makes her a participant in a form of representation that was a prerogative of the social elite’.¹⁵ The subversive character of this depiction runs counter to the public disciplining of laughter in the 17th century. Nevertheless, Hals had frequently painted smiling children and laughing and grinning drinkers before, probably as a characterization of the human senses and unbridled emotions, if not even as a symbol of transience. The owl as a sign of madness and occult sayings may also be associated with the wisdom of fools who laugh about life.

The date of this unusual picture has been moved back and forth between Hals’s genre production of the 1620s and his later work. The streaky brushstrokes and the opaque grey tones in the shaded area of the face, however, distinguish the present painting from both depictions of Peeckelhaering in Leipzig and Kassel (A1.50, A1.51) and move it to the beginning of Hals’s late career. Judging from the brown-grey palette, the painting’s execution can be assumed no earlier than 1639. Perhaps, even the date of 1645 was not based on conjecture, when Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) wrote it on his copy of Malle Babbe [5].

A1.103
Photo: Christoph Schmidt; Public Domain Mark 1.0

5
Gustave Courbet after Frans Hals (I)
Woman drinking, with an owl on her shoulder, dated 1869
Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle, inv./cat.nr. 2262

Oil on canvas, 122.4 x 97.5 cm, inscribed, dated and monogrammed upper left: AETAT SVAE 72 / AN° 1643 / FH
New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, inv.no. 1961.18.23
Pendant to A1.105

Today’s appearance of this pair of portraits is relatively dark; the sitters’ silhouettes are placed in front of the backs of the chairs, and there is little contrast against the dark background. The distinctive heads and hands form bright islands in the composition, whose characterful expression deserves particular attention. The face of the man expresses a friendly disposition and an attempt to concentrate. From today’s perspective, his expression can be seen as the psychological effect of tedious sitting and the hope for a desired result in his portrait. The superficial friendliness is combined with composure, as expressed by the hands clasping the gloves. The identification of the sitter as ‘Mr Bodolphe’ is based on anecdotal evidence, according to Valentiner it referred to an earlier inscription on the reverse of the picture which is no longer verifiable.¹⁶

Oil on canvas, 122.4 x 97.5 cm, inscribed, dated and monogrammed upper right: AETAT SVAE 72 / AN° 1643 / FH
New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, inv.no. 1961.18.24
Pendant to A1.104

As she scrutinizes the painter – and the viewer today – while seemingly about to utter a withering remark, this woman’s face is one of Hals’s masterpieces. Few others of his portraits have captured such pronounced traces of a suspicious nature. The way the sitter frowns and the tension in her mouth, creating a small crease above the right nostril, result in a sharp and not very sympathetic appearance. It may have been the case that a person of such a character was not grateful for her brilliant portrait. It may also have been true that the majority of the portrait’s viewers focused more on the overall representation in a dignified large format, than on the extremely strong character expressed in the facial features. Hals’s power of observation is incredibly accurate in this instance; the present picture could be read as that of a Malle Babbe (A1.103) of the upper class.

Oil on canvas, 93.4 x 76.2 cm, inscribed, dated and monogrammed upper right: ÆTA SVÆ 6... / 1643 FH
Sale London (Christie's), 2 July 2024, lot 17

From his three-quarter turned position, this standing gentleman peers at the viewer somewhat sullenly. On the basis of recent archival research, Frans Grijzenhout and Oliver Mertens have discovered that the coat of arms to the right of the sitter's head can be assigned to the De Wolff family, which can be traced back to 16th- and 17th-century Haarlem. Grijzenhout, additionally, drew attention to the tombstone of Jan de Wolff (1542/1543-1606) in the Haarlem Church of St. Bavo, which features a comparable family crest. Considering the life dates of the various members of the De Wolff family that are still known today, it is likely that the individual depicted by Hals could be the cloth weaver Joost de Wolff (1576/1577-after 1652). He reportedly lived in the Grote Houtstraat in 1604 and is documented as the owner of a house in the Kleine Houtstraat in 1628 and 1650. According to an entry in a register of members of the Dutch Reformed Church, Joost de Wolff was 52 years old on December 12, 1629. Accordingly, he was probably 65 or 66 years old when his portrait was painted.

A drawing in chalk and wash, probably dating from the late 19th century, accurately copies the area of the head and shoulders (D99).

A1.106

Oil on canvas, 118.7 x 94 cm, inscribed, dated and monogrammed center right: AETAT SVAE 37/ AN° 1643 / FH
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv.no. 26.101.11

Gudlaugsson succeeded in identifying the sitter on the basis of an oval copy after the present portrait, painted around 1700 by Pieter van der Werff (1665-1722).¹⁷ It was part of a series of portraits depicting the directors of the Rotterdam Chamber of the East India Company that documented the names of the sitters as well as the date of their election to lifetime director, in this case 1651. Paulus Verschuur (1606-1667) was the owner of Rotterdam’s biggest cloth mill; he was also a member of the local town council, and seven times mayor. The reason why he had his portrait painted by a Haarlem artist may perhaps be found in his business connections. However, his sister also lived in Haarlem, where she was married to a cloth merchant. It may be assumed that the sittings took place in Hals’s workshop. The portrait depicts a self-confident noble gentleman bordering on arrogant, casting a searching look with raised eyebrows at the viewer.

A1.107

Oil on canvas, 80 x 65.3 cm, monogrammed lower right: FH
Greifswald, Pommersches Landesmuseum, inv.no. A 228/17 411

Around 1850, this picture was in a private collection in Stettin (today Szecin, Poland), from where it was donated in 1863 to the local municipal museum, together with the Portrait of a woman (A3.43). The two paintings were then considered to be pendants, and the date of 1643 on the female counterpart could also be correct for the male portrait. However, a cleaning process in 1937 created doubts about whether they actually formed a pair. The woman’s portrait had been adapted in size to correspond to that of the man by adding a strip of canvas. In addition, the posture of the two sitters does not match. In Spring 1945, a selection of artworks from the Stettin museum was moved away from the advancing front line to the West. These were temporarily stored in the Coburg Fortress where three pictures remained later on, including the Portrait of a woman. The Portrait of a man became part of the Pommern foundation that was first housed in Kiel castle and which forms part of the Pommersches Landesmuseum in Greifswald today. Nowadays, the Portrait of a woman is in the same collection, reunited with its alleged pendant.

The present little-known portrait is extremely effective in its dashed brushwork and excellent state of preservation. The brushstrokes in the face, which become detached from the representational function, anticipate later works, such as Portrait of a man in the Frick Collection (A3.61) and Portrait of a man at the Bührle Foundation (A1.129).

A1.108
© Pommersches Landesmuseum

Oil on canvas, 36.8 x 29.2 cm
Hanover (New Hampshire), Hood Museum of Art, inv.no. 2009.78.1

The sitter’s face, with its complacent expression in the eyes and mouth, is loosely executed and well-preserved. Sadly, only the relatively narrow fragment of the original portrait survives. Stylistically, this picture is close to the Portrait of a man in Greifswald (A1.108).

A1.109

Oil on canvas, 87.9 x 65.1 cm
Amsterdam, Douwes Fine Art

This portrait was offered in the art trade several times in recent years, and its odyssey does not seem to have ended yet. The reason seems to lie in the difficult reconstruction of the area around the chest and proper right arm of the sitter. The execution of the powerful head and the right hand with the glove are convincing examples of Hals’s style – closely related to the Portrait of Joseph Coymans (A1.111). However, there is a blind spot in the much too white collar and in what is now the flat area of the chest, that cannot have been executed by Hals in this way. This contradiction in quality is the result of earlier damage and overpainting. The picture has been recorded in a Dutch private collection since 1930 and was offered at auction in Arnhem in 1963 in an overpainted condition, where the previous owners acquired it. They had it cleaned in two separate treatments and presented it at the Frans Hals Museum in 1964. The museum director, Henricus Petrus Baard (1906-2000), identified it as a work by Frans Hals. In 1964-1965 and 1969 the picture was restored in the Haarlem Museum. In between, it was sold at auction in London in 1965 and purchased by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. In 2004 it returned to the art market.

A1.110