The Signature Style of Frans Hals: Painting, Subjectivity, and the Market in Early Modernity 9789048514595

Table of contents :
Table Of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Liveliness Uniquely His
Chapter 2.Virtuosity
Chapter 3.Painting For The Market
Chapter 4.The Hals Brand
Chapter 5.Modernity
Notes
List Of Illustrations
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The SignaTure STyle of franS halS

Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age Editorial Board H. Perry Chapman, University of Delaware Lia van Gemert, University of Amsterdam Benjamin J. Kaplan, University College London Henk van Nierop, University of Amsterdam Eric Jan Sluijter, University of Amsterdam Marc van Vaeck, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Published in this Series Christopher D.M. Atkins, The Signature Style of Frans Hals (isbn 978 90 8964 335 3) Peter de Cauwer, Tranen van bloed. Het beleg van ’s-Hertogenbosch en de oorlog in de Nederlanden, 1629 (isbn 978 90 8964 016 1) Margriet van Eikema Hommes, Art and Allegiance in the Dutch Golden Age (isbn 978 90 8964 326 1) Liesbeth Geevers, Gevallen vazallen. De integratie van Oranje, Egmont en Horn in de SpaansHabsburgse monarchie (1559-1567) (isbn 978 90 8964 069 7) Jonathan Israel, Stuart Schwartz, Michiel van Groesen [Inleiding], The Expansion of Tolerance. Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624-1654) (isbn 978 90 5356 902 3) Robert Parthesius, Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters. The Development of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Shipping Network in Asia 1595-1660 (isbn 978 90 5356 517 9) Jochai Rosen, Soldiers at Leisure. The Guardroom Scene in Dutch Genre Painting of the Golden Age (isbn 978 90 8964 204 2) Eric Jan Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude (isbn 978 90 5356 837 8) Erik Swart, Krijgsvolk. Militaire professionalisering en het ontstaan van het Staatse leger, 1568-1590 (isbn 978 90 5356 876 7) Anna Tummers, Koenraad Jonckheere, Art Market and Connoisseurship. A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and Their Contemporaries (isbn 978 90 8964 032 1) Anna Tummers, The Eye of the Connoisseur (isbn 978 90 8964 321 6) Natascha Veldhorst, Zingend door het leven. Het Nederlandse liedboek in de Gouden Eeuw (isbn 978 90 8964 146 5) Griet Vermeesch, Oorlog, steden en staatsvorming. De grenssteden Gorinchem en Doesburg tijdens de geboorte-eeuw van de Republiek (1570-1680) (isbn 978 90 5356 882 8) Thijs Weststeijn, Margaret Cavendish in de Nederlanden. Filosofie en schilderkunst in de Gouden Eeuw (isbn 978 90 8964 029 1) Thijs Weststeijn, The Visible World. Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age (isbn 978 90 8964 027 7)

The SignaTure STyle of franS halS Painting, Subjectivity, and the Market in early Modernity

Christopher D.M. Atkins

Am sterdam Uni v er s i t y P re s s

Founded in 2000 as part of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Amsterdam Centre for Study of the Golden Age (Amsterdams Centrum voor de Studie van de Gouden Eeuw) aims to promote the history and culture of the Dutch Republic during the ‘long’ seventeenth century (c.1560-1720). The Centre’s publications provide an insight into lively diversity and continuing relevance of the Dutch Golden Age. They offer original studies on a wide variety of topics, ranging from Rembrandt to Vondel, from Beeldenstorm (iconoclastic fury) to Ware Vrijheid (True Freedom) and from Batavia to New Amsterdam. Politics, religion, culture, economics, expansion and warfare all come together in the Centre’s interdisciplinary setting. Editorial control is in the hands of international scholars specialized in seventeenth-century history, art and literature. For more information see www.aup.nl/goudeneeuw or http://cf.uba.uva. nl/goudeneeuw/

The publication of this book has been made possible by grants from the Prince Bernhard Fund, the Historians of Netherlandish Art, The Netherland-America Foundation, The Professional Staff Congress of The City University of New York, Queens College of The City University New York, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Saunders III, and an anonymous donor. Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Cover illustration: Frans Hals, Samuel Ampzing, ca. 1630. Oil on copper, 16.2 x 12.3 cm. Private Collection, New York. Lay-out: ProGrafici, Goes isbn e-isbn e-isbn nur

978 90 8964 335 3 978 90 4851 459 5 (pdf ) 978 90 4851 559 2 (ePub) 642

© Christopher D.M. Atkins / Amsterdam University Press, 2012 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Ta b l e o f Con T e n Ts

Acknowledgements Introduction Painting and Style Subjectivity The Market Early Modernity

7 9 12 14 16 18

Chapter 1

A Liveliness Uniquely His Lively Paintings/Painting Liveliness A Lively Method A Distinctive Approach

23 26 50 64

Chapter 2

Virtuosity Virtuoso Brushwork Virtuosi-Liefhebbers The Self-Aware Virtuoso?

85 89 101 111

Chapter 3

Painting for the Market A Process Innovation? Flemish Inspiration A Signature Style

115 118 127 147

Chapter 4

The Hals Brand Hals’s Workshop The Activities and Products of the Workshop Market Identity and the House Brand

159 162 167 178

5

table of contents Chapter 5

Modernity Initial Constructions The Nineteenth-Century Revival The Modern Tradition “Fated Always to Look Modern”

the signature style of frans hals 193 196 211 224 232

Notes

239

List of Illustrations

289

Bibliography

297

Index

319

6

a C k n o w le dgme n Ts

This book would not have been possible without the aid of innumerable individuals and institutions. These terse acknowledgements can only begin to express the depths of my gratitude. My study of Hals and his paintings began as my doctoral dissertation under the watchful eye of Mariët Westermann at Rutgers University. Her unflinching support and provocative commentaries have propelled this project, as well as my understanding of northern European art, more generally. Most formatively, she offered the advice that sticks in my mind every time I sit before my computer – write so that readers see what I see. Perry Chapman, Sarah McHam, and Catherine Puglisi all provided rigorous and thoughtful feedback to my dissertation that pushed my interpretations in new directions. I hope that they recognize my answers to their questions in what follows. While at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ronni Baer stood as my model for her exacting attention to detail and thoroughness. She also helped me learn important lessons about how to balance one’s professional and personal lives. She has taught me more, about more, than she will ever know. The Netherland-America Foundation, The Graduate School of Rutgers University, and several Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Awards funded opportunities to conduct research in the Netherlands and examine paintings by Hals in European collections. While undertaking this research, several individuals deserve special thanks. At the Stichting Restauratie Limburg, through the Amsterdam-Maastricht Summer University, René Hoppenbrouwers and his staff helped teach me how painters paint. My dear friends Tico and Iris Seifert proved the most hospitable of hosts first in Berlin, and later in Edinburgh, and did wonders connecting me with colleagues throughout Germany. Especially during our shared time abroad, Adriaan Waiboer served as my sounding board over many, many lunches at the RKD and excursions to local watering holes. Cécile Tainturier shared her office with me many years ago in Leiden, supplying all manner of advice in the process, and, more recently, facilitated research in Paris. In Haarlem, Pieter Biesboer shared then unpublished research, and offered advice and inspiration to a younger scholar. I also wish to thank others who have contributed to this project directly, or to my intellectual growth, more broadly: Susan Anderson, Matthew Baigell, David Bergeron, Myra Berman, Marten Jan Bok, Peter van den Brink, Edwin Buijsen, Marietta Cambereri, Bill Clark, Marcus Dekiert, Laurel Dial, Blaise Ducos, Charles Dumas, Martin Eidelberg, Frima Fox Hofrichter,

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Peter Hecht, Dagmar Hirschfelder, Julie Hochstrasser, Frederick Ilchman, Natasha and Narayan Khandekar, Elmer Kolfin, Gerbrand Kotting, Barbara Lane, Walter Liedtke, Bernd Lindemann, Rhona MacBeth, Mirielle de Mareveld, Kevin Murphy, Uta Neidhardt, Petria Noble, Andrea Norris, Saander Paarlberg, Jim Saslow, Gero Seelig, Suzanna Simor, Eleanor Skolnik, Seymour Slive, Eric Jan Sluijter, Sara Smith, Linda Stone Ferrier, Annette Stott, Judy Sund, Anna Tummers, Lisa Vergara, Ulrike Villwock, Dennis Weller, Ernst van de Wetering, Arthur Wheelock, Joanna Woodall, and Michael Zell. I thank the staffs of numerous libraries who offered much-needed assistance, including those at The Art Library, Rutgers University; Universiteitbibliotheek Leiden; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague; Rijskbureau voor Kunsthistorische Dokumentatie; William Morris Hunt Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fine Arts Library and Widener Library of Harvard University; Frick Art Reference Library; Yale Art Library; New York Public Library; Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Marquand Library and Firestone Library at Princeton University; and Rosenthal Library, Queens College. At Amsterdam University Press, first Maaike Groot and later Anniek Meinders led me through the process of transforming my manuscript into a book. One could not ask for better, more attentive guides. Inge van der Bijl served as a tireless editor who shepherded the text through the production phase with the most attentive of gazes. At various intervals, Christine Waslander offered invaluable contributions. During the review process, both Frans Grijzenhout and Hans Vlieghe made salient suggestions for strengthening my arguments. Thanks, too, to Eric Jan Sluijter for undertaking the crucial colorproofing so that readers can see Hals's mastery for themselves. Publishing a book as well-illustrated as this one is an expensive undertaking. Financial support for this publication has been supplied by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Netherland-America Foundation, the Historians of Netherlandish Art Research Fellowship, and a Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award. With unparalleled aplomb, Otto Naumann identified and secured crucial contributions from private individuals. I thank in particular Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Saunders III and an anonymous donor for their generosity. At Queens College, Barbara Lane advocated for financial support on my behalf and Dean Tamara Evans generously allocated much-needed funds. Finally, I would like to thank my family. My mother and father long ago taught me invaluable lessons about hard work, perseverance, and the joys that come with stimulating the mind. As my role model, I have always benefited from chasing my sister’s examples. My stepparents and every member of the extended Matt family have offered all manner of encouragement. My son Oliver has brought immeasurable joy and wonder, providing frequent relief from the rigors of scholarship. My wife, Sharon, has lived with this book as long as I have. I cannot begin to express my boundless gratitude for her patience, and empathy. She variously supplied a critical eye, a supportive ear, and an open heart at all the most opportune moments. None of what follows could have been possible without her.

8

I n Tr o du CTIon

I n Tr o du CTIon

Two formative experiences I had with paintings by Frans Hals inspired and shaped this project. In my first semester of graduate school I stood before the portrait of Claes Duyst van Voorhout (fig. 92) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, I confronted the image of a robust Dutch burgher who seemed to be brimming with confidence and vitality. Rather than poring over costume details or paraphernalia, though, I was struck by an overriding sense of technical brilliance in the execution. I marveled at the painter’s graceful touches of the brush – short jabs at the elbow, broad sweeps at the contours of the shoulder, daubed highlights at the cheek and nose. To put it differently, I was engrossed not with the “what,” but with the “how.” While this way of viewing might be natural for an artist, it was an epiphany for me, as I came to the discipline as a student of cultural history. A few years later, I made my maiden trek to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. About halfway through the galleries, I turned the corner to see Hals’s late group portraits of the regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse (figs. 59 and 60). As soon as my eyes met the portraits I stopped in my tracks. Standing a good fifteen meters or more from the canvases, I could clearly see Hals’s bold brushwork. To take but one passage, the knee and calf of the seated figure at the far right read as bold handling of the type more common to the 1950s New York School. I found it hard not to imagine how anyone could have seen Hals’s patchwork of red, white, and black as anything other than strokes of paint. Perhaps inspired by the setting – the museum is the Old Men’s Almshouse – and certainly influenced by my art history studies, I began to wonder how Hals’s original audiences experienced the pictures and to ponder the unmistakable facture employed to craft them. To excavate how seventeenth-century viewers saw the paintings I turned to early written characterizations of Hals and his art. Theodorus Schrevelius’s 1648 characterization of Hals’s art illuminates some of the ways the painter’s work was understood in his lifetime: “Nor can I let this pass in mute silence, Frans and Dirck Hals, brothers, of whom one excels almost everyone with the superb and uncommon manner of painting which is uniquely his. His paintings are imbued with such force and vitality that they seem to breathe and live.”1 Squarely focusing on the way that Hals painted, Schrevelius’s brief characterization succinctly captures the three-fold impact of the artist’s handling: it was lively, unique, and masterful. Similarly, the first biography of Hals, published in 1718 by Arnold Houbraken, described the painter’s process as follows: “They say that it was his custom to lay his portraits on thick and wet, only applying the brushstrokes later with

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the words: ‘Now to give it the master’s touch.’”2 Houbraken’s labeling of Hals’s ultimate strokes as the self-consciously applied “master’s touch” emphasizes the painter’s artistry, subjectivity, and agency. The responses of Schrevelius, Houbraken, and others variously refute and/or problematize longstanding opinions about Hals’s manner. While these early accounts address the vitality of his method, scholars have considered that Hals used his vigorous brushwork merely to activate his subjects, ignoring other ways in which it functioned. At the same time, none have explored why Hals would have sought to enliven his subjects through his brushwork and the selection of momentary gestures and expressions, or why seventeenth-century audiences would have appreciated and cultivated such an artistic approach. Since the late nineteenth century, criticism also has oriented Hals in relation to later artistic movements.3 While Hals’s influence on later painters has had a significant impact on the history of Western art, considering his art almost exclusively in relation to the art it inspired rather than from its sources and contemporaries essentially jettisons it from the temporal and cultural contexts of its production. As recently as 1990, for example, Claus Grimm described Hals’s rough manner as a “peculiar quirk” in seventeenth-century Holland.4 Indeed, until Pieter Biesboer unequivocally demonstrated that the artist’s sitters and clients were members of the economic and cultural elite in Haarlem, Hals and his paintings were widely believed to have been misunderstood and unappreciated by the painter’s contemporaries.5 To date, no study has attempted to build upon Biesboer’s findings by exploring why Hals’s rough manner appealed to the painter’s clients. This book is the first to explore how, why, and to what ends Hals consciously cultivated his technique, style, and aesthetic. I approach the topic from different angles in each chapter – seventeenth-century art theory, economic and market forces, the workshop and early modern notions of authorship, relationships to high-end contemporary Flemish painting, and active selffashioning programs by the artist and his clients, among others. The various conclusions offered by each chapter complement one another and yield an understanding of the multiple levels on which Hals’s manner of painting operated for himself, his contemporaries, and later viewers.

Painting and Style Frans Hals was a painter. We can classify Hals’s contributions as art and label him an artist, but he produced paintings exclusively. This is in contrast to contemporary figures such as Hendrick Goltzius and Rembrandt who successfully worked in a variety of media. Even more unusually, not a single drawing by Hals – preparatory or otherwise – is known to exist. He surely must have struck pen to paper at some point, at least during his studies, but the complete lack of surviving drawings indicates how central painting was to Hals. Hals has frequently been lauded as a “painter’s painter.” I understand this designation to mean that Hals was not only a master painter but also that his works take full advantage of the medium. Put differently, Hals’s pictures operate as paintings in an almost Greenbergian sense.

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introduction

Take the iconic Jolly Toper as an example (fig. 36). At the most basic level, the viewer encounters an image of a solitary male figure gesturing outward with a half-full glass of beer. Hals has rendered the figure naturalistically with an animated gesture and a convivial facial expression. The nondescript backdrop, near monochrome palette, flattened passages such as the broad brim of the hat, and the unblended brushwork that punctuates areas like his left sleeve, however, disrupt the sense of pictorial illusionism. The painting is neither an Albertian window nor a mirror of reality, strictly speaking. Instead, at even the earliest moments of engagement, the viewer’s experience of the represented subject is self-consciously mediated through paint. One almost immediately understands the image to be not an illusion of the subject, but a painting of that subject – a two dimensional figure rendered on a flat support with paint. In other words, Hals crafted paintings that look like paintings, and look like they were painted. Painting can be a verb and noun, describing both the act of applying pigment to a support and the resulting product of that act. Early sources corroborate this dualism. Writers insistently characterized Hals’s pictures as made objects. In their reading of Hals’s manner of execution, both Schrevelius and Houbraken, for instance, convey a keen awareness of the pictures as painted matter. Concurrently, each author emphasized Hals’s working methods and the act of creation. Doing so cast individual paintings as products of Hals’s actions and stressed the artist’s agency. More so, the texts relay that personal factors such as personality, ability, and taste shaped the image’s final appearance. In the process, the writings of Schrevelius and Houbraken raise the specter of style. As Meyer Schapiro noted, the distinct and distinguishing formal elements that result from an artist’s direct personal, if not personalized, intervention are the very definition of style.6 Style, however, has a complicated history in the study of Dutch art. Variously, the search for attributions and the untangling of iconography have held scholars’ attention more raptly. Even Svetlana Alpers, who offered alternative interpretative modes to iconological approaches by rooting images in scientific observation rather than textual amplification, derided discussions of style.7 As Walter Liedtke has argued, the naturalism, seeming or otherwise, of much early modern northern European art seems to have distracted from the study of style.8 Scholars too frequently have taken the means of representation for granted in their search for meaning exactly because the pictures appear so natural. As Liedtke has cogently put forth, though, naturalism, regardless of other attendant issues, is in fact a style. Rather than a default mode of representation, it is a cultivated aesthetic that differs from other visual forms. Recent poststructuralist critiques have also surely contributed to the diminished status granted to style in art historical studies more generally. Fear of devolving into simplistic formal analysis has held considerable sway. As this book argues, though, analysis of style need not be equated with formalism or structuralism. Explorations of style enable us to approach how early modern artists and audiences saw and comprehended visual material. This is because formal concerns were fundamental to these viewers. Philip Sohm has articulated how discussions of style were rampant in early modern Italy.9 Though Sohm found that innumerable definitions of style existed, nearly all art literature from the period invoked or grappled with elements that we can classify as stylistic. Though many of the specific relations still need to be disentangled, much northern European art theory is either

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rooted in or a response to Italian aesthetics, art literature, or both. To invoke but one example, Karel van Mander, whose 1604 Het Schilderboek set the course for verbal engagements with Dutch art, based his book on Vasari’s Vite after an extended period of living and working in Italy. As a rejoinder to the debate on iconological and emblematic interpretations of Dutch paintings, Eric Jan Sluijter advocated turning to seventeenth-century art literature to see what features interested period audiences.10 As Sluijter found, these sources largely ignore analysis of subject matter. Rather, as Sohm identified in Italian art literature, Dutch texts generally demonstrate intense engagement with the appearance and quality of specific objects. This is certainly true for contemporary accounts of Hals and his paintings as each of these texts focuses almost exclusively on aesthetic appearance, form, and manner. As a result, I understand the meaning of Hals’s art, at least in seventeenth-century terms, to rest in matters of style. As Ernst van de Wetering has argued in relation to the work of Rembrandt, style and process are interdependent.11 The way an artist paints dictates how a picture will look. If an artist wishes to produce a painting in a particular style, a corresponding method must be selected in order to achieve the desired appearance. Consideration of a painter’s style, therefore, necessarily requires deliberation on the artist’s method. Firsthand examinations of a large sample of Hals’s autograph works from all periods of his career, combined with the results of valuable pre-existing technical examinations of his paintings, have provided a measure of access to the painter’s process.12 Thanks to existing technical studies of other artists in Hals’s milieu, particularly Johannes Verspronck (1606/9-1662) and Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), it has been possible to compare several methods employed in Haarlem in the first half of the seventeenth century in order to posit which features were common in the city and which were unique to Hals.13

Subjectivity Hals’s stylistic trajectory reveals his intentionality. Initially, Hals worked in two divergent modes – one smooth and refined for portraiture, and one rough and unblended for generic types. Hals maintained this stylistic differentiation for nearly twenty years before transferring his painterly manner to portraiture in the 1630s, the same time he stopped producing genre pictures. Focusing exclusively on portraiture for the next thirty years, Hals gradually but consistently accentuated a sketchy aesthetic. For example, though surface-level wet-in-wet passages connote the speed of execution that often accompanies a sketch, scientific examination proves that Hals layered paint atop dry layers and carefully worked up his images over several sessions. In this way, Hals did not dash off painted sketches, but he encouraged viewers to think that he had.14 This brief outline of Hals’s production exposes several key points. One, Hals was capable of working in more than one style, at the same time. Two, Hals could and did consciously decide when to work in each of these different fashions. Three, the abandonment of fine detail and the increasing looseness of his paintings must be understood as deliberate and intentional. In other words, Hals intentionally selected, constructed, and employed his style.

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introduction

Hals’s chosen manner was distinctive and highly personalized, if not unique. Schrevelius made the point most explicitly when calling Hals’s style “the superb and uncommon manner of painting which is uniquely his.”15 For Schrevelius, Hals’s mastery rested on a highly individualized and imminently discernable aesthetic. Indeed, Hals’s paintings differ significantly from those of his contemporaries in the Dutch Republic, especially those in his local environment in Haarlem. It does not take a connoisseur to distinguish a painting by Hals from those of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Verspronck, or Jan de Bray. Each artist produced highly divergent visual forms even though their paintings are figural and naturalistic. What distinguishes Hals most is his sketchy manner of representation. Increasing the roughness and degree to which his strokes were unblended placed a greater premium on those features that make his art different. Even more so, Hals seems to have deliberately emphasized the individualized elements of his paintings not only through calligraphic handling wherein individual strokes stand as the artist’s trace, but also by working ever looser. Hals’s rough manner operated as a signature style. My definition of this term derives from Richard Wolheim’s articulations of the concepts of individual style and signature. Wollheim posited that individual style is personal and intentional, while signature elements are distinctive items that reveal authorship but are not necessarily employed intentionally.16 As such, these two features are rarely one and the same, but as Wollheim acknowledged, a particular artist may intentionally employ the distinctive pictorial elements that constitute his or her individual style for the purpose of making his or her authorship known. I call the confluence of Wollheim’s concepts “signature style.” As Schrevelius’s estimation signals, the painterly aesthetic that dominates Hals’s creations has repeatedly been considered to be intrinsically distinctive so that one can convincingly argue that Hals’s authorship is readily apparent. Conceiving of Hals’s rough manner as his signature style illuminates the interconnections between subjectivity and style. Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal book Renaissance Self-Fashioning thrust subjectivity – the property of being a subject – into scholarly discourse on early modernity.17 Focusing on the writings of the sixteenth-century English authors Sir Thomas More, William Tyndale, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare, Greenblatt probed how these individuals recognized their individuality, and in the process became active subjects rather than passive objects. As an active subject, the individual then fashioned or shaped his or her identity based on accepted social conventions in an effort to improve or enhance his or her station. Myriad texts produced across Europe such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, Castiglione’s The Courtier, and Montaigne’s Essays suggest the breadth of the phenomenon and, in turn, the preponderance of interest in self-reflexive subjectivity. Descartes’s famous proclamation “I think therefore I am” provides the most succinct statement of this phenomenon. Descartes wrote and published these words in 1637 during the twenty years he lived in the Dutch Republic. Perhaps not coincidentally, Hals painted a portrait of Descartes in the late 1640s.18 Following Greenblatt, artistic motivations have often been investigated in relation to the projection and production of early modern subjectivity, especially in the Dutch Republic. Perry

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Chapman successfully applied Greenblatt’s formulations to her study of Rembrandt’s self-portraits.19 Chapman argued that Rembrandt’s evolving attempts to understand and shape his own persona are registered in his self-portraits. On somewhat different terms, Alpers treated Rembrandt as a self-aware artist who, through his manipulation of paint, crafted a market identity for himself, which in turn established a high value for his art.20 Several succeeding studies, most notably the catalogues that accompanied the exhibitions Rembrandt by Himself and Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt, continued to consider the ways in which the artist fashioned his personal and artistic identities, sometimes in ways that limit or critique the very possibility of such identifying mechanisms in painting.21 In the 1990s, Chapman, Mariët Westermann, and Celeste Brusati considered how other painters such as Jan Steen (1626-1679) and Samuel van Hoogstraten (16271678) also pursued self-fashioning programs in their art.22 As a result of these important studies, it has become widely understood that artists actively attempted to craft artistic and market images for themselves and that they did so through their pictorial methods. Still, these studies have tended to focus on self-portraiture, including embedding the artist’s face within larger compositions, rather than on matters of style or execution. Hals rarely painted his own visage. Instead, he fashioned his artistic persona through brushwork and paint. His brushstrokes recall not only the act of painting but Hals as the maker of the marks and the creator of the picture. As in modern connoisseurship wherein discerning viewers divine attribution from distinctive features and personalized representational features, Hals communicated his authorship through inimitable marks that differ from those of other artists. As a result, stylistic elements stand as signs for and of the artist, or his artistic and market personae, within the work of art. In early modern terms, as Georges-Louis le Clerc, Comte du Buffon wrote in 1753, “style is the man.”23 And, stylistic elements are the means of fabricating and communicating that persona. To put it simply, Hals embedded his subjectivity in his paintings through his signature style.

The Market Early modern notions of subjectivity were, and are, frequently conceived in market terms. To take perhaps the most famous and most succinct example, John Locke explored individualism through the metaphor of property. In his 1689 Second Treatise of Government, Locke wrote: “every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.”24 C.B. Macpherson influentially labeled Locke’s ideas, and those of the sources that inspired him, as “possessive individualism.”25 As Macpherson interpreted Locke, the individual is the sole proprietor of the self and, being an individual – being a subject – constituted self-ownership. For Locke, ownership of one’s self also meant possession of one’s labor, and the fruits of that labor. From this position, Locke continued to argue that personal labor transformed communal property into private property because the individual had acted upon it. In contemporary phrasing, property becomes personal once an individual embeds his or her own subjectivity in it. Importantly, Jerrold Siegel has demonstrated how Locke conceived and formulated his ideas away from court culture and in direct

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response to contemporary commercialism rampant in the urban centers of the time.26 As the example of Locke suggests, early modern notions of subjectivity were increasingly understood in commercial terms and were shaped by experiences with the various markets that individuals encountered daily. Like Locke, while Hals maintained and cultivated a considerable degree of agency, his signature style and the subjectivity embedded therein were shaped, at least in part, by market forces. As he was a professional painter, it would be naïve to think that economic concerns did not affect him. Likewise, one should not forget that while Hals and his contemporaries considered painting to be an art, it was also a business. Hals’s self-consciously individualized artistic means and products developed as personal responses to economic features of the art market in which he worked. The art market in the seventeenth-century northern Netherlands was varied. Works of art changed hands through indirect sales outlets to an unprecedented degree rather than solely through direct patronage. In addition to making sales from their studios, artists sold their wares through dealers, auctions, and lotteries, among other venues. In so doing, they often worked on spec not knowing whom, if anyone, would purchase a work of art. This is not to say, however, that commissions were wholly absent. Portraiture depended on direct means of exchange. As both a painter of portraits and of genre scenes, Hals participated in each facet of the market. Numerous studies, especially those of John Michael Montias, have begun to elucidate with greater clarity that the Dutch art market – both in terms of commissions and indirect sales outlets – was intricate, sophisticated, and highly competitive.27 The art market in the Dutch Republic also rested largely on the exchange of paintings. This was certainly true in Haarlem where Hals worked almost exclusively. The population of Haarlem was 39,455 in 1622. Between 1615 and 1625 twenty-five artists joined the guild.28 Between 1625 and 1635 another fifty joined, so that by 1635 there were eighty-four artists registered.29 Not only is the ratio of artists to citizens high, but the number of active artists increased dramatically. Many of these figures, though not all, specialized in one or two genres, but even still there were several artists who worked in each genre. Take portraiture, Hals’s primary line of production, for example. Cornelis van Haarlem (1562-1638) and Frans Pietersz. de Grebber (1573-1643), who were both a generation older than Hals, frequently ventured into the genre. Pieter de Grebber (ca. 1600-ca. 1653), Salomon de Bray (1597-1664), Johannes Verspronck (1606/9-1662), and Pieter Soutman (ca. 1580-1657), along with Hals, constituted a second wave of portraitists. The younger painter Jan de Bray (ca. 1627- 97) entered the market in the later decades of Hals’s career. Specialization by subject matter was not enough to carve a niche in the market, as there was always competition for commissions. Painters needed to differentiate themselves and their products even further. Stylistic differentiation and specialization emerged as a means of creating a unique market identity and therefore of achieving a competitive advantage. Hals’s rough manner was advantageous because it carried the potential for numerous positive associations. His painting roughly elicited comparison to valued current and historical master painters like Titian, Rubens, and Van Dyck who worked with broad, unblended strokes.

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Venetian and Flemish artists also frequently utilized a sketch aesthetic that enabled sophisticated viewers to imagine the painter at work and marvel at the virtuosity of his individual touches. Working in an analogous manner, Hals was able to offer clients a related aesthetic experience. A sketchy mode also enabled Hals to showcase his virtuoso handling and mark his paintings as high-quality works of art. In addition to offering evidence that contemporaries valued Hals in this way, this book probes how these aesthetics and concomitant notions of quality operated in the early modern art market and how they participated in defining monetary value. As a result, one can see how Hals’s distinctive manner helped the artist craft an image as a virtuoso of the highest rank with a concurrent financial advantage. To invoke contemporary parlance, Hals used style to create a brand – a collection of perceptions or associations embodied in an object. In this way it is possible to posit that the intersections of style and subjectivity developed not only alongside the market economy, but most likely because of it.

Early Modernity Hals developed his signature style during the period that scholars recently have begun to describe as early modernity. More traditionally, at least in art historical terms, the seventeenth century has been defined as the Baroque, a temporality distinct from the earlier Renaissance. No one in the seventeenth century used the word Baroque to define themselves or their time. Rather, Baroque – or, as a stylistic rather than temporal term, baroque – is a later appellation that describes the theatrical exuberance of much Italian art of the period. While the art of Hals and Rembrandt often displays related aesthetics of movement and theatrical lighting, baroque does not adequately describe Dutch aesthetics or the cultures of the Dutch Republic. Alternatively, early modernity identifies art and culture as antecedents of and precedents for the modern eras of the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Of course, the term early modernity presupposes that elements of modernity were already active, or at least in development, during the seventeenth century and earlier. As Ann Adams has recently delineated, many of the writings on subjectivity that mark the onset of early modernity and the philosophical debates that surrounded them frequently appeared in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.30 They are worth repeating here. Montaigne’s Essays first published in Paris in 1588 were reissued in Leiden in 1602.31 Consequently, Montaigne directly impacted Dutch writers like Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert, Hendrik Laurensz Spiegel, and Pieter Cornelisz Hooft.32 During his twenty-year tenure in the Dutch Republic, Descartes published the first edition of Discours de la Méthode in 1637 in Leiden and a second edition of Meditationes de prima philosophia in 1642 in Amsterdam, just one year after it appeared in Paris.33 Like Montaigne, Descartes and his writings influenced many Dutch intellectuals like Constantijn Huygens who engaged Descartes in a lengthy correspondence.34 John Locke reworked his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1683-4 while he was in Holland and published a resumé of it in 1688 in Amsterdam before returning to England later that year.35 These instances and the debates that followed them in the universities of Leiden and Utrecht begin to illuminate

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the centrality of the northern Netherlands in the discourses that have come to signal the modern era, or at least its dawn. Likewise, both the Dutch economy at large in the seventeenth century, and the subset of the art market, displayed modern characteristics. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude claim that the Dutch Republic was “the first modern economy.”36 They base their assessment on the conscious efforts to maximize economic well-being (by individuals, corporations, and political bodies), and dynamic and innovative social processes that improved the efficiency of production and distribution (urbanization, education, mobility, and monetization). A market economy that relies on the production and consumption of commodities is widely understood as one of the leading conditions of modernity.37 Most simply, commodities are items created expressly for exchange.38 One can rightly claim that paintings functioned as commodities in this sense for Hals and his contemporaries, as they were most frequently produced with the explicit intent of being sold for money. In turn, we can begin to perceive the commodification of art and culture that, in part, also signals the modern era.39 Style and formalism are modern concerns in their own right. Numerous examples abound in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Gautier and Ruskin’s promotion of “art for art’s sake” depend on these twinned features, Matisse and Picasso’s experimentations that took pictorial form as their point of inspiration, and the writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg attend primarily to stylistic matters, to list but three. The early modern era was also highly engaged with issues of style. In 1673, Giovanni Battista Passeri wrote that “today it is fashionable for painters to do nothing but squabble among themselves about manner, taste, and style.”40 Passeri’s point of reference was Italy, but his assessment succinctly frames the point for Hals and his contemporaries as well. The stylistic features of facture, technical achievement, compositional variety, and other formal characteristics were highly prized features in seventeenth-century aesthetics, perhaps especially Dutch ones. Peter Hecht has even suggested that Dutch painters and viewers valued the form of paintings to the point that the concept of art for art’s sake may have already been current in Hals’s lifetime.41 Indeed, though the art produced in the northern Netherlands shared a largely naturalistic bent, the diversity of representation and execution suggests that personalized and subjective creation was valued, too. Even the primacy of painting may be considered a modern typology. Though the exact process and the reasons behind its occurrence have yet to be adequately explained, painting has been granted privileged status in formulations of modern art and its histories. One need only scan art historical survey texts to see how many more paintings are treated than are examples from other media. With notable exceptions, of course, most figures included in the Western art historical canon were exclusively, or at least primarily, painters – Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Kandinsky, O’Keeffe, and Pollock, to name but a few. Perhaps painting could more completely undertake the self-critical examination of the nature and forms of art, as Greenberg argued.42 Or perhaps painting has become aligned with modernity due to its perceived lack in antiquity. It has long been known that painting was an important art in ancient Greece and Rome, but much of that knowledge has come from ekphrastic descriptions of works that are no longer extant. Rather,

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the primary records of the visual arts of antiquity are sculpture and architecture. The same can be said of medieval art, with the exception of manuscript illuminations. Thus, painting might have been associated with a more recent time. Whatever the reason, it is worth noting that painting also took pride of place in the art of the Dutch Golden Age. To be sure, individuals worked in the full range of media then available, but far and away the most common and best regarded approach was painting. One might be able to argue, therefore, that the prevalence of painting was yet another typology of modernity already active in the Dutch Republic. Though Hals’s fame has fluctuated with changing tastes, nearly every posthumous response to Hals and his paintings belongs to discourses on modernity in art. Most explicitly, a Belgian art journal proclaimed in 1883, “Frans Hals c’est un moderne.”43 While Frances Suzman Jowell has studied the revival of interest in Hals in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly Thoré-Bürger’s role in inspiring this resurrection, the continued characterization of Hals’s art as modern from the eighteenth century to the present has thus far not been examined.44 Understanding modern as a stylistic rather than a temporal term, though the term “modern” was not applied to Hals until the late nineteenth century, the concepts embodied by the word were associated with the artist from at least the earliest extended analysis of his work published in 1718. Through critical review of the posthumous responses – verbal and visual – to Hals’s manner, it becomes clear that the multifaceted features of Hals’s style – roughness, sketchiness, liveliness, seeming spontaneity, virtuosity, calligraphic handling, self-referentiality, and materiality – all came to be signs of modern painting. As the combination of these elements, Hals’s signature style came to be designated as modern in its own right. This early perception of his rough manner eventually led to critical neglect in academic circles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and likewise may have led to Thoré-Bürger’s resurrection of Hals and the painter’s subsequent ascension to the heights of the artistic pantheon in the late nineteenth century. In other words, Hals’s modernity is not a nineteenth-century construction. One must ask, therefore, if he is inextricably interwoven into the discourse on the modern and into the modern aesthetic itself. Or, as the contemporary British painter Lucian Freud put it, is Hals “fated always to look modern.”45 Recognizing his manner as inextricably modern, Hals’s work also signifies the pronounced modernity of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and perhaps the art produced therein. Understanding the modernity, or at least proto-modernity, of both Hals’s art and aspects of the Dutch Republic begins the process of reintegrating the artist into his social and cultural contexts. That Hals grappled with style and form in highly innovative ways that influenced legions of self-proclaimed modern painters like Manet and Van Gogh places him at the fore of the modern Western tradition. Yet, developing an original aesthetic does not put Hals ahead of his time. To the contrary, as this book re-envisions, Hals was very much a man of his time. Through the representative medium of painting, Hals’s art engaged contemporary aesthetic discourses. His paintings also registered and produced his personal and artistic subjectivity in an era when these concerns were central. In turn, each of these processes and agendas were supported, enabled, and encouraged by seventeenth-century market conditions and practices. In other words,

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Hals may be symptomatic of his time, cultural context, and emerging projects of modernity exactly because of his signature style of painting that is, in so many ways, modern.

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Cha p te r 1

a livelineSS uniquely hiS

C h a p Te r 1

a liveliness uniquely his

Nor can I let this pass in mute silence, Frans and Dirck Hals, brothers, of whom one excels almost everyone with the superb and uncommon manner of painting which is uniquely his. His paintings are imbued with such force and vitality that he seems to surpass nature herself with his brush. This is seen in all his portraits, so numerous as to pass belief, which are colored in such a way that they seem to breathe and live.1 —Theodorus Schrevelius, 1648

Schrevelius’s brief characterization indicates that Hals’s contemporaries found his manner of painting lively and unique.2 As naturalism in its various forms was the dominant mode of representation in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, praise for an artist’s ability to create a “living image” was a standard trope for many writers, but Schrevelius’s description differs from common literary adulation by addressing both the effect of vitality that Hals was able to achieve and the means by which he crafted it.3 Indeed, with Schrevelius’s words in mind, we see more readily how different Hals’s vivacity was from that of both his predecessors and his contemporaries, especially in portraiture. This chapter explores the vitality of Hals’s imagery, the techniques he developed to render his subjects as lively, and the ways in which Hals’s conception and execution differ from the representational strategies of his contemporaries, especially those of other portraitists in Haarlem. Since it has always been taken as a given that Hals worked spontaneously and directly, none have systematically considered why he sought to craft lively imagery or how exactly he created the illusion of spontaneity in a multi-stage process. I will describe how Hals used broad, unblended strokes and stark contours to convey a sitter’s energy, animation, and temporality, which in turn rendered his subjects as distinct individuals. This approach distinguished his paintings from those of others. While Hals was not the only painter striving for naturalism, his manner was as unique as Schrevelius described.

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Fig. 1. Frans Hals, Stephanus Geraerdts, c. 1650-1652. Oil on canvas, 115 x 87 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.

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Fig. 2. Frans Hals, Isabella Coijmans, c. 1650-1652. Oil on canvas, 116 x 86 cm. Private Collection.

Lively Paintings/Painting Liveliness The pendants of Stephanus Geraerdts (fig. 1) and Isabella Coijmans (fig. 2), both from about 1650-52, introduce how Hals employed temporal signs to craft extremely lively figures. Cocking his head to his right, Geraerdts stands casually with his left arm akimbo. His left hand dangles a glove as he extends his right hand across his body towards the portrait of his wife that originally hung immediately to his left. With her body torqued at the neck and shoulders, Coijmans turns slightly to offer her husband the rose that rests across the barely closed fingers of her right hand. The two figures reach out to each other, unifying the canvases and creating a play across the space that separates them. Like the gap between the hands of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, the tension between the outstretched limbs captures the act of reaching, simultaneously suggesting the prior extension and subsequent meeting of their hands. The reaching gesture that connects the two figures most likely derives from Anthony van Dyck’s engaged pendants of Peeter Stevens (fig. 4) and Anna Wake (fig. 3) from 1627 and 1628, respectively, which were produced during the Flemish artist’s second period in Antwerp. Also like Van Dyck, Hals staged a transitory moment through each sitter’s facial expression. Mirroring their gestures, they turn their heads and lock their eyes on one another. Coijmans has turned up the corners of her mouth into a smile, forcing her rouged cheeks close to her glimmering eyes. Though more

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Fig. 3. Anthony van Dyck, Anna Wake, dated 1628. Oil on canvas, 112.5 x 99.3 cm. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague.

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Fig. 4. Anthony van Dyck, Peeter Stevens, dated 1627. Oil on canvas, 112.5 x 99.4 cm. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague.

reserved, a slight grin breaks across Geraerdts’s face as he gazes lovingly at his companion. The dramatic lighting illuminates the connection between the couple and partially cloaks the exterior fringe of the two paintings. As a result of these features, viewers seem to encounter a fleeting moment. Executed late in his career, in many ways these two portraits constitute the culmination of Hals’s distinctive approach. In the first ten years of his career, Hals’s portraits only hinted at the vivacity of those of Geraerdts and Coijmans. In the Portrait of a Man in Birmingham (fig. 5) and its companion now in Chatsworth (fig. 6), both from about 1611-12, each figure turns and gestures slightly toward the other, but their overall appearances are considerably more still.4 Rooted in Mannerist gesticulation, the man’s cradling of the skull, like his outward gaze, engages the viewer rather than his pendant wife. Instead of implying movement, each figure holds a static pose that stabilizes, but also inactivates, their appearance. Hals’s portrait of a man holding a miniature in the Brooklyn Museum presents a slightly more vivacious figure (fig. 7). While setting the man within a fictitious oval frame, a common conceit at the time, the right hand overlaps the frame to create the impression that he occupies the viewer’s space as much as he does that of the picture. At the same time, the elbow lies parallel to the picture plane so that any projection is subtle. Likewise, while the cheeks appear somewhat flushed, the eyes, mouth, and other features stand immobile, at rest. Not long after, in 1616, Hals painted Pieter van den Morsch (fig. 8) with considerably more verve as a result of the cocked head and squinting eye. Such touches of increased activity begin to impart more vitality to the sitters. Some four years later, Catherina Hooft and Her Nurse from

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Fig. 5. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull, c. 1611-1612. Oil on panel, 94 x 72.5 cm. © The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham / The Bridgeman Art Library.

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Fig. 6. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman, c. 1611-1612. Oil on panel, 94.2 x 71.1 cm. The Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth House Trust.

about 1620 (fig. 9) displays a new level of energy. Both figures smile, somewhat mischievously. Their cheeks appear ruddy and flushed with life; their eyes glimmer in the light. Each and every detail of their faces aims to give the impression of living figures. Furthermore, the child steadies herself against her nurse’s chest with a tiny outstretched arm, the first momentary activity in Hals’s portraiture. Hals’s visualization of transitoriness derives from his early occupation with genre painting and group portraiture. In his earliest genre picture, the Shrovetide Revelers from about 1615-16 (fig. 10), Hals depicted a raucous crowd celebrating a last chance at frivolity before Lent.5 The stock carnivalesque character Hans Worst, identifiable by his sausage adornments, beams at the viewer as he crowds the young maiden in front of him. She too takes an active stance – gesturing either to give her male companion pause or to keep time to music – as she looks away to some other element of the merriment that encircles them. Though not as brightly painted, fellow celebrants fan out from the comically mismatched pair of the older man and younger woman.6 Each of the fringe figures wields a toothy grin, an open-mouthed howl, or a sly smirk to indicate their amusement. Animated subjects populated early seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, especially in Haarlem. Vrolijke gezelschappen, or merry companies, dominated non-narrative figurative art

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a liveliness uniquely his

Fig. 7. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1614-1615. Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 55.2 cm. The Brooklyn Museum, New York. Gift of the executers of the estate of Colonel Michael Friedsam, 32.821.

in the 1610s. The immigration of David Vinckboons (1576-1638) from Flanders to Amsterdam introduced this new type of painting from the Southern Netherlands to the Dutch Republic.7 Scenes such as Banquet with Dancers from about 1614 in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 11) represent a specific moment during a festive occasion. To the left, Vinckboons pictured an elegant young couple dancing. The man leans back as he extends his left leg forward above the ground. Similarly, the L-bend of the skirt of the woman’s dress indicates that she is in the process of moving forward towards her companion. At the lower right, another young man reclines against the lap of a woman, gestures outward with his arm, and opens his mouth, perhaps indicating that he is singing along to the tune strung by the lute players at the center of the composition. An even more explicit indicator of the temporality of the scene is the young page who dramatically pours a beverage from the pitcher held high above the glass in his left hand. In Haarlem, Willem Buytewech (ca. 1591-1624) began to produce numerous merry companies almost immediately after entering the guild in 1612. In paintings such as Merry Company from about 1616-17 (fig. 12), Buytewech created the effect of capturing a transitory moment through the inclusion of details like the glowing embers of the pipe and gentle trail of smoke seeping from the mouth of the slouched figure in black. Merry company painters active in the 1620s and 1630s, including Hals’s brother Dirck, continued the practice initiated by Vinckboons and Buytewech by staging their own scenes of youthful frivolity as occurring at a particular time.8 In his single-figure genre paintings, Hals combined the temporal conventions cemented

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Fig. 8. Frans Hals, Pieter van den Morsch, 1616. Oil on panel transferred to canvas, 88.1 x 69.5 cm. The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. With support of Mrs. Alan M. Scaife, 1961.

Fig. 9. Frans Hals, Catherina Hooft and Her Nurse, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, 86 x 65 cm. bpk, Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders.

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Fig. 10. Frans Hals, Shrovetide Revelers, c. 1615-1616. Oil on canvas, 131.5 x 99.6 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Fig. 11. David Vinckboons, Banquet with Dancers, c. 1614. Oil on panel, 28.5 x 44 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 12. Willem Buytewech, Merry Company, c. 1616-1617. Oil on canvas, 49.3 x 68 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

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by genre painters in Haarlem, including those in his immediate milieu, with the three-quarter and half-length ruffians, minstrels, and prostitutes pictured by the Utrecht Caravaggisti. Shortly after Dirck van Baburen (1594/5-1624), Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1646), and Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588-1629) returned from Italy in the mid-1620s, Hals, like many painters throughout Holland, began producing images of solitary figures in a Caravaggesque mode. Many of Hals’s figures appropriate specific types and gestures. As did their compatriots in Haarlem, the Utrecht painters often pictured temporal specificity. Honthorst’s Merry Fiddler (fig. 13) flashes a broad, open-mouthed smile as he extends his arm upwards as if in a toast. The smile reverberates across his face as his dimples punctuate his cheeks, his drawn-back lips push those ruddy cheeks upward, his eyes squint, and his brow furrows in merriment. Even the slight head tilt and upraised fiddle communicate a sense of a particular moment. The moment must be short-lived, as one cannot maintain such a pose indefinitely, and certainly not with such gaiety. The outward thrust of the right arm, accentuated by its projection from the casement window, and the straightforward gaze create the effect that the figure is engaging the viewer directly. In turn, the fiddler occupies the viewer’s space and exists in the same time as the viewer. Though not as effusive and in a more restrained color palette, it is easy to see how Hals appropriated much of Honthorst’s schema in his so-called Jolly Toper (fig. 36). The paired lozenge panels now in a New York private collection exemplify Hals’s conception (figs. 14 and 15). Here, a girl sings and a boy plays a violin. Hals choreographed every element

Fig. 13. Gerrit van Honthorst, Merry Fiddler, 1623. Oil on canvas, 108 x 89 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Fig. 14. Frans Hals, Singing Girl, c. 1625-1630. Oil on panel, 18.2 x 18.4 cm. The Ivor Collection. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Saunders III.

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Fig. 15. Frans Hals, Boy with a Violin, c. 1625-1630. Oil on panel, 18.4 x 18.8 cm. The Ivor Collection. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Saunders III.

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in the pictures to create a sense of fleeting moments. The bow touches the strings of the violin while the boy’s mouth opens. He looks upward as if he may be projecting his voice to accompany the sounds of his instrument. The girl stares intently at the music book with lips slightly parted. Her right hand is just above the book, in a casual, perhaps involuntary, gesture. The upper-most page at right flitters above the others, failing to lie flat. Strands of her hair spill out in almost every direction. Though static images, both figures are presented as if the artist has captured a single instant in the singing of their songs. Musical subjects are particularly apt for conveying the momentary, as music is perhaps the most transitory of art forms. Hals drew upon local practice to imbue his group portraits with an innovative animated temporality similar to that found in his genre paintings. Hals’s first group portrait, Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard from 1616 (fig. 16), bustles with activity. At least three different conversations seem to be taking place around the table. Two figures gingerly hold their beverages as if having just taken a sip. In the center of the composition, the man on the far side daintily grasps the roast just before slicing himself a portion. To the right, an officer has doffed his hat while the standard bearer gazes out towards the viewer. The movement of glances in multiple directions across the painting’s surface accentuates the sense of vitality by decentralizing the viewer’s focus. Although the bustle was carefully choreographed, the resulting image initially strikes the modern viewer as being as unstaged as a photographic snapshot. Despite the seeming naturalism that stems from the heightened activity and sense of the momentary, Hals’s group portraits are heavily steeped in pictorial precedent in Haarlem. In his seminal study of Dutch group portraiture, Alois Riegl noted that Hals borrowed the composition of Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard of 1583 (fig. 17) by Cornelis van Haarlem

Fig. 16. Frans Hals, Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard, 1616. Oil on canvas, 175 x 324 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson.

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(1562-1638) for his own picture of the company over twenty years later.9 Riegl also suggested that, following Cornelis’s forays into the genre in 1583 and 1599, almost every Haarlem painter subdivided their multi-figure portraits into subgroups.10 As Cornelis discovered, pockets of engagement within these complex scenes added variety and decreased the staged quality of the works of his predecessors. To unite a small number of figures, Cornelis turned his subjects toward each other and provided them with gestures that established relationships and interactions. Ensuing portraitists in Haarlem followed Cornelis’s innovations as they forged some degree of interior engagement between figures, even if nearly every officer faces the viewer frontally.11 In the process, it became convention not only to group figures though gestures, but also to picture civic guard banquets as active scenes. As Riegl noted, however, Hals revised local pictorial tradition by centering subgroups around a specific activity, such as carving meat or serving drinks. What has not been fully appreciated is that by providing an active focus for his figural subgroups, Hals introduced a sense of transitoriness that increased the naturalism of his group portraits. Riegl attributed much of Hals’s innovations to his engagement with genre painting. Indeed, Hals’s group portraits share numerous similarities with merry companies like those painted by his brother Dirck. In his group portraits, Hals presents viewers with the impression not only of the representation of a feast, but also of a single instant during the event.12 Hals heightened the level of animation by activating his sitters’ expressions. Cornelis and others animated the bodies of the officers they portrayed through unfocused gesture, but the faces of their figures remained wooden. Their cheeks are still as their eyes peer out evenly

Fig. 17. Cornelis van Haarlem, Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard, 1583. Oil on panel, 135 x 233 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

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with little glint or glimmer. Similarly, their mouths have been drawn straight across so that they lack the perceptible pulse of Hals’s imagery. Not only did Hals vary mouth positions, but he also pictured the push and pull of flesh across the underlying cheekbone as a result of the movements of facial muscles. The ruddy pinks that flush the cheeks with color further breathe life into the subjects. Similarly, Hals articulated his figures’ interactions through expressive eyes and eyebrows. In total, these details complement the figures’ animated gestures and create a coherent sensation of catching the officers in a transitory moment. This effect is all the more remarkable as Hals and his contemporaries had never seen true stop-action imagery like snapshots produced by photographic cameras. Harry Berger recently has coined this type of stop-action portrayal “posing as if not posing.”13 Berger derived his terminology from his claim that portraits are not so much images of individuals in reality as they are images of sitters posing. In other words, portrayal is a performative act. Sitters play roles or take on stage-constructed identities. The artist then registers that performance and that pose in the portrait. As such, a portrait presents an event – the act of posing – that happened at some exact point in the past. Though Berger does not make the case, this mode of “posing as if not posing” and the representation of a sitter as occurring at a particular moment were revolutionary in Holland in the early seventeenth century. Ann Adams, for example, has explored how static, sober portrayals like those produced by Thomas de Keyser (1596/71667) which convey the stoic ideal of tranquility were imminently popular well into the 1630s.14 Focusing on Rembrandt, Berger de-emphasized Hals’s crucial role in fueling, if not introducing, such a new pictorial mode into the Dutch Republic. Berger also does not contextualize the underlying assumptions of in-the-moment portrayals in their historical and cultural particularities. Berger’s “posing as if not posing” or the snapshot effect seen in Hals’s work may be rooted, in part, in new theories of vision and time. Svetlana Alpers has suggested that seventeenthcentury pictorial modes that emphasize illusory and ephemeral effects mirror Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) novel understanding of vision.15 Kepler posited that seeing creates and imprints an image on the retina and that the process of seeing is really that of interpreting a sequence of still images. Kepler’s formulation of vision has much in common with the growing recognition of time and temporality in the Dutch scientific community. The influential Leiden professor Franco Burgersdijk (1590-1635), for example, postulated time as successive, proceeding from one movement and one moment to the next.16 Analogous to Kepler’s conception of retinal imagery, Burgersdijk theorized a moment as a single, static point or, to invoke a twenty-first century analogy, a frozen frame. Susan Kuretsky has recently argued that the seventeenth-century Dutch populace was well-versed, if not enthralled, by issues of time and duration such as those formulated by Burgersdijk and, later, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), René Descartes (1596-1650), and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677).17 Indeed, while no evidence indicates that Hals studied science, Kepler’s and Burgersdijk’s formulations that were circulating at the beginning of the seventeenth century do seem akin to the strategy of active representation that Hals first staged in his genre pictures and group portraits. The lively, in-the-moment qualities of Hals’s group portraits and genre paintings eventu-

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ally informed similar mechanisms in his individual portraits. Although Hals continued to produce relatively stiff portraits through the mid-1620s, such as that of Jacob Pietersz. Olycan (fig. 77), he began to picture greater vitality and momentary temporality in pictures like his seemingly transitory portrait of Isaac Massa dated 1626 (fig. 18). Seated, Massa hangs his right elbow off the chair back while holding his forearm out and across his chest. A branch of holly dangles from his two-finger grip. He turns his head to the right, nearly in line with his right shoulder. His pose replicates that of Nicolaes van der Meer in Hals’s portrayal of the St. George company officers from ten years earlier (fig. 16). In the middle, Van der Meer twists his head to the right so that his face engages the viewer although the rest of his body is perpendicular to the picture plane. While Massa actually holds the same pose as Van der Meer, Hals rotated Massa one quarter

Fig. 18. Frans Hals, Isaac Massa, 1626. Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 65 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Legacy of Frank P. Wood, 1955.

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turn. Rather than focusing outwards to the viewer, Massa’s pupils sit in the right corners of his eyes as if they are following something occurring to his right. The overall composition creates the impression that Massa has not been placed in this pose by the artist, but that he has turned to address someone standing outside the boundary of the picture. Even his mouth appears open as if in mid-speech. Though not showing any teeth, Hals divided Massa’s lips with a thick dark line suggesting an open mouth. Isaac Massa also owes much to Hals’s genre images of young musicians. Though far more boisterous, the Merry Lute Player from about 1625 (fig. 19) strikes a remarkably similar pose. Like Massa, the youth’s shoulders recede back to the left while his head turns to the right as his eyes dart up and out to the right. The two figures share an elusive gaze in which their pupils sit in

Fig. 19. Frans Hals, Merry Lute Player, c. 1625. Oil on panel, 90 x 75 cm. Harold Samuel Collection, Mansion House. Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London.

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the corners of their eyes trained on something other than the viewer. Although it is difficult to determine whether the genre painting preceded the portrait, the sideways glance and the ensuing sense of the momentary indicate an early convergence of genre and portrait conceptions in Hals’s works.18 Paintings like the Merry Lute Player owe much to the work of Ter Brugghen, Baburen, and Honthorst that introduced Caravaggesque fashions current in seventeenth-century Italian religious and genre painting to the northern Netherlands.19 To put it differently, Hals’s genre pictures relate to contemporary Italian modes. Hals’s animated aesthetic also shares certain affinities with portraits produced in Rome in the early seventeenth century. As has been long noted, Bernini’s desire to study his subjects in an animated state, if not conversation, appears in his 1632 sketch of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (fig. 20).20 Summarily drafted in profile, Bernini portrayed Borghese with parted lips and open mouth that may suggest that he is speaking.21 While adding other signs of the active moment such as rumpled fabric and precariously closed buttons, Bernini repeated the open-mouth expression in his marble bust of Borghese of the same year. In the parted lips, diverted gaze, and aura of casualness, Bernini’s portraits bear a striking similarity to paintings like Hals’s Isaac Massa (fig. 18), despite the differences in media.22 While Bernini’s efforts postdate Hals’s, in many ways they continue a longer Italian tradition. As Andrea Bacchi and Catherine Hess have recently posited, Bernini’s informal busts closely follow the model of Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630).23 Active in Rome at the very beginning of

Fig. 20. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Cardinal Borghese. The Morgan Library & Museum.

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the seventeenth century, Leoni specialized in portraiture of the local aristocracy and ecclesiastical elite. Best known today are Leoni’s drawn portraits that were collected by Scipione Borghese, his great patron. In his portrayal of the painter Tommaso Salini (ca. 1575-1625), Leoni depicted his subject’s face in profile but his torso frontally, as if Salini had turned dramatically to his right (fig. 21). Salini’s relaxed face seems not yet to have registered who or what has diverted his attention. The soft lines and subtle coloring of the cheek combine with these other features to lend an air of immediacy to the representation despite, or precisely because of, the sketchy rendering of other features. Ann Sutherland Harris has posited Simon Vouet (1590-1649) as another source for Bernini and another proponent of active portrayal in the first decades of the seventeenth century.24 Vouet painted several seemingly immediate portraits when he was in Rome from 1614 to 1627. Vouet’s self-portrait from about 1615 stands as a representative example of the artist at his liveliest (fig. 22). Here, Vouet turns to face the viewer. His lips part almost breathlessly, wide enough to see the teeth beyond. His hair appears tousled as it falls irregularly across his head and shoulders. The sense of immediacy that results from these features does seem to anticipate Bernini’s portraits of Scipione Borghese, even if Leoni’s work also must have been formative. The

Fig. 21. Ottavio Leoni, Tommaso Salini. Chalk on paper. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Firenze.

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dark, earthy palette and strong focused light on the face clearly betray Vouet’s debt to Caravaggio. In conception, tone, color, and even execution, Vouet’s self-portrait also resembles paintings by Hals like Youth with a Flute (fig. 88).25 The formal relationships between the portraits of Bernini, Leoni, and Vouet, and those of Hals are leading, but it remains unclear how or if Hals came to know any of these artists’ works. As far as we know, Hals never traveled any further south than Antwerp. Rembrandt famously proclaimed that he had no need to travel to Italy because there was plenty of Italian art in the northern Netherlands. Despite this assertion, the record of what was available locally to Dutch artists is incomplete. Leoni’s work is the most likely to have been found in the north, as he worked in the highly transportable media of drawings and prints. Leoni crafted prints after many of his portraits, including that of Salini. Alternatively, Baburen, Ter Brugghen, and Honthorst may have introduced more than just the art of Caravaggio to the northern Netherlands. Though none of the three artists are known to have executed portraits in the manner then in vogue in Rome, they surely must have been familiar with the full range of contemporary Roman painting, including immediate portrayals.26 Despite the formal correspondences, the lack of evidence makes it impossible to claim that Hals followed Roman prototypes directly. More cautiously,

Fig. 22. Simon Vouet, Self-Portrait, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, 64 x 48 cm. Musée Réattu, Arles.

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Fig. 23. Frans Hals, Paulus van Beresteyn, 162[0]. Oil on canvas, 137.1 x 104 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

it is worth considering whether awareness of the lively, temporally specific methods of artists like Vouet and Leoni, as well as new formulations of vision and time, helped encourage Hals to transfer the mode he had already developed and practiced in his genre painting to portraiture. A heightened liveliness pervades even Hals’s more conventionally posed portraits from the late 1620s and after.27 A comparison of Paulus van Beresteyn (fig. 23) from about 1620 in the Louvre and Portrait of a Man dated 1630 (fig. 24) shows how much livelier the portraits from the end of the decade are. The paintings share a nearly identical three-quarter length composition wherein a figure rotates his shoulders back and to the left while turning his head to the right. The vitality of the later portrait, however, far exceeds that of the earlier painting in the Louvre. Though not entirely without liveliness, Van Beresteyn stares out with an even gaze and masked expression. His unblemished, porcelain-like skin rests rigidly still. In contrast, beneath a slightly

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Fig. 24. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, 1630. Oil on canvas, 115 x 89.5 cm. Private Collection.

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furrowed forehead, the man’s eyebrows in the later painting contract, leaving two vertical creases. In a related movement, the lids squeeze together ever so slightly. These features, combined with the aqueous treatment of the eyes, create the impression that the sitter is locking his gaze on the viewer. Hals built the cheeks and lips from ruddy pinks that show through lighter surface layers to imbue the flesh with vitality and plasticity. The close-cropped hair falls imperfectly around the face. At the upper left, for example, seven short wisps reach down rather than across. The sitter’s pose enhances the naturalism of the face. Standing with a certain air of nonchalance, he casually grasps his doffed hat in his left hand. His right hand dangles his gloves. The image reminds one of Schrevelius’s estimation that Hals’s portraits breathe with life. Similarly, Hals’s portrait of the

Fig. 25. Frans Hals, Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan, c. 1639. Oil on canvas, 111.1 x 86.3 cm. Bequest of John Ringling, 1936. Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida.

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Haarlem burgermeester and States General delegate Pieter Jacobsz Olycan from about 1639 (fig. 25) surpasses the liveliness of earlier representations. Olycan appears to be scrutinizing the artist or the viewer with narrowed eyes and a cocked right eyebrow. His forehead is a tapestry of furrows as a result of his serious expression and, characteristically, his lips are separated and his lower lip juts forward. As a result, the figure seems to have existed not only in space but also in time, as if the portrait records Olycan’s visage as it appeared during a single instant. Mariët Westermann has argued that Hals’s liveliness and temporality, like that of Jan Steen (1626-1679), appealed to patrons and consumers because these features enabled the artists to render their sitters more naturally and distinctly.28 Westermann focused on Hals’s genre-like portraits such as the Laughing Cavalier, but her argument holds for his more conventional portraits as well. In contrast to conceptions of the self as unflinchingly stable in preceding centuries, she cited several sources that indicate an emerging understanding of it as being in constant flux.29 For example, Johan de Brune the Younger wrote, after Montaigne, that “we are never properly what we were, or will be; each step changes us into a very different nature.”30 Westermann linked De Brune’s sentiments to Aristotelian rhetoric where successful arguments were believed to be made with ener’gia (visual vigor) and en’argia (distinctness).31 In this schema, the most natural – and therefore best – portraits could be believed to be those that captured the distinctness of the sitter’s identity and character through a lively and energized representation.32 The rhetoric of liveliness in seventeenth-century Holland could have informed the appreciation of the paintings by Hals and Steen even if, as Westermann rightly suggests, artists did not consider their works in these terms. Numerous sources indicate, in less rhetorical language, that there was a longstanding awareness among early modern artists of the interrelationships between movement, vitality, and distinctness.33 The Florentine sculptor and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) was perhaps the first to articulate such thinking when he wrote: “The body is said to live when it has certain voluntary movements…Therefore the painter wishing to express life in things, will make every part in motion.”34 Hals’s teacher Karel van Mander, who was steeped in Italian art theory, advocated a similar practice of conveying identity and character through a figure’s movement. In his didactic poem Den Grondt der edel vry schilderconst, Van Mander suggested how to differentiate figural types through represented movement and bearing: Especially men of strong constitution should move and stand powerfully. But youths, who know no hardships, must be more lively, with relaxed limbs, entirely free and loose. Now the position of old men: they should hold onto something with their hands in order to support their weak, failing bodies on their tired legs which are inclined to bow. In sum, by the strength and nature of the character should then all figures be recognized, and also by their activity, as should be well understood: because a swordsman will conduct himself differently, more wildly, in pose and movement than a philosopher, by whose gestures it will be seen that he is answering difficult questions of judgment; all this one must distinguish to the best of one’s ability.35

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Fig. 26. Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, c. 1630-33. Oil on canvas, 75 x 64 cm. bpk Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders.

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Fig. 27. Frans Hals, Malle Babbe (detail), c. 1630-33. Oil on canvas, 75 x 64 cm. bpk Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders.

For Van Mander, as for all Renaissance art theorists versed in the rhetoric of decorum, diverse types of individuals carried themselves differently. Age, profession, and even character could be read from one’s movement. Van Mander related pictorial individuality to a figure’s distinctive activity. Though Alberti and Van Mander both addressed figural representation generally, others, like Bernini, spoke similarly about portraiture. Bernini proclaimed, “If a man stands still and immobile, he is never as much like himself as when he moves about. His movement reveals all those personal qualities that are his and his alone.”36 Similar conceptions can be found in Dutch in the treatises of the Latin scholar Franciscus Junius and the painter-writer Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678). Both authors supported portraitists who rendered “the movements of the soul” because doing so imbued their painted figures

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with a sense of liveliness.37 Junius’s and Van Hoogstraten’s positions recall those of Pliny when he wrote that Polygnotus of Thasos “first contributed many improvements to the art of painting, as he introduced showing the mouth wide open and displaying the teeth and giving expression to the countenance in place of primitive rigidity.”38 As Ann Adams has noted, psychological movement, like physical activity, cannot be maintained constantly, so that it also implies a degree of temporality.39 In this way, all of these artists and writers communicated a perceived relationship between activity, liveliness, and portraying a sitter as distinct. Furthermore, each seems to have concurred that the distinctness of the individual – the fundamental concern of portraiture – can be relayed best in a representation of the figure at one particular moment.40 In light of these wide-ranging sources, including his own teacher, it seems highly likely that Hals would have been aware of this perception of the distinctive moment even if his visualization of the concept was highly innovative.

A Lively Method Though Schrevelius noted that Hals’s vitality was rooted in his manner of painting, the relation between Hals’s method of execution and his sense of the momentary has never been accurately treated. Following nineteenth-century estimations that Hals worked swiftly from his models to craft proto-impressionistic works, his technique was long considered to be an immediate one. Scientific examination of Hals’s paintings resolutely rejects this view, as it has shown that Hals worked in stages over some time. In the wake of these studies, there has been no attempt to reconcile the duration of his process and the impression of transitoriness and spontaneity put forth in his finished paintings. This section explores not only how Hals created his paintings, but also how he consciously cultivated a method that accentuated the illusion of a distinctive moment that was fundamental to his approach to portraiture. A significant number of Hals’s paintings have been subject to scientific examinations in recent years. In the 1980s, Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks analyzed the group portraits by Hals in the Frans Hals Museum in preparation for their restoration of these pictures. Groen and Hendriks also studied twenty-five paintings by Hals prior to Slive’s monumental monographic exhibition shown in Washington, London, and Haarlem from 1989 to 1990. Groen and Hendriks published their results in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition. In the same volume, Martin Bijl presented what he had learned from his restoration of the so-called Meagre Company painted by Hals and Amsterdam artist Pieter Codde (1599-1678). During the run of the exhibition in Haarlem, conservators at the Frans Hals Museum conducted a more systematic study of fifty-nine of the eighty-six paintings on display.41 Hendriks and Koos Levy-van Halm recorded the results of the examinations conducted prior to and during the exhibition in an unpublished report which synthesizes technical studies of eighty-five of the 220 paintings that Slive attributed to Hals.42 More recently, the five paintings by Hals in the Mauritshuis were studied as part of the museum’s cataloguing of portraits in the Dutch royal collection.43 From these significant examinations of a sizable percentage of Hals’s known oeuvre, it is possible to make several general observations about Hals’s materials and procedure.

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Fig. 28. Frans Hals, cross-section Claes Duyst van Voorhout, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, 80.7 x 66 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Neither the supports nor the materials that Hals applied to them differ much from those of his contemporaries. As did many painters in the period, Hals gradually transitioned from panel to canvas. Of the works Slive published as autograph paintings, fifty-seven are on panel while 157 are on canvas. In fact, most of Hals’s works that can be dated after 1620 are on canvas. After being introduced in the sixteenth century, cloth supports quickly eclipsed wood as the medium of choice throughout Europe, as they were less expensive, easier to transport, and simpler to prepare. Some of these advantages were negated in small-scale works that were already quite portable and relatively cost efficient, so it is not surprising to find that Hals did execute some small works on wood planks during the later portion of his career.44 As for his works on canvas, one finds a variety of canvas grades in Hals’s paintings, although the width and coarseness of the fabrics are typical of those used in Haarlem in the seventeenth century.45 As Hals employed different grades in works close in date, he probably selected his canvas from a stash of bolts on hand.46 It is also quite possible that Hals was aware of the effects of various weaves on the final appearance of the painting and made his selections accordingly.47 Hals most frequently primed his supports with lead white as was common practice, but he also used the slightly archaic chalk glue grounds for several works.48 As for the paint, Hals tended to employ a limited palette in individual works, although he varied his tonal schemes from painting to painting. In the 1620s and early 1630s, for example, browns and yellows dominate while in the 1640s and 1650s the gray spectrum is more prevalent. Hals never used rare and expensive colors like lapis lazuli or gold

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leaf.49 Like his supports, his pigments and binding mediums were all readily available and typical for the period.50 What distinguishes Hals’s works is not what they were made from, but how he employed his materials. Contrary to longstanding assumptions, technical examinations have unequivocally proven that Hals did not craft his paintings entirely alla prima.51 In works such as Malle Babbe (figs. 26 and 27), one can see from the seemingly smeared passages of flesh tones like those at her jaw line and those cascading down her nose that Hals worked the uppermost surface of his canvas wet-in-wet. From such examples, it has been believed that he crafted the entirety of his paintings in a single sitting in a flurry of inspiration.52 Paint samples reveal, however, that even the most dashingly painted works were executed in a series of layers. For example, samples from the

Fig. 29. Frans Hals, Jolly Toper (detail), c. 1628-1630. Oil on canvas, 81 x 66.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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fluid coat of Claes Duyst van Voorhout (fig. 28) show clearly defined layers that could only result from applying paint atop an already dried stratum of paint. If Hals had not let the underlying layers dry, the samples would have shown the colors to be less rigidly differentiated. Likewise, one can see Hals’s use of dried layers in the right sleeve of the Jolly Toper (fig. 29). Here, trickles of paint solvent have washed away the yellowish surface to reveal a darker, umber layer beneath. Although Hals, like most other artists in the seventeenth century, employed far fewer layers than did painters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he could not have quickly dashed off an individual work, since oil-based paints can take several days to dry depending on the properties of the mixture. Instead, each of his paintings resulted from a multi-staged process. Hals began each work by applying a uniform coat of paint across a primed support. This ground layer served as the tonal foundation for the entire work. Generally light, Hals’s grounds range from white to yellowish ochre to light grays to reddish browns. Applying other colors over this type of base created more complex shades and tones than would a solid white ground. As Van Gogh noted with unbridled admiration, “Frans Hals had no less than twenty-seven blacks.”53 Rather than mixing his paints differently to achieve this effect, Hals applied thin layers of lamp black over the ground and various undertones, so that he indeed could create the appearance of multiple blacks.54 For example, a cross section of a paint sample taken from Man in a Slouch Hat in Kassel (fig. 30) shows that Hals applied deep lamp black over a double ground of ruddy red and cool gray to craft the depth of color in the figure’s garment. While undertones built from the

Fig. 30. Frans Hals, cross-section Man in a Slouch Hat, c. 1660-6. Oil on canvas, 7.5 x 66.5 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel.

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base layer could be used to create a dazzling array of shades, the ground also unified the entire work by providing a common foundation from which all colors derived. This was especially true for paintings made with Hals’s open technique of the late 1620s and 1630s. Like several painters in Haarlem, Hals did not entirely cover the ground with paint but instead left portions exposed, applying lighter and darker shades of the same color only in passages.55 In Youth with a Flute (fig. 88), Hals used a bluish, gray ground that he barely washed over with light browns in the background. While informing all parts of the picture, the ground also peeks through thinly brushed passages at the white cuff of the youth’s sleeve and at his hairline. Through this exposure and by applying this same shade atop the white at the inside corner of the flutist’s left eye, Hals was able to unify the tonalities of the picture. The variety of colors used for the grounds, even for works close in date, indicates sensitivity to the impact of this initial stage on the final appearance of his works.56 Atop the ground, Hals sketched a rudimentary design with heavy, dark strokes of paint.57 Evidence of this underdrawing occasionally can be seen through the surface layers as in the Family Portrait in Cincinnati (fig. 31), where the marks at the husband’s and wife’s chins and at the transitions from their collars to garments show the painter’s initial designs for the composition. Unlike the detailed underdrawings common in earlier Northern art, this sketch consisted of a basic silhouette of shapes that provided only a cursory guide for working up the surface of the painting.58 From this schematic guide, Hals blocked in tonal values with wide passages of unmodulated color, or “dead-coloring.” For the faces of his subjects, for example, Hals employed gray, pink, and reddish underpaint below pinkish tones to craft a variety of complexions. In the Cincinnati group, the warmer brownish red of the man’s face and the cooler gray of the woman’s visage are the result of the use of different modeling tones. Next, Hals began to model his forms with local touches of color to define the underlying structures of the face, hands, and costumes.59 At the lower left of the woman’s dress, near the man’s right foot, one can see how Hals applied swatches of dark black atop a thinner, gray-black midtone to mark the structure of the crinkled folds. He then covered the modulated underpaint with another layer or two of paint that set the ultimate features of an image. In Family Portrait, Hals used the unblended strokes of dark black that signal the recesses of the garment and the sweeps of whites and grays to indicate the crests of its folds. As such, he built his paintings from patches of tones in different values rather than from line drawing. In two to three layers, he was able to modulate his basic shapes and forms to create depth and volume from color rather than from line. Though working in layers, Hals did not build up the surfaces of his paintings uniformly, but rather worked from back to front.60 He progressed from those elements that were to appear furthest from the viewer forward. For instance, he generally completed the body of a garment before the collared ruff worn over it. Similarly, highlights that are by definition those areas closest to a light source are actually placed atop all other layers of paint. In this way, Hals’s paintings do project from the support out into the viewer’s space, even if slightly. Thus, Hals not only crafted an illusion of depth and volume, he also enhanced the three-dimensional presence of the image. Hals’s series of dry layers and apparent lack of preparatory studies raise the question,

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Fig. 31. Frans Hals, Family Portrait, c. 1635. Oil on canvas, 113 x 93.4 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum.

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Fig. 32. Frans Hals and Pieter Codde, The Meagre Company, 1633. Oil on canvas, 209 x 429 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

how much of that process took place in front of a model? While the technical analyses of Hals’s paintings fail to provide an answer, Hals’s commission for The Meagre Company (fig. 32) offers some insight. In 1633, the St. George Civic Guard of Amsterdam under Captain Reynier Real and Lieutenant Cornelis Michielsz. Blaeuw commissioned Hals to paint a group portrait of the militia’s officers. A series of notarized letters written between March 19, 1636 and July 16, 1636 document a dispute between the officers and Hals over the completion of the picture.61 By March 1636, Hals had finished only a portion of the painting, leaving the remainder incomplete. According to Bijl, Hals sketched the initial composition for the entire work and began working left to right, building up and finishing only a few of the individual figures.62 In response to demands by Real and Blaeuw, Hals corresponded that despite several expensive trips to Amsterdam, he had been unable to progress further due to difficulties in assembling the militia group for sittings. Hals claimed that he had agreed to sketch the officers’ heads in Amsterdam and would then finish the painting in Haarlem. As he had been unsuccessful in gathering the men in Amsterdam, Hals suggested that the officers travel to Haarlem to sit for him. Real and Blaeuw steadfastly refused, stating that the original agreement called for Hals to paint all of the heads in Amsterdam, presumably in their entirety, and render the details and unify the painting in Haarlem. Furthermore, they demanded that Hals travel to Amsterdam immediately to fulfill his part of the contract. In turn, Hals offered to reverse his working process. Instead of beginning with the heads, he offered to complete the figures’ garments and then paint the faces – once the officers agreed to come to Haarlem. As the officers eventually turned to Codde to finalize the portraits, Hals and the militia group obviously could not reach an agreement and parted ways. While these documents give only a cursory picture of Hals’s interactions with his sitters, it is clear that Hals required the sitters’ presence, or at least their faces, for multiple stages. Not only did he need the

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group fully assembled to sketch the composition, but he also needed to work from individual models in both the working-up and finishing stages of his extended process. Several sources affirm that seventeenth-century Northern artists required multiple extended sittings with their models in individual portraits as well. In his manuscript memoir from 1629-31, Constantijn Huygens described posing for a portrait by Jan Lievens (1607-74) in The Hague.63 According to Huygens: “It being winter and the days drawing in, and my own affairs leaving me little time to pose, he was content to paint my clothes and my bare hands (a task of which he acquitted himself most tastefully) and to postpone the portrayal of my face until the advent of spring.”64 Even though all but the face could be crafted without Huygens’s presence, this account suggests that Lievens not only needed multiple sittings, he also required that they last for a duration longer than the winter hours could afford. In about 1646, the English painter and calligrapher Edward Norgate (1580s-1650) provided extensive instructions to aspiring portraitists in Miniatura; or the Art of Limning. Making no distinction between the painting of the face and the body, he advocated a schedule of three sittings with the model.65 In the first stage, which could take two to four hours, the artist was to draft an outline of the composition and lay in preliminary shadows. In the second, the painter would need three to four hours to work up the tones and volumes. Lastly, the painter would need to flesh out the shadows, smooth the surface, and otherwise finish the painting in another three to four hours “according to the patience of the sitter, or skill of the Lymner.”66 Of course, Norgate’s drawn-out process was advised for miniatures that were far smaller in size and incomparably more finessed than the portraits Hals painted. Given the multiple layers that Hals employed and his protestations to the Amsterdam militia, however, one finds little reason to doubt that for his individual portraits Hals required sittings of at least comparable length to those described by Huygens and Norgate, even if he could complete a figure’s garments later. While technical examination of his paintings and analysis of contemporary texts on the act of portraiture clearly indicate a time-consuming process, Hals developed a method for presenting sitters as if they appear to have been deftly captured in a fleeting moment. In his description of what should transpire in the ultimate sitting, Norgate elucidated how one could craft such a vital image: In this [final] sitting you shall doe well to bend your observations upon what conduces most to the Likeness, which all good workmen commonly make their principall, but yet their last care and to this purpose the party sitting is by occasion of Discourse to be sometimes in motion, and to regard you with a friendly merry and Joviall aspect, where in you must bee ready and sudaine, to catch at and steale Your observations, and to expresse them with an assured quick and constant hand, which is the last and best note I can give you, for this last and third sitting.67

Like Bernini and others, Norgate considered the best likeness to be one that presented the sitter in motion. Norgate, however, recognized the difficulty involved in depicting a figure as emo-

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tionally active in the drawn-out process of painting. The practical solution was to construct the foundation of a portrait in the first two sittings and wait until the third and final meeting with the subject to capture the sitter’s vitality. First-hand observation and technical examination of his paintings indicate that Hals infused his works with liveliness at the end of his process. Hals deviated from his underpainting in slight repositionings of hands, minimal redefinitions of silhouettes, and reductions of the size of men’s hats.68 Rather than label these changes pentimenti, Hendriks and Levy-van Halm consider these changes to be “the result of a more pragmatic creative process.”69 Indeed, Hals had little need to make dramatic changes because he did not set the contours of the image until the final surface layer. In the pendant portraits from about 1645 now in the National Galleries of Scotland

Fig. 33. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1645. Oil on canvas, 115 x 86.1 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

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(figs. 33 and 34), one can clearly see that the sharp black contours of the torsos and shoulders overlap the background.70 The exposed fringes of these marks indicate that they were applied after those that appear on either side of it. By refraining from locking in the final shapes until the end of the process, Hals allowed himself the flexibility to respond to his sitters’ movements. While this did not allow Hals to alter the composition of his picture, he could have used this flexibility to render a sitter’s subtle, distinctive shifts in posture and gesture. As a result, he could better convey a sitter’s vitality. In addition to setting the contours, Hals’s uppermost layer of boldly unblended brushwork intrinsically suggests activity. Frequently of a different shade than the shape being framed, Hals rarely fused his contour strokes with the remainder of the picture from the 1630s onward.

Fig. 34. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman, c. 1645. Oil on canvas, 115 x 85.8 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

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In his attempt to characterize the essential features of Hals’s autograph oeuvre, Mau van Dantzig noted an inherent dynamism in these distinctively “springy” strokes.71 Van Dantzig’s remarks recall those of Henrich Wölfflin, for whom Hals was an exemplar of the “painterly” approach.72 In his binary opposition of the linearity of the Renaissance to the painterliness of the Baroque, Wölfflin defined painterly works, in part, by their animation: “The aim of the painterly style is to create an illusion of movement.”73 Wölfflin found that even though Hals’s marks disrupted the tangibility of his sitters, his strokes, along with his sensitive modeling, imbued his works with an unrivalled vitality. Sarah Friedman and Marguerite Stevenson provided a model for understanding Van Dantzig’s and Wölfflin’s responses in their psychological study of the perception of movement relayed by abstracted pictorial representation. Friedman and Stevenson found that the majority of those surveyed understood the detached circles framing a drawn dog’s tail and the dashed marks trailing the animal’s limbs (fig. 35) as indications of movement, even though these features do not occur in nature.74 They also found that angular and curved lines convey a strong sense of movement, as did blurred contours.75 In Hals’s lifetime, Philips Angel put forth a similar belief that indistinct renderings enhanced the illusion of movement. As part of his lecture to the Leiden Guild of St. Luke in 1641, Angel stressed naturalistic representation, but noted that painters rarely succeeded in depicting convincing images of carriages in motion. He explained: When painting a carriage, especially, they [painters] will make it appear that the horses are galloping at full speed while the wheels or spokes of the carriage are standing still… Whereas if they had correctly and closely observed all the real, natural things, they could have avoided this error if they had paid more heed to natural movement, presenting us with the form as it truly appears. For whenever a cartwheel or a spinning-wheel is turned with great force one sees that, because of the rapid rotation, no spokes are really visible but only an uncertain shimmer. Although I have seen many pictures in which carriage wheels are depicted, I have never seen this imitated properly, but with each spoke drawn or painted in such a way that the carriage did not appear to move, so that there was no distinction between a stationary carriage and one that was supposedly in motion.76

As Angel described, the eye does not register all details of objects in motion. Minutely rendering an object therefore imbues a representation with an impression of stasis. Conversely, seventeenth-century viewers recognized that imprecision imparts movement. One can see similar phenomena in the brushwork of paintings such as Hals’s Jolly Toper (fig. 36). Here, Hals’s clearly discernible strokes are far from regular, undulating in thickness and often curving to shape a rounded form. At the figure’s right shoulder, a flurry of short jabs extend beyond the figure’s cloth jerkin to form a fractured, almost blurred silhouette. On his right sleeve, Hals employed dark umber slashes that in tone are not to be found elsewhere in the sandycolored garment so that they appear as distinct lines. In each of these ways, Hals’s bold strokes operate as pictorial metaphors for movement.

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Fig. 35. Illustration of Abstracted Motion from Sarah Friedman and Marguerite Stevenson, “Perception of Movement in Pictures”. In The Perception of Pictures, ed. Mary Hagen (New York and London: Academic Press, 1980) 243.

While animating his pictures, Hals’s brushwork also forged a degree of indistinctness that, somewhat paradoxically, enhanced the likenesses of his sitters. The loose passages that enhance animation lack precise delineation. In many ways, the strokes suggest, rather than demarcate, forms. Aside from Hals’s early single-figure portraits like Jacob Pietersz. Olycan dated 1625 (fig. 77), none of his later paintings possess extended passages of articulated detail or sharp silhouette. As Sir Joshua Reynolds said in relation to portraiture, indistinct rendering allowed viewers to complete the image through mental projection: The likeness of a portrait as I have formerly observed, consists more in preserving the general effect of the countenance, than in the most minute finishing of the features, or any of the particular parts. Now Gainsborough’s portraits were often little more, in regard to finishing, or determining the form of the features, than what generally attends a dead colour; but as he was always attentive to the general effect, or whole together, I have often imagined that this unfinished manner contributed even to that most striking resemblance for which his portraits were so remarkable. Though this opinion may be fanciful, yet I think a plausible reason may be given, why such a mode of painting may have such an effect. It is presupposed that in this indetermined manner there is the general effect; enough to remind the spectator of the original; the imagination supplies the rest, and perhaps more satisfactory to himself, if not more exactly, than the artist, with all his care, could possibly have done.77

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Fig. 36. Frans Hals, Jolly Toper, c. 1628-1630. Oil on canvas, 81 x 66.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Fig. 37. Frans Hals, Paulus Verschuur, 1643. Oil on canvas, 118.7 x 94.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

For Reynolds, lack of definition provided viewers with a basic schema that recalled their memories of the sitter. If the artist did not provide too many details, viewers could perceive a more complete likeness than the sum of information given them. In this way, Hals’s methods, especially his flurried brushstrokes, served to craft not only a lively image but also a convincing likeness even if they eschewed particularizing details. Over the course of his career, Hals’s technique became increasingly loose. His portrait of Paulus Verschuur from 1643 (fig. 37), for example, with the unmodulated strokes of white at the sitter’s waist, the flurried description of the gray gloves, and the hazily rendered collar is far rougher in handling and finish than are earlier efforts such as the 1625 portrait of Jacob Pietersz. Olycan (fig. 77). In comparison to Vincent Laurensz. van der Vinne from about 1655-60 (fig. 63), however, Verschuur appears tight and reserved. With barely blended brushwork, Hals summarily

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rendered Van der Vinne’s jacket and juxtaposed sharply distinct tones in the face. While Hals selectively exposed his handling in Verschuur, nearly every touch can be read independently in the later portrait. In becoming looser, Hals increasingly emphasized those stylistic features that distinguished his work from that of other painters.

A Distinctive Approach Hals’s conception of figural painting, especially portraiture, and his methods of execution that captured his sitters’ lively appearances and independently connoted movement and activity were distinctive in the northern Netherlands. One cannot find works similar in conception and execution in the oeuvres of any known Dutch artists of the seventeenth century not associated with Hals’s studio. Comparisons to painters whose works have been suggested bear the closest similarities to Hals’s paintings and to fellow painters in Haarlem with whom Hals would have competed for sales demonstrate how distinctive Hals’s works were. Moreover, it was Hals’s method that distinguished his works from those of others. Rembrandt (1606-1669), who crafted some of the most animated portraits of the Dutch Golden Age, is the contemporary to whom Hals has been most frequently compared. As the majority of his single portraits from the early years of his career suggest, Rembrandt initially remained closely tied to the longstanding tradition of staid portrayals.78 His 1631 portrait of the Baltic merchant Nicolaes Ruts (fig. 38) is an exception. Though not engaged in any activity, his casual posture – with one hand resting on the back of a chair and the other hand dangling a small sheet of paper – crack the crystallized portrait conventions of the period. The graceful turn of his head and serious, focused gaze further imbue the sitter with an attentiveness that communicates a breathing presence. Amy Golahny has suggested that Rembrandt followed the model of a portrait by the north Italian painter Giovanni Battista Moroni (ca. 1525-78) to achieve a conception of active portraiture that was foreign to the northern Netherlands.79 How familiar Rembrandt was with the works of Moroni at this time remains to be seen, but Golahny is correct in noting a discrepancy between Rembrandt’s active approach in his portrait of Ruts and the works produced by the majority of his contemporaries. Jan Emmens argued that Rembrandt was able to present the entirety of a sitter’s presence by painting “speaking portraits.”80 In works such as the double portrait of the preacher Cornelis Claesz. Anslo and Aeltje Gerritsdr Schouten from 1641 (fig. 39), Rembrandt successfully pictured two individuals during a moment in conversation. Anslo extends his left arm in the rhetorical gesture of oration, but it is the braced right arm, inclined head with directed gaze, and parted mouth that deviate from convention to activate the sitter. Though eminently more passive, the subtle inclined nod of Anslo’s wife communicates her status as active listener to her husband’s exhortation. The couple’s interaction derives from Rembrandt’s earlier The Shipbuilder Jan Rijcksen and His Wife Griet Jans from 1633, but the rather stiff poses fail to convey the same sense of vitality that Rembrandt was able to achieve in his later painting. It should be noted, however, that Hals’s earliest active portrayals predate Rembrandt’s by a decade. Despite their shared engagement with lively portraits, Hals and Rembrandt practiced

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Fig. 38. Rembrandt van Rijn, Nicolaes Ruts, 1631. Oil on panel, 116 x 87 cm. The Frick Collection, New York.

Fig. 39. Rembrandt van Rijn, Cornelis Claesz Anslo and Aeltje Gerritsdr. Schouten, 1641. Oil on canvas, 173.7 x 207.6 cm. bpk, Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders.

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Fig. 40. Rembrandt van Rijn, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1653. Oil on canvas, 143.5 x 136.5 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

divergent methods to achieve their ends. Though both used rough styles later in their careers that were notably different from the smooth styles of Johannes Verspronck (ca. 1606/9-62) and Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), Rembrandt’s heavy impasto and accumulated layers bear little resemblance to Hals’s seemingly quick dashes. Rembrandt’s fine-tuned layerings solidified his figures with what Svetlana Alpers has termed sculptural effects.81 As an early legend has it, one visitor was able to lift a portrait by the nostrils because Rembrandt had painted the nose so thickly.82 In works such as Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (fig. 40), Rembrandt frequently employed this dense layering to model costume details like Aristotle’s chain, which projects from the picture as if it were sculpted in relief. While Rembrandt’s late style was well suited to render psychological presence, the solidity of its forms and the requisite labor to achieve such effects were anathema to Hals’s goal of fluid impressions of the momentary. Recently, scholars have recognized that Rembrandt also employed a rough manner early in his career.83 In several pictures created sometime in the late 1620s in Leiden before he relocated to Amsterdam, Rembrandt crafted figures like the Laughing Soldier now in the Mauritshuis from roughly hewn strokes. Bernhard Schnackenburg has noted that although these early works by Rembrandt often have a high degree of conviviality akin to that of Hals’s figures, considerable differences, most notably Rembrandt’s greater reliance on the push and pull of thick impasto, mark the two artists’ work as but tangentially related.84 For those limited areas of convergence, the chronologies of their works suggest that Hals was not following Rembrandt. Instead, Hals would have set the tone for his younger counterpart.

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Fig. 41. Hendrick Ter Brugghen, Singing Boy, 1627. Oil on canvas, 85.2 x 73.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund.

Though Hals’s active formulations share some similarities with the lively genre scenes by Ter Brugghen, Baburen, and Honthorst, their methods differ considerably. Each of the Utrecht painters handled the brush somewhat differently, but they consistently employed tight and controlled finishes. In following Caravaggio’s innovations, the emphasis was on lighting and volumetric modeling. Ter Brugghen’s Singing Boy (fig. 41), for example, presents the viewer with a tactile subject. Precise outlines lock the contours. Even in broader passages such as in the blue vest and the boy’s ruddy nose, at no point is brushwork visible on the surface. In total, the tactile, illusionistic presence could not successfully incorporate bravura strokes that flatten the image and affirm the painting’s status as painting. In Haarlem, Hals’s conception of portraiture deviated from those of his predecessors and contemporaries in its high premium on momentary activity.85 Though Hals’s paintings differ considerably from those of other Dutch painters, it is most useful here to focus on Haarlem artists because these were Hals’s primary competition for commissions and sales. Their art constituted the most likely frame of reference for his original audience, as the vast majority of Hals’s patrons hailed from the artist’s hometown, Hals never registered in a painter’s guild elsewhere, and he appears to have been reluctant to leave the city for even short periods of time.86 As a burgeoning urban center, especially in the first half of the seventeenth century, Haarlem boasted numerous artists who painted portraits of its burghers during Hals’s lifetime. Cornelis van Haarlem (1562-1638) and Frans Pietersz. de Grebber (1573-1643), who were both a generation older

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than Hals, frequently ventured into the genre. Pieter de Grebber (ca. 1600-ca. 1653), Salomon de Bray (1597-1664), Verspronck, and Pieter Soutman (ca. 1580-1657), along with Hals, constituted a second wave of portraitists. The younger painter Jan de Bray (ca. 1627-97) entered the market in the later decades of Hals’s career. Though Pieter Biesboer has expertly discussed many, but not all, of these portraitists, it is worth reviewing here how distinct Hals’s approach was from those of his contemporaries.87 Although Van Mander purported that Cornelis preferred to paint history pictures, he acknowledged that Cornelis created several “distinguished, beautiful portraits” in his lifetime.88 Despite the enlivened qualities of his 1583 civic guard painting, the few known single portraits by Cornelis are considerably more static. Pieter van Thiel has explained this quality by arguing that, by the mid-1590s, Cornelis began to combine the Italian aesthetic concepts of ritrarre (recording a person’s likeness) with imitare (interpreting the beauty of the countenance).89 In so doing, Cornelis crafted stylized depictions that were both flattering and timeless. In his 1624 portrait of Andries Pietersz. van Souwen (fig. 42), the cleric is seated at his desk with books strewn before him. His left hand marks his place in one volume while the fingers of his right hand are spread wide. Though these features seem to animate, they are also stock rhetorical gestures. Indeed, the rest of the body and face show no sign of movement whatsoever. His sealed lips create a disjunction with the gesticulating right hand. The striking contrast with Hals’s Laughing Cavalier of the

Fig. 42. Cornelis van Haarlem, Andries Pietersz. van Souwen, 1624. Oil on panel, 107 x 79 cm. Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht.

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same year, with its ebullient grin and warmly rosy flesh, indicates that Cornelis was operating within a more conventional aesthetic.90 Though known more as a history painter, Frans Pietersz. de Grebber also produced portraits that deviated little from convention. Much as in his civic guard pieces, the elder De Grebber represented his figures as rigidly static in his single portraits, such as that of Job Claesz. Gijblant from 1611 (fig. 43). He staged Gijblant in an upright and immobile stance. Even the hands remain tranquil as Gijblant holds his thumb as well as fore and middle fingers out in a gesture common in earlier Mannerist portraiture. De Grebber paid great attention to physiognomy, perhaps more than Cornelis, as can be seen in the detailed treatment of Gijblant’s hair and costume. Yet the excessively smooth, porcelain skin emphasizes the stylization of features. The result is an enduring and idealized image of the sitter at his best. Like Cornelis, De Grebber deviated little from his established model of portraiture during his career. As one of the leading painters of histories and portraits in the early decades of the seventeenth century, De Grebber operated a large studio where he trained several young artists, including his son Pieter Fransz. de Grebber.91 Like his father, the younger De Grebber primarily painted religious works, but he also produced around twenty portraits.92 Though he did not join the Haarlem painters’ guild until 1632, Pieter had begun painting portraits by 1621, almost all of which were of local Catholic clerics like the 1631 portrait of Philippus Rovenius (fig. 44).93 Typical of his work at this time, this painting shows how Pieter fused his father’s detailed approach

Fig. 43. Frans Pietersz. de Grebber, Job Claesz Gijblant, 1611. Oil on panel, 127 x 99 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

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Fig. 44. Pieter Fransz. de Grebber, Philippus Rovenius, 1631. Oil on canvas, 105.5 x 93 cm. Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht.

Fig. 45. Pieter Fransz. de Grebber, Maerten Jorisz. van Velden, 1638. Oil on panel, 90 x 80 cm. Archive photo; on loan until 1951 at Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden.

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to physiognomy and costume with a more intense sense of naturalism and dramatic lighting.94 In paintings from Pieter’s period as an independent master, like the portrait of Maerten Jorisz. van Velden dated 1638 (fig. 45), one can see a continuation of the more formalized tranquility favored by elder artists. Thick coursing veins punctuate the back of Van Velden’s right hand, but the sitter appears frozen. His eyes are opened wide, almost bulging from their sockets, but there is no glimmer of focus in the pupils. Each hair on his scalp and chin has been willed into passive submission as every element connotes stillness. The multi-talented Salomon de Bray painted several portraits throughout his career. A generalist who also painted histories, landscapes, and genre pictures, De Bray exemplified the art establishment in Haarlem in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. During Hals’s lifetime, De Bray was one of the leading figures in the Guild of St. Luke, which he helped reform in 1631.95 His earliest known portrait is that of a nun from 1622, now in Berlin (fig. 46). Here, De Bray sensitively shaped his subject’s features through delicate shading. Though her eyes sparkle, they stare ahead blankly. Similarly, her jaw stands firm as stone despite the evocation of soft cheeks, making her appear more like a sculpted bust than a breathing individual. In 1628, De Bray added a small child to the lower right-hand corner of Hals’s now divided Family Portrait in a Landscape (figs. 47 and 48).96 The girl was most likely born after Hals painted the family around 1620, although why Hals did not complete the group he had begun remains unknown. As Slive

Fig. 46. Salomon de Bray, Nun, 1622. Oil on canvas, 48.4 x 40.1 cm. bpk Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Gustav Schwarz.

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Fig. 47. Frans Hals and Salomon De Bray, Family Portrait in a Landscape, c. 1620-1628. Oil on canvas, 151 x 163.6 cm. The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo.

Fig. 48. Frans Hals, Family in a Landscape, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, 152 x 107.5 cm. Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels.

has noted, the overly polished cheeks and lack of lively accents distinguish this figure even before one finds De Bray’s prominent signature on the girl’s left shoe.97 Indeed, De Bray took a more conservative approach to his sitters. This may have been a result of training with the Haarlem academicians Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) and Cornelis, although it must be noted that no such apprenticeship is documented.98 In any case, in his mature works De Bray continued to blend his brushwork so completely that his sitters appear with porcelain-like complexions that are foreign to Hals’s oeuvre. Verspronck was the best known of Hals’s contemporary portraitists. Like Hals, but unlike the majority of those who painted portraits in Haarlem in the period, Verspronck specialized in the genre. Nearly all of the about 100 paintings attributable to him are portraits.99 Among these works, one finds little variety. As Rudi Ekkart has noted, soon after his earliest works from 1634, Verspronck developed a limited number of compositional formulas that he repeated throughout his twenty-five-year career.100 Despite this homogeneity, Verspronck took a natural approach to portraiture.101 Stripped of much of the stylizations favored by the De Grebber family, his portraits offer delicately differentiated features like those of the young girl in blue from 1641 in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 49). The light bathes her forehead and shapes her full girlish cheeks. Her wide eyes and slightly upturned lips give her a reluctant expression. Her presence seems palpable. This favoring of naturalistic rather than more formal, idealized renderings is related in conception to Hals’s portraiture, but as is evident in paintings like Maria van Strijp from about 1652 in the

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Fig. 49. Johannes Verspronck, Young Girl in Blue, 1641. Oil on canvas, 82 x 66.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 50. Johannes Verspronck, Maria van Strijp, c. 1652. Oil on panel, 97 x 75 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Fig. 51. Pieter Claesz. Soutman, Portrait of a Woman, 1625-1630. Oil on canvas, 118 x 91.4 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Edward Mallinckrodt. Object number: 139:1922.

Rijksmuseum (fig. 50), Verspronck opted not to animate his figures. Seated, Van Strijp rests her left arm atop the back of her chair as she looks out at the viewer in a pose that is reminiscent of those employed by Hals from the 1620s onward.102 Verspronck’s sitter, however, lacks the torsion of Hals’s as her shoulders and hips both rest perpendicular to the picture plane. As a result, she turns slightly to confront the viewer, but does not twist as if distracted. She sits quiet and still, posing for the painter. This static quality, along with his meticulous handling of paint, distinguishes Verspronck’s works from those of Hals.103 Though of a comparable age to Hals, Soutman was a different sort of painter. Soutman was born in Haarlem but immigrated to Antwerp around 1615 to work in Rubens’s studio. In 1624, he began a short period of service to King Sigismond III of Poland who was in Flanders at the time. By 1628, he had returned to Haarlem where he entered the Guild of St. Luke in 1633. His international and courtly experience was unique for Haarlem artists of his generation. Soutman is best known today for his reproductive prints after Rubens produced in both Flanders and Haarlem, but he also crafted history paintings and portraits upon his return. Indeed, Soutman secured two important group portrait commissions in the early 1640s.104 The portrait of a woman in the St. Louis Art Museum (fig. 51) exemplifies Soutman’s individual portraits. Not surprisingly, it is somewhat Rubensian in appearance; the woman’s cheeks are flushed with color in the fashion of the Flemish master and a baroque swag of drapery adorns the upper-right hand corner. That said, the overall conception of a sober half-length representation set against a nondescript wall is

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more typically Dutch than Rubens’s often more flamboyant portrayals. Biesboer has argued that the formalized qualities of Soutman’s portraiture relate to that of the De Grebbers.105 Although Soutman’s works differ significantly from the finely detailed smoothness of the De Grebbers, the high-keyed blushes and occasionally flattened features do appear more stylized than the more natural approaches of Verspronck and Hals. The leading portraitist in Haarlem of a generation younger than Hals was Jan de Bray. Though his father and teacher Salomon de Bray practiced the genre occasionally, the bulk of Jan’s pictures are portraits. Eight years after his earliest dated picture, he was able to execute accomplished works like Boy with a Basket of Fruit from 1658 (fig. 52) that has recently been described with some justification as “undoubtedly one of the finest Dutch portraits ever produced.”106 With a slight tilt of his head, the boy locks a focused gaze. His right hand rests comfortably atop the luscious fruits in his spot-lit basket. De Bray’s meticulous attention to details, despite the nondescript black backdrop, creates a wondrous tactility. In the youth’s necktie, for example, one not only gets a sense of the satiny fabric, but the exacting placement of highlights also enables us to feel the downturn of the tie’s tail that falls from his chin. Similarly, the glistening blond highlights and feathery tapering of hair give a tactile illusion. De Bray even infused the flesh with a remarkable level of plasticity so that the texture as well as the tone of the skin conveys a living presence. The success of such early works enabled De Bray to obtain a number of important

Fig. 52. Jan de Bray, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, 1658. Oil on panel, 67.9 x 56 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles H. Beyley Picture and Painting Fund and other funds.

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Fig. 53. Jan de Bray, Boy, 1654. Oil on panel, 59.5 x 47 cm. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague.

commissions for group portraits in the 1660s and afterward.107 It should be noted, however, that De Bray’s ascent occurred after Verspronck’s death in 1662 and during Hals’s last years.108 What can be seen from De Bray’s efforts from the 1650s and early 1660s is a proclivity for the lively conception of portraiture formulated by Hals decades earlier. Even though he restrained his figures considerably more than did Hals and employed a vastly smoother and less open brushwork, De Bray came the closest of any of the Haarlem portraitists to Hals in this regard. Yet Hals had almost reached the end of his career before De Bray painted the first of his lively images. Because their conceptions of portraiture differed, the methods and execution of other portraitists active in Haarlem in Hals’s lifetime diverged as well. As part of their traditional approaches, Cornelis and the De Grebbers emphasized coolly delineated forms and polished surfaces. Strokes of paint do not stand apart to interrupt the otherwise crystalline features that result from the layers of paint and glazing.

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Later, Verspronck carefully drafted his compositions before laying brush to canvas. In contrast to Hals’s rudimentary working sketch, Verspronck defined every detail in meticulous underdrawing.109 Never deviating from this design, Verspronk cemented the pose, gesture, and expression at the start of his process. Verspronck controlled the interaction with the sitter instead of responding to the model’s momentary physical and mental movements as Hals appears to have done. As a result, he had little need to remain flexible or leave the setting of his contours until the final stage of execution. Instead, he could mold the shapes of his forms continuously in each layer. Verspronck’s sitters have sharply delineated boundaries like that between the skirt of the young girl’s dress and the backlit wall behind her in the Amsterdam portrait (fig. 50). Similarly, instead of juxtaposing unmodulated colors, Verspronck smoothly brushed out his strokes so that the girl’s rosy cheeks elegantly transition into a subtly shadowed jaw line. In every way, Verspronck’s demure elegance contrasts with Hals’s rough and bold execution. Though Rubensian in tone, neither Soutman nor the De Brays approached Rubens or Hals’s bravura handling. Jan de Bray’s portrait of a six-year-old boy dated 1654 that now hangs in the Mauritshuis (fig. 53) displays the influence of Hals, but it remains more reserved.110 Unmodulated and unblended strokes appear as white highlights in the boy’s blond hair. A thick smudge marks the edge of his lower lip. Despite these painterly passages, the picture surface is calm. The black jacket and cape, for example, presented the opportunity for dashing plays of highlights and shadows, but De Bray decided to render these garments unobtrusively. Similarly, the boy’s

Fig. 54. Jan van Goyen, Dune Landscape with Figures, 1632. Oil on panel, 33 x 54 cm. Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden – long term loan by the Cultural Heritage Agency (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed).

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right arm and shoulder were marked with contour strokes, but De Bray did not flashily tail off these strokes or dramatically juxtapose them with the adjacent passages of cloth. They are not self-evident, nor do they animate the solidly unwavering posture. Hals’s manner differed considerably from those of the other portraitists active in Haarlem, and it is fair to say that his method distinguished his paintings from theirs. Stylistically, Hals’s paintings bear greater resemblance to those of the tonal painters in Haarlem working in other genres than they do to any of the town’s portraitists, although his bold bravura strokes cannot be found among these contemporaries either. In the 1620s, painters in Haarlem specializing in almost every genre experimented with open techniques that exposed ground layers to serve as mid-tones. Their works executed in the brown and yellow spectrums displayed subtle tonal variation crafted from a limited palette. In landscapes such as Dune Landscape with Figures dated 1632 (fig. 54), Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) thinly washed a sandy brown ground with grayish blues to cast a hazy sky.111 The foreground was rendered comparably summarily. Traces of the artist’s touch can be seen in the horizontal striated indentations left in the brush’s wake across the broad expanses of sky and in the thickly daubed turf to the left of the small party. Van Goyen never used broad strokes to define his forms or mark his contours. His minute delineations of trees and garments spring instead from stippled marks of a small-headed brush. As such, they not only serve different purposes than do Hals’s, they are also never as dramatically obvious.

Fig. 55. Pieter Claesz., Still Life With a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Oil on panel, 24.1 x 36.9 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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More fully delineated shapes appear in the open still lifes painted by Pieter Claesz. (ca. 1597-1660) like that dated 1628 now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 55). Claesz.’s yellow umber ground peeks through the skull and the shadows that rim the roemer’s shimmering reflections, but his more polished surfaces give crisp edges to his objects. A long, dark contour defines the bottom edge of the book, but Claesz. carefully brushed out the fringes of such strokes. Frenetic linear evocations of energy and movement would have seemed out of place for the representation of inanimate objects. Adriaen Brouwer (ca. 1605-1638), who briefly resided in Haarlem in the mid-1620s, also made full use of his grounds in the final appearance of his genre paintings.112 In Tavern Scene (fig. 56), Brouwer applied relatively broad strokes of unmodulated black or umber to denote drapery

Fig. 56. Adriaen Brouwer, Tavern Scene, c. 1630-1635. Oil on panel, 35.5 x 27.2 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek München.

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folds such as those that define the collar of the central figure in blue with his back to the picture plane. Even in these marks, however, Brouwer employed a smaller, more controlled stroke that does not insistently call attention to itself, quite unlike Hals’s sweeping contours. Similar comments can be made about Brouwer’s followers Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685) and Isaak van Ostade (1621-after 1649) who hazily rendered their boorish peasants against barely described brown backdrops but rarely applied broad brushwork. Adriaen van Ostade’s paintings from the 1630s such as Carousing Peasants in an Interior (fig. 57) are close to those of Brouwer in conception and handling. After 1640, however, the interiors in which Van Ostade set his figures become more expansive and the artist increasingly rendered details of the scenes and costumes with greater precision. In the 1650s and 1660s, Van Ostade applied these shifts in composition and execution to scenes like Peasant Family in an Interior (fig. 58) where peasants were engaged in less bawdy and disruptive behavior. Bernard Schnackenburg has argued that Van Ostade’s later paintings illustrate a shift in meaning from admonitory, satiric imagery to idealizations of the simplicity of peasant life so that handling of the paint was tied to the meaning of the picture.113 In short, none of these tonal artists employed the unblended strokes or active, freely set contours so central to Hals’s process and finishing touches. No artist approached Hals’s lively conception or animated execution of the portrait or single-figure genre scene. It may even be possible to claim that Hals helped usher in a new way of conceiving portraiture. Up to now, this chapter has taken as given that a seemingly living, if not lively, portrayal was the ultimate goal of portrait painting. In fact, prior to the seventeenth century and even for many in Hals’s lifetime, this was decidedly not the case. Ancient Roman tradition frequently held portraits as effigies and memorials. In this function, the unchanging immortality of the image was key, not temporal specificity or embodied presence. These ideas continued to inform much early modern representation. As Ann Adams has argued, the depiction of stoic tranquility remained in vogue through the 1630s.114 In a different sense, the intentional distance and dissonance of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century royal portraits resulted in images that are highly unnaturalistic. As Sarah Schroth has argued with Juan Pantoja de la Cruz’s (1553-1608) portraits of King Philip III of Spain, royal sitters did not wish to appear to be accessible to the viewers of these images, all of whom occupied a lower social and political rank than themselves.115 As a result, these figures embraced an aesthetic of stillness, rigidity, and above all formality. To achieve these effects, painters like Pantoja forged lifeless porcelain-looking skin and utilized neat, crisp brushwork that crystallized their subjects. Presenting sitters in the moment, as casual, relaxed, and animated as Hals did placed them within the viewers’ immediate experiences. Sitter and viewer engage each other as social equals. One finds a comparable development in the art of Bernini, where his liveliest busts Scipione Borghese and Costanza Buonarelli depicted peers while his sculpted portraits of popes retained older, static, reserved representational schema where convention was expected if not demanded. In the northern Netherlands, these same conventions seem to have been dominant before Hals. Later artists like Hals and Rembrandt met the demands of a society where wealth and status were more horizontally distributed than they had been previously. What I seek to illuminate here is that Hals’s mode and method were highly

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Fig. 57. Adriaen van Ostade, Carousing Peasants in an Interior, c. 1638. Oil on panel, 28.8 x 36.3 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.

Fig. 58. Adriaen van Ostade, Peasant Family in an Interior, 1661. Oil on panel, 34.1 x 39.7 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.

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Fig. 59. Frans Hals, Regents of the Old Men’s Almhouse, 1664. Oil on canvas, 172.5 x 256 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson.

Fig. 60. Frans Hals, Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almhouse, 1664. Oil on canvas, 172.5 x 256 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson.

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innovative, even if they were well suited to meet the desires of his clients as the ensuing chapters will argue. Furthermore, as alternative modes were possible, if not dominant, Hals’s naturalistic aesthetic – presenting his subjects seemingly as they naturally existed in life – was a conscious artistic decision. As Walter Liedtke has lucidly written, naturalism is not a default mode of representation but a style and a stylistic choice.116 Though naturalistic modes came to define much, though not all, of seventeenth-century Dutch art, Hals’s choices both in terms of formulating the operations of portraiture and the specific means of actualizing his aims were highly distinctive. As such, Schrevelius’s characterization of Hals’s manner as unique was quite apt. Hals increasingly emphasized the features that distinguished his paintings. Early in his career, Hals developed broad, unblended brushwork along with lively postures and gestures primarily to animate and give stronger presence to his sitters. By the mid-1640s, however, Hals divorced his bold strokes from this initial purpose. Hals’s ultimate paintings, the regents and regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse in Haarlem (figs. 59 and 60), illustrate the point. Here, nothing suggests movement. Hands do not appear mobile, nor is there any activity underway other than posing for a portrait. Yet the brushwork is imminently apparent. For example, the white sleeves of the figure seated at bottom right of the regents read as near-chaotic scratchings and scribbles, even from some distance. The strokes that cut dark ravines down the man’s leg clearly stand apart and cannot be mistaken for anything other than evidence of the artist’s touch. In this way, the former sign of movement has become an independent mark to be appreciated in its own right. The steadily increasing looseness of his brushwork over the decades likewise resulted in a greater disparity between his paintings and those by other artists. Hals crafted and cultivated both his conception of portraiture and his method. Contrary to dominant opinion, Hals’s dashing strokes, frenetic contours, and juxtaposed rather than blended tones are not the result of an immediate method. He did not capture what he saw before him in a single sitting. His process of working in layers was far more time-consuming. Instead, he crafted images that looked like they had been dashed off in the spur of the moment to better express a vital and individualized movement. That Hals would eventually employ these lively touches on otherwise static subjects signals a significant shift in motivation and meaning. As they signified and embodied Hals’s distinctive execution, several questions arise about how and why the artist sought to distinguish himself and his works generally and, in particular, why he chose to do so through roughly unblended brushwork. The following chapters explore these issues by examining how the manner that was “uniquely his” operated within the contexts of contemporary art theory, the market, and the workshop.

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C hap te r 2

v i rTu o SiTy

C h a p Te r 2

virtuosity1

Frans Hals’s late Portrait of a Man in the Museé Jacquemart-André (fig. 61) displays the artist’s bold mastery of his materials. Half-cloaked in shadow, the man’s broad features and ruddy complexion demand the viewer’s attention. Upon closer inspection, one notices that Hals conveyed the play of light across the sitter’s face through a series of unblended daubs of unmodulated color. For the sitter’s left cheek, for example, he applied a pinkish flesh tone atop a red ground without smoothing out the perimeter of the bristles’ reach and crowned the crest of the cheekbone with a dab of pure white. Elsewhere, Hals ran a single arc of umber upward from the tail of the mustache to the edge of the nostril carving a furrowed shadow to create volume and distinguish the features of the face. He crafted the nose and forehead from similar juxtaposed swaths of unblended tones. Hals’s method of limited, highly visible touches is even more readily apparent in his attention to the man’s garment. The broad gray sleeve would lie flat if not for a series of efficient strokes. A thick black sweep defines the elbow crease. Shorter strokes radiate up and down the sleeve to create folds. On the underside of each black jab is a smaller hint of a light gray or pure white that casts a highlight in contrast to its shadow, giving a sense of depth. Most remarkable is the nearly white gray daub beneath the central crease. The stroke has uneven tails and undulates in thickness, features that convey a sense of hasty application. Yet it is perfectly placed, for it grazes the black without smudging either tone. The black and gray lie side by side in perfect harmony. In passages like these where Hals’s skills as a painter are abundantly clear, the unblended brushwork beckons the viewer to contemplate the act of creation. How was Hals able to place his bare strokes just so, without mistake? While contemporary appreciation for Hals’s painterly approach has surely been conditioned by the prevalence of gestural painting in modernity from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism and the general favor in which these movements are held, does that mean that responses like the one above are inherently anachronistic?2 In this chapter, I argue that, in the artist’s lifetime, Hals’s method was considered not only to be lively and uniquely his, but also to

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Fig. 61. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1660-1666. Oil on canvas, 69 x 60.5 cm. Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.

be virtuoso. More specifically, the earliest descriptions of Hals’s paintings that judged them to be particularly masterful also described the artist’s work as rough. Rather than serving as a condemnation, a review of seventeenth-century art literature reveals that the label “rough” engaged contemporary discourses on handling and finish, referencing a tradition of painterly painters

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exalted in theory and practice. In this light, Hals should be seen as an artist who was appreciated as a master painter par excellence by a sophisticated and knowledgeable community of consumers that judged his style to be particularly artful. Furthermore, because Hals’s manner was so valued, it marked those who sat for him as cultivated virtuosi-liefhebbers who possessed sufficient knowledge of the arts to appreciate the artfulness of rough painting. Though he has previously been considered to be aloof from theoretical concerns due to his occupation with the “low” genre of portraiture, this chapter concludes with a consideration of the possibility that over the course of his career Hals decreased the level of finish of his paintings to attract a wealthy clientele and to cultivate the artistic identity of a virtuoso painter.

Virtuoso Brushwork Thomas Carson Mark has offered three features that define a work of virtuosity: “1.) The artwork must require skill; 2.) it must be about the skills that it requires; 3.) it must display the skills that it is about.”3 According to Mark, while virtuosity is brilliant technical execution, the display and recognition of that mastery are what distinguish a virtuoso work from one that is merely produced competently. Mark’s second requirement may not be entirely relevant in early modernity as it neglects the importance of subject matter, but as art literature frequently addressed various topics related to handling, Hals’s audiences would have been attuned to the display of technical skills that comprise Mark’s third condition for virtuosity. Written descriptions of Hals and his paintings make it clear that his contemporaries perceived virtuosity in his works. Prior to Arnold Houbraken’s life of Hals in De Groote Schouburgh of 1718, written reactions to Hals’s paintings are sparse, yet informative.4 Samuel Ampzing, who Hals had masterfully portrayed a few years later, offered the first impression when he briefly remarked in his 1628 history of Haarlem, “How dashingly Frans paints people from life!” (fig. 62).5 In his 1648 book-length praise of Haarlem, Theodorus Schrevelius elaborated slightly: Nor can I let this pass in mute silence, Frans and Dirck Hals, brothers, of whom the one [Frans] excels almost everyone with the superb and uncommon manner of painting which is uniquely his. His paintings are imbued with such force and vitality that he seems to surpass nature herself with his brush. This is seen in all his portraits, so numerous as to pass belief, which are colored in such a way that they seem to live and breathe.6

Both Ampzing and Schrevelius focused on Hals’s act of painting. As Joseph Koerner has posited, the early modern viewer valued paintings as made things and therefore was aware of the object’s “madeness.”7 Indeed, Schrevelius used active verbs that credit Hals as the source of the naturalistic effects: Hals “colors” his paintings in a way that enhances the vitality of the work, and he “imbues” his paintings with the sense of life. Schrevelius further emphasized Hals’s agency by noting the uniqueness of his manner. Even Ampzing’s laconic adulation employed the active verb “paints.”

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Fig. 62. Frans Hals, Samuel Ampzing, c. 1630. Oil on copper, 16.2 x 12.3 cm. Private Collection, New York.

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Later authors remained focused on Hals’s execution, employing the word rouw, or rough, to describe his works. In Het Gulden Cabinet van de Edel vry Schilderconst, Cornelis de Bie characterized Hals’s portraits in his discussion of Philips Wouwerman (1619-68) as follows: “He [Wouwerman] studied with Frans Hals, who is still living in Haarlem, a marvel at painting portraits or counterfeits which appear very rough and bold, nimbly touched and well composed, pleasing and ingenious, and when seen from a distance seem to lack nothing but life itself.”8 More verbose than the Haarlem historians, De Bie credited Hals’s touches with the success of the artist’s “rough and bold” works. In a poem from 1660, Frederick Waterloos also referred to Hals’s manner as rouw.9 In contrast to De Bie’s clearly positive use of the term, Waterloos used it derisively to condemn Hals’s handling as too rough to express the brilliance of his sitter Herman Langelius’s mind.10 As Maria Isabel Pousão-Smith has recently articulated, rouw, in any of its manifold spellings, was a loaded term in seventeenth-century art discourse.11 Jan Emmens first showed that rouw, and its antithesis net, or smooth, were not arbitrary terms, but were based on art theory.12 Together, they defined divergent opinions about how artists applied their paint and finished their paintings. As tastes frequently changed, the meaning of both terms was unstable and often contradictory. Because of this fluidity, it is necessary to briefly map the multivalent connotations of rouw in order to better understand the descriptions of Hals as a rough painter. As with all attempts to unpack the language of Dutch art literature and theory, one must begin with the writings of Karel van Mander. In Den Grondt der edel vry schilderconst, Van Mander (1548-1606), with whom Hals studied, wrote of rouw and net: “Herewith, apprentices I have placed before you two perfect manners toward which you may now guide your path according to your bent, but I should still advise you to begin by applying yourselves to the neat manner.”13 In the passages immediately preceding this one, Van Mander praised Titian’s “rough strokes” but recognized the inability of his followers to successfully replicate these touches.14 Therefore, Van Mander did not advocate that the young painter should paint smoothly because such a method was inherently superior, but because it would be easier to execute. Just as Titian began working neatly early in his career before adopting a bolder method, a young artist would have not yet honed his skills adequately to try his hand at rough painting. Pousão-Smith has explored how Van Mander’s conception of rouw was not always this positive.15 As she notes, Van Mander rarely used the term in Het Schilderboek and sometimes, as in his reproach of Jan Soems for not painting neatly enough, it could operate as a criticism.16 In other passages where one would most expect it to be used as praise, rouw is curiously absent. In the life of Dirck Barendsz (1534-1592), for example, the term does not appear even though Van Mander discusses at length Barendsz’s period of study with Titian and praises his Titianesque handling.17 Van Mander’s unequivocal praise for net painting throughout Den Grondt and Het Schilderboek and his occasional disparagement of rouw in other passages does seem to indicate an occasionally antagonistic stance towards rough handling. However, despite the seemingly contradictory messages on the topic that his texts present as a whole, the passage on the two perfect manners clearly conveys a consideration of rough painting as not only acceptable, but also difficult and technically challenging.18

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Samuel van Hoogstraten provided the most extensive – and for Pousão-Smith also the most sympathetic – discussion of rouw in the tenth chapter of Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst published in 1678.19 In this section devoted to the various ways to handle the brush, Van Hoogstraten established net and rouw as opposite stylistic poles that reflected the duration of time that an artist labored over a painting. The ancient artist Protogenes, who was known for toiling excessively over each of his works, and Leonardo da Vinci, who had supposedly spent four years painting the Mona Lisa, appeared as examples of net painters. At the other extreme stood the rouw painters Antidotus and Tintoretto who in Van Hoogstraten’s judgment began well but failed to bring their works to suitable conclusions.20 Between these two antipodes, Van Hoogstraten advocated moderation. An artist should dedicate enough time and attention that his painting appeared well finished, but not work at it so long that it appeared overwrought. Van Hoogstraten’s identification of rough paintings as somewhat unfinished appears to be a widely held conception, though one not fully explored by Pousão-Smith, as various sources describe schetsen (sketches) as rouw.21 Van Hoogstraten encouraged the use of “een ruwe schets” as a preparatory work in the painting process.22 Willem Goeree made a similar recommendation that employed the term.23 Philips Angel used rouw to describe a sketch of the sacrifice of Abraham by Jan Lievens (1607-74).24 In each case, the rough sketch connoted lack of finish because, as an intermediary stage in the creative process, it signified an incomplete painting project.25 Indeed, many finished paintings by Hals resemble sketches.26 In light of the complete lack of preparatory drawings by Hals, Wilhelm von Bode remarked that Hals did not need to draw because his painting style was that of a draftsman due to its reliance on individual strokes to define forms.27 A portrait such as that of Vincent Laurensz. van der Vinne (fig. 63) recalls drawn studies like the portrait of Gillis van Breen (fig. 64) by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) that display a carefully crafted face and a summarily rendered body. Goltzius drew the head in detail down to a series of flourishes that mark each strand of the figure’s hair. Below the collar, Goltzius laid only wiry outlines and cursory hatching to shape the hands, arms, and torso. Likewise, while Hals opted not to blend the tones that make up Van der Vinne’s flesh, he devoted more attention to the face than he did to the rest of the composition. Through a subtle evocation of light and coloring, he defined the form and texture of his sitter’s features. Van der Vinne’s jacket, on the other hand, barely reveals the shape of the body beneath. Atop a broad brown mid-tone, Hals dashed sweeps of dark umber to mark shadows and strokes of a lighter, yellow umber to give highlights. Aside from the right shoulder where Hals used graduated tones to mold volumes, the body lies flat. The left arm and shoulder are broadly rendered. Like Goltzius, Hals tapered the degree of finish from a relatively precisely rendered face down to a barely delineated body.28 Hals’s refusal to set contours until the last stages of execution further recalls the sketching process. As technical examination confirms, Hals worked directly on the canvas, building up his forms in layers, but rather than working from a set conception he continually set and reset boundaries.29 Only in the final stages, atop layered paint, did he lay in the outlines with broad strokes.30 In his portrait of Van der Vinne, Hals blocked in the white collar with dark umber, literally drawing the borders of the flurried mass of lighter tones. Similar marks are also visible

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Fig. 63. Frans Hals, Vincent Laurensz. van der Vinne, c. 1655-60. Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 48.9 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Legacy of Frank B. Wood, 1955.

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Fig. 64. Hendrik Goltzius, Gillis van Breen, c. 1600. Pen in brown ink, 223 x 178 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet / Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

all along the edge of Van der Vinne’s left arm and shoulder, clearly separating the body of shadowed browns from the muted background. As has long been recognized, contour lines like these set atop the bulk of the painted surface are characteristic of the master’s work.31 Hals seems to have favored this method because it allowed him to revise, if only slightly, his original conception while working up his surfaces. Ella Hendriks has posited that these visible reworkings, such as the overlapping contours where Van de Vinne’s right sleeve meets the edge of the picture, suggest “a creative searching.”32 Deviations visible through pentimenti are a common feature to sketches, drawn and painted, as the sketch functioned as an avenue where the artist could work out his ideas before undertaking the final project. Hals’s juxtaposed swatches of fleshtones parallel those found in Flemish head studies like the one by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) in Munich (fig. 65).33 Focusing on the subject’s expression, Van Dyck cared little for the rendering of the body below the head. As the piece was to serve as a guide for subsequent works rather than stand alone, Van Dyck did not linger long enough to blend his strokes completely. Van Dyck, like Hals, sculpted the figure’s features from unblended jabs of contrasting shades. Both artists even left a wide highlight just below the hairline that catches the light streaming from the left. From these analogies to preparatory works, it is easy to see how Hals’s contemporaries employed the language of the unfinished to describe his rough paintings.

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Fig. 65. Anthony van Dyck, Head, c. 1616. Oil on paper laid on canvas, 57 x 41.4 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

Hals was not the only “sketchy” painter who was designated as rouw. Van Mander preceded Van Hoogstraten in classifying Antidotus as rough. Titian (ca. 1485/90-1576) also received this label from Van Mander. Van Hoogstraten placed Titian’s fellow Venetians Jacopo Bassano (about 1510-1592) and Tintoretto (1519-1594) in this category as well. The association of rough painting with the Venetian masters helps illuminate further meanings of the designation. Like sketches, these artists composed passages where the forms were not always clearly delineated. This effect may have derived, in part, from a relatively direct working method. For example, late in his career, Titian abandoned preparatory drawings in favor of working directly upon the canvas in paint. Van Mander, following Vasari, circulated knowledge of Titian’s direct technique in the Dutch Republic in Het Schilderboek.34 In this way, the aesthetics of the sketch that were linked to Hals’s paintings recalled Titian’s surfaces, or at least Dutch perceptions of them.35

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De Bie also perceived a relationship between paintings by Hals and those by Titian when he wrote that Hals’s paintings were best viewed from a distance. Ernst van de Wetering has exposed how viewing from afar was a trope employed in art literature to evoke comparisons to Titian.36 Amongst Vasari’s backhanded compliments of Titian was that the master’s late paintings “cannot be looked at from close quarters, but from a distance they appear perfect.”37 As Vasari’s verdict must have been well known, Van de Wetering argued that when Rembrandt advised Constantijn Huygens that the painting he was sending “should be viewed from a distance,” he was eliciting comparison to the Venetian master.38 Indeed, Van Mander cemented the link between distant viewing and Titian in Dutch minds when he repeated Vasari’s analysis in his own life of the artist. De Bie, who was intimately familiar with Van Mander’s text, must have consciously chosen to invoke the trope to encourage his readers to consider a relationship between Hals and Titian. In so doing, De Bie’s invocation of viewing from afar embellished the author’s glowing praise by presenting Hals not as a competent craftsman, but as a master painter. The ultimate presentation of Hals as a virtuoso appears in Houbraken’s life of the artist. In this, the first extended treatment of Hals, one finds an elaboration of each of the qualities that earlier authors had remarked upon: sketchiness, associations with revered painters of the past, and mastery derived from his unique method. Published in 1718, Houbraken’s text relayed the author’s “classicist” (to use Emmens’s term) perspectives, but it was also informed by traditions developed during the previous century. Houbraken’s image of Hals is a synthesis of seventeenthcentury perceptions forged from the ongoing discourse on rouw painting. One of the central elements of Houbraken’s life of Hals is the artist’s encounter with Van Dyck in Haarlem. According to Houbraken, Van Dyck traveled to Haarlem specifically to visit Hals. After learning that Hals was not at home, Van Dyck located him in a tavern. Without revealing his identity, Van Dyck convinced Hals to paint his portrait. Returning to his studio with Van Dyck, Hals quickly completed the picture. As Hals had made painting look so easy, Van Dyck asked if he could test his hand at portraying Hals in return. Only when Van Dyck turned his canvas around for Hals to see, did Hals recognize that he had been in the company of the famed Flemish master. Hals purportedly proclaimed, “You are Van Dyck, for none but he could do this.” Van Dyck then attempted, unsuccessfully, to entice Hals to join him in London before taking leave of Haarlem with Hals’s portrait of him in hand. Despite the detailed account and the plausibility of the two artists having direct contact, Houbraken’s narrative of their meeting is a fiction based upon a classical prototype. As neither Hals nor Van Dyck scholars have succeeded in identifying the portraits created during this encounter or in unearthing any other evidence that substantiates the veracity of Houbraken’s tale, the reasonable conclusion is that such a meeting never occurred.39 The contrivance of the HalsVan Dyck encounter becomes clearer when one reads it in relation to the competition between the antique painters Apelles and Protogenes that immediately precedes Houbraken’s life of Hals. After learning of the fame of Protogenes, Apelles traveled to Rhodes to meet his counterpart. Once in Rhodes, Apelles visited Protogenes’s home only to find the artist absent. Rather than leaving a note, Apelles drew a single line and told the housekeeper to tell her master that he who

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had come to call had drawn the line. Upon hearing this message Protogenes responded by making an even more elegant line to leave for the mysterious visitor in case he should be out when his guest returned. Indeed, Apelles called again while Protogenes was away. Seeing Protogenes’s amendment to his original line, Apelles left a third line that was even more accomplished than both his and Protogenes’s previous efforts. When confronted with this last stroke, Protogenes exclaimed that it must be the work of Apelles, for only he could have left such a masterful touch. In addition to the common trope of one master seeking another anonymously, Houbraken’s account of Hals and Van Dyck’s meeting shares with the classical one the theme that even concealed identities are revealed in works of unmistakable mastery. In their seminal study of art literature from antiquity through early modernity, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz defined the contest between Apelles and Protogenes as a battle of virtuosity.40 This tale that was first recorded by Pliny put forth that one line could be considered superior to another. Neither Apelles nor Protogenes made more than a single stroke as proof of his artistry. They were not required to conceive of an image or even replicate a part of the natural world. They were judged only upon the dexterity of their individual marks. In this way, the most basic element of artistic execution, not conception, was the subject of their contest. By repeating this battle of individual strokes at the fore of his description of Hals’s life and work, Houbraken conditioned readers to contemplate the virtuosity of Hals’s manner. Hals and Van Dyck supposedly painted each other’s portraits rather than render solitary brushstrokes, but, like Pliny, Houbraken was interested in the artists’ handling. Houbraken wrote: He [Van Dyck] had great respect for Hals’s art, and often said later that if he had blended his colors a little more delicately or thinly he would have been one of the greatest masters. For regarding control of the brush, or the ability to conceive a portrait to so fittingly render the essential features, heights and depths, with a touch of the brush, without tempering or change, his equal was not to be found.41

Jeffrey Muller has interpreted this passage and the preceding competition as unmitigated praise by Houbraken of Van Dyck’s grace and artfulness that stood in contrast to the roughness of Hals’s works.42 Houbraken certainly considered the Fleming a superior artist for blending his colors more completely, but through the voice of the fictional Van Dyck he lavished considerable praise upon Hals’s brushwork. Van Dyck regretted that Hals’s strokes were not more coherently fused, but each individual mark, in itself, was a work of pure mastery. In this light, Hals’s individual touches appear comparable even to those of the antique masters Apelles and Protogenes.43 Houbraken devoted further attention to Hals’s individual touches in his account of Hals’s working method. He wrote, “They say that it was his custom to lay his portraits on thick and wet, only applying the brushstrokes later with the words: ‘Now to give it the master’s touch.’”44 In so doing, Houbraken fictionalized Hals’s process to align the artist with the paradigm of rough painting. With few exceptions, like the Laughing Boy in the Mauritshuis (fig. 66), Hals did not apply his paint thickly. Analysis of eighty-four paintings exhibited in 1990 by conservators at

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Fig. 66. Frans Hals, Laughing Boy, c. 1620-25. Oil on panel, 29.5 cm diameter. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague.

the Frans Hals Museum indicates that Hals painted quite thinly.45 Contrary to popular opinion, Hals worked in more than one sitting, layering paint to increase tonal variation and heighten the depth of his colors.46 In order to make use of underlayers and colored grounds as mid-tones in the final image, Hals brushed the paint thinly, frequently leaving his grounds partially exposed.47 Furthermore, a higher ratio of pigment to binding medium would have provided paint too stiff to perform the fluidly swift dashes that were central to Hals’s artistic conception.48 Houbraken’s description mimics Van Mander’s portrayal of Titian’s method as both wet and thickly applied. Van Mander noted that Titian worked directly on the surface without first drawing the composition, so that he painted “wet with good judgment.”49 Similarly, despite the directness of his manner, Van Mander described Titian’s paintings as being “covered with layers of color, and there

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is imponderably much effort in them.”50 As in De Bie’s advocation of viewing works by Hals from afar, invoking Van Mander’s widely read description of Titian’s technique linked Hals to his highly esteemed Venetian predecessor. According to the image of Hals’s process that Houbraken put forth, Hals’s thick underlayers precede the artist’s self-conscious application of “the master’s touch.” While he laid in his contours towards the end of the painting process, Hals’s uppermost highlights might be what Houbraken defined as “the master’s touches.” By definition, highlights heighten the illusion of convexity by representing those passages that are closest to the light source and the picture plane.51 An examination of areas of overlapping paint indicates a general progression from background to foreground features in Hals’s paintings, as was common for painters in the period, so that the highlights must have been amongst the latest additions.52 In paintings like Portrait of a Seated Man Holding a Branch now in Ottawa (fig. 67), we can see how Hals applied dabs of light tints atop flesh and garment tones so that the image flickers with vitality. The sharp diagonal running down from the corner of the left eye, the crescent stroke on the forehead carving the bulge of the eye socket, and the trickle down the bridge of the nose are all highlights added in the last stages because the boundaries of these marks rest cleanly without having been smudged from a subsequent application. Each defines the play of light, momentarily capturing the shimmer that breathes life into the sitter’s appearance. The same can be said for the series of strokes on the man’s sleeve that Hals pushed and smeared to give the garment a lively crinkle or the splotch at the wrist that catches the sheen of his skin. Each of these touches stands alone, unblended and distinct. The direction of the stroke as well as how sharply the brush was lifted from the surface affects the character of the highlight. When executed properly and with skill, this type of touch adds panache to the completed surface, distinguishing it from more mundane representations. As such, the highlights had to have been executed in a single flourish, without mistake. Any hesitation or misstep would be impossible to cover, as any attempt to brush out the stroke would leave a more static gradation of color that was anathema to Hals’s endeavors. For these reasons, these marks were incredibly difficult to execute. By labeling Hals’s ultimate interventions “master touches,” whichever elements he considered these to be, Houbraken admiringly acknowledged the difficulty of these passages.53 Anna Tummers has argued that early modern art literature was obsessed with discerning and evaluating elements of mastery.54 An excerpt from Pierre le Brun’s Brussels Manuscript more clearly elucidates the seventeenth-century appreciation for technically challenging elements. Le Brun wrote: “Outlines, gestures, symmetry, proportions, expressions, and character, give reknown to the pencil, and are the principal points to be aimed at. The inner part is easily done; but the outline, the finishing touches, and the roundings off of the different objects are difficult.”55 Le Brun explicitly established that the features with which Hals finished his paintings were the most challenging components to complete successfully. His statement also reveals that these elements, among others, could shape a positive reputation for the artist who can execute such touches with aplomb.56

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Fig. 67. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Seated Man Holding a Branch, c. 1645. Oil on panel, 42.4 x 33 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

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With its emphasis on Hals’s exemplary method, Houbraken’s life of Hals is a tale of virtuosity. By introducing his account with the encounter between Apelles and Protogenes, Houbraken focused his readers’ attention on the artfulness of individual strokes. He further emphasized this feature by constructing an artistic competition in which the great Van Dyck expressed his esteem for the handling of his counterpart from Haarlem. Finally, Houbraken linked Hals’s manner to the revered tradition of rough painting by describing it as thick and wet before labeling Hals’s final marks as master touches. Through the combination of these devices, Houbraken consistently considered not only the skill of Hals’s method but also how his paintings inherently displayed that skill. Though it is the most extensive of the early accounts of Hals’s work, the tropes that Houbraken applied had all been connected to Hals by earlier authors. In this way, Houbraken’s views were indebted to previous writers, but they can also be considered indicative of the high regard for Hals’s paintings that existed prior to the publication of Houbraken’s text. During Hals’s lifetime, writers were almost systematically drawn to the skill with which he rendered his subjects and the manner that exhibited that talent. In total, their statements explicitly convey the contemporary conception of Hals’s paintings as works of virtuosity.

Virtuosi-Liefhebbers The conception of Hals’s manner as technically brilliant and particularly artful helps explain why Hals’s sitters would have appreciated being portrayed roughly. This section explores how Hals’s rough manner identified his elite sitters as virtuosi-liefhebbers. In Italian, the word virtuoso derives etymologically from virtù, meaning one who had a love or taste for fine objects of art. In early modernity, virtù also connoted humanistic conceptions of moral excellence that have evolved from the Latin virtus into the modern notion of virtue.57 In the seventeenth century, virtue and virtù were translated into Dutch as deugdt or deucht.58 While deugdt often bore ethical associations, it also connoted knowledge and wisdom, especially as the term was employed in poetry and painting in Haarlem. Liefhebber, literally one who has love, was used to refer to patrons and collectors in the period, but it also meant one who possessed an informed love for fine objects of art. An investigation of the interrelationships of the terms deugdt, virtuoso, and liefhebber aids us in reconstructing the type of contemporary viewer who would have valued Hals’s artfulness. Numerous behavioral guides indicate that knowledge of the arts, and esteem for skilled handling in particular, could distinguish one as socially sophisticated. It becomes clear, therefore, how clients would have chosen to be portrayed in Hals’s characteristically rough manner as a means to present an image of themselves as informed lovers of art and as members of the cultured elite. Though he rarely used deugdt in his writings on art, Van Mander composed a poem to his friend, the painter Cornelis Ketel, titled De Kerck der Deucht.59 Published in 1610 in Den Nederdytschen Helicon, Van Mander imitated and emulated Songe au Sier de la Rouvère by Pierre de Ronsards (1524-85) and the humanist conception of moral and ethical virtú described therein.60 Of particular interest here, Van Mander’s physical description of Deucht recalls images of Min-

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erva.61 Personified as a woman, Deucht bore arms and armor and even had green eyes, giving her many of the traditional attributes of the ancient goddess of wisdom. In this way, Van Mander deviated considerably from Cesare Ripa’s prescription that virtú be depicted as a winged young woman wearing a sun on her chest and carrying a spear in one hand and a laurel wreath in the other.62 This artistic license led Hessel Miedema to posit that Van Mander perceived connections between Deucht and Minerva.63 Hendrik Goltzius’s triptych of Mercury, Minerva, and Hercules now in the Frans Hals Museum serves as a visual counterpart to Van Mander’s poem and illustrates the relationships between virtú, deugdt, and knowledge (figs. 68, 69, and 70). In 1611, Goltzius painted a pair of large canvases, one of Mercury with fork-tongued Envy and the other of Minerva with the ancient symbol of ignorance, the ass-eared King Midas. Two years later, he added a comparablysized painting of Hercules with the slain cattle thief Cacus to his left. Unlike the female personification in Van Mander’s poem, Hercules was the most common icon of virtú since the Renaissance.64 With this addition, the series has been considered to represent eloquence (Mercury), wisdom (Minerva), and virtue (Hercules) as victorious over envy, ignorance, and evil.65 Even with this imaging of virtú as manly and righteous vigor, its pairing with Minerva shows that virtue and knowledge were complementary attributes. Eddy de Jongh has asserted that Goltzius’s triptych also constituted an elaborate argument about the status of painting.66 De Jongh first argued that, with brushes and palette in hand and drawing books at his feet, Mercury symbolized the practice of painting while Minerva, despite lacking any directly artistic attributes, stood for the theoretical aspects of the art. According to De Jongh, Goltzius’s pairing of the gods with vices designated them as protectors of the arts. The personification of envy and the half-rolled drawing of the Calumny of Apelles on the ground foreshadow Mercury’s squelching of the envious slander that could threaten the integrity and financial well-being of artists. Minerva, meanwhile, countered the threat posed to the arts by the ignorant. De Bie, for example, clearly articulated this perception: I know quite well gracious reader, that many … will eschew praising the art of painting, because many people are the enemy of this art and are not pleased to hear someone speak its praise, even envying it from an innate sense of pride, I shall console myself by thinking of the Latin proverb: Ars nullum habet inimicum nisi ignorantem, according to which only the ignorant are the enemies of Art.67

Thus, Goltzius’s Mercury and Minerva jointly protect painting from the envious and ignorant “haters of art.”68 For De Jongh, the later Hercules painting added a third guardian in the guise of both virtú and the patron. As a portrait historiè, probably of the owner of the triptych Johan Colterman, the patron as virtue complimented the gods of eloquence and wisdom in aiding the survival and flourishing of painting.69 More personally, Colterman appeared not only as the embodiment of virtue but also as an eloquent and learned lover, rather than an ignorant hater, of art.

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Fig. 68. Hendrick Goltzius, Mercury, 1611. Oil on canvas, 214 x 120 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem – long term loan by the Cultural Heritage Agency (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed).

Fig. 70. Hendrik Goltzius, Hercules, 1613. Oil on canvas, 207 x 142.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem – long term loan by Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague.

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Fig. 69. Hendrik Goltzius, Minerva, 1611. Oil on canvas, 214 x 120 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem – long term loan by the Cultural Heritage Agency (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed).

Liefhebber, or lover of art, was the most common word in Dutch to describe those who appreciated and supported painting and sculpture, but since the late sixteenth century it also connoted one who possessed knowledge of the arts. Understanding of the term liefhebber has often focused on Van Mander’s usage of it in Het Schilderboek. In his annotations to Het Schilderboek, Miedema has suggested that liefhebber could be applied more loosely, but that it most frequently referred to collectors who valued paintings as works of art.70 Van Mander mentioned several liefhebbers by name, usually in reference to a painting that the person owned. Marten Jan Bok has shown that these individuals hailed from the upper economic and social strata of Dutch society and boasted significant collections of Dutch art.71 Additionally, as Zirka Filipczak has noted, a liefhebber was one who could boast wisdom of the arts.72 Christoffel Plantin’s trilingual dictionary Thesaurus thetonicae Linguae, published in Antwerp in 1573, defined liefhebber der kunsten as “amatuer des arts/cultor Minervae,” or adherent to the cult of Minerva.73 In 1599 in Amsterdam, Cornelis Kilianus’s Dutch-Latin-French dictionary also emphasized the pursuit of knowledge along with a love of arts as a characteristic of the liefhebber.74 This conception of liefhebbers as learned collectors and supporters recalls the connections between the terms deugdt, virtú, and virtuoso.

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Indeed, two seventeenth-century English language texts equated the terms virtuosi and liefhebbers. In the Art of Limning of 1650, Edward Norgate used the two interchangeably throughout the text after a marginal note identified the meaning of liefhebber as a “virtuoso or lover of Art.”75 Henry Peacham provided a more detailed linkage in 1634 when he wrote: Such as are skilled in them [antiquities], are by the Italians termed Virtuosi, as if others that either neglect or despise them, were idiots or rakehels. And to say truth, they are somewhat to be excused, if they have all Leefhebbers (as the Dutch call them) in so high estimation, for they themselves are so great lovers of them that they purchase them at any rate, and lay up mightie treasures of money in them.76

From his ensuing discussion it is clear that to be skilled in antique sculpture, reliefs, and coins is to have knowledge of them. He continued: “It is not enough for an ingenuos Gentleman to behold these with a vulgar eye: but he must be able to distinguish them, and tell who and what they might be.”77 For Peacham, both virtuosi and liefhebbers possessed considerable erudition in antique objects of art. Similar constructions can be found in texts published in the Dutch Republic. In his treatise on painting in antiquity, Franciscus Junius subdivided liefhebbers into two categories based on their knowledge: An unlearned lover of art should apprehend and discerne the Artificer’s skil, out of his designe, colours, and such things, delighting himself especially in those parts of the picture; but much further he cannot go, it belongeth onely to that are learned indeed, to judge moreover the invention, to consider whether every figure hath his due place, and bee inspired with such lively passions as the present occasion of the represented historie requireth.78

For Junius, the learned viewer possessed a greater ability to evaluate art and thus could better understand not only the execution, but also the invention. In 1678, Van Hoogstraten offered a different perspective in the opening pages of his Inleyding. Van Hoogstraten wrote that he hoped his text would provide all liefhebbers with a body of knowledge with which they could make sound judgments and thus avoid becoming or remaining naemkoopers (literally name buyers) who only considered the name of the artist when evaluating and purchasing a painting.79 With clear disdain for this latter group, Van Hoogstraten encouraged readers to learn the virtues (deugden) of painting that he discussed at length in his text. Doing so would ensure their elevation into the more esteemed category of consumer.80 As these texts demonstrate, by mid-century, liefhebber meant not only a lover and supporter of the arts but also one who had knowledge of them, validating Peacham’s equation of virtuosi and liefhebbers for their erudite appreciation. Many of Hals’s identified sitters meet the primary definition of liefhebber in that they amassed substantial collections of art. The Haarlem brewer Nicolaes Duyst van Voorhout who

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Hals portrayed around 1638 owned numerous artworks of extremely high quality.81 Listed in the 1650 inventory of Van Voorhout’s forty-nine paintings were works by Peter Paul Rubens (15771640), Goltzius, Floris van Dijck (1575-1651), Cornelis Vroom (ca. 1591-1656), and Jan van Goyen (1596-1656).82 Willem van Heythuisen, the wealthy textile merchant who sat twice for Hals, possessed ninety-one paintings.83 Tieleman Roosterman, who Hals portrayed in 1634, owned eighty paintings by the time of his death in 1705.84 Similarly, Dorothea Berck who Hals painted in 1644 along with nearly every other member of the extended Coijmans family, including her husband Josephus and her cousin Willem, amassed a collection of forty-two paintings by fashionable artists like Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638), Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9-ca. 1682), Vroom (6), and Wouwerman (2).85 While documentation is too scant to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the collecting habits of all of Hals’s sitters, these extant examples demonstrate that at least a portion of Hals’s patrons collected quality paintings in considerable quantity. A collection offered opportunities to converse eloquently and learnedly with those who came to call, enabling the virtuoso-liefhebber to display his status and knowledge of art.86 Seventeenth-century painting collections have long been understood as status symbols. In her analysis of kunstkamer paintings, Filipczak argued that pictures were luxury items that offered their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish owners the opportunity to display their wealth.87 Elizabeth Honig qualified Filipczak’s suggestion by noting that, as jewelry and silver consistently had higher monetary values in the period than did paintings, artworks would not have been the most logical choice with which to flaunt one’s affluence. Instead, she argued, the value of paintings lay in the occasions it provided to exhibit one’s erudition and culture.88 As such, acquiring and displaying works of art also may have functioned as a part of the civilizing process for Hals’s elite sitters, like Willem Coijmans, who especially after 1640 increasingly presented an aura of refinement rather than solemn dignity in their portraits through their elegant garments and graceful comportment (fig. 71).89 In his seminal study of the aristocratization of the European middle classes, Norbert Elias described a “civilizing process” amongst these groups.90 According to Elias, due to the rising wealth of the middle and merchant classes, social distinctions began to be made not only on the basis of wealth but also on culture. As an attempt to maintain their elevated positions, the elite sought to distinguish themselves from the nouveau riche through sophisticated behavior and intellectual pursuits. As a result, all manner of activities became codified to conform to these conceptions of social adeptness.91 Amongst the numerous published prescriptions that instructed individuals how to present themselves more civilly to meet these new social codes, several early modern behavior books contained passages on art appreciation. The earliest and best known of these texts was Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano published in 1528 in Italy.92 Along with myriad other social graces, Castiglione advocated that all courtiers should posses an acquaintance with drawing and painting.93 Though Il Cortegiano was repeatedly reprinted and widely translated throughout Europe, local variants such as Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman in England refined and updated Castiglione’s directions.94 In addition to advising informed collecting of antiquities, Peacham also devoted one of his sixteen chapters to drawing and painting in oil.95 In the Dutch Republic,

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Fig. 71. Frans Hals, Willem Coijmans, 1645. Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 63.5 cm. Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Van Hoogstraten contributed Den Eerlyken Jongeling in 1657. Here, in a chapter devoted to painting, poetry, geography, and languages, he encouraged his readers to familiarize themselves with writings on art by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Van Mander, and Junius.96 Van Hoogstraten’s later Inleyding of 1678 can be interpreted as a book-length text designed to educate aspiring gentleman in various aspects of the arts. Stephan Greenblatt has demonstrated how such behavioral texts were instrumental in providing models from which readers could fashion their own behavior.97 According to the prescriptions for fashionable conduct, basic artistic knowledge was a key component of the curriculum for those who wished to hone an image of social refinement.98 Several authors of early modern etiquette guides further indicated that an informed appreciation of painters’ handling signified cultural sophistication. Just as Castiglione implied

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admiration for painterly brushwork in his oft-cited passage on sprezzatura, Van Hoogstraten advised readers to judge paintings by their virtues (deugden), of which handling was a part.99 In the Brussels Manuscript, a guide to gentlemanly appreciation of the arts in the Castiglione mode, Le Brun advised that appreciating rough touches as artful was a means to display an educated aesthetic judgment.100 Though it was never published, Le Brun envisioned his text as a primer on the basic mechanics of artistic production as well as an introduction to the discourse of art so that the reader would be able to speak about painting without incurring ridicule.101 For Le Brun, to appear ignorant about the arts was unacceptably unsophisticated behavior for a gentleman. More directly, Le Brun’s eleventh chapter, “How to Speak of Beautiful Pictures” offered readers eleven comments of sufficient erudition that aspiring gentlemen could repeat verbatim to demonstrate their cultivation. Among these stock phrases, Le Brun suggested that readers could impress others by saying, “Is it possible that the pen can have given such softness by such rough touches, and that such apparent carelessness should be so attractive?”102 Van de Wetering has linked this quotation to the concept of sprezzatura, as it describes the “apparent carelessness” of rough painting, but Le Brun’s suggested appraisal takes on added significance in the context of the behavioral guide in which it appears.103 Implicit in Le Brun’s statement is the belief that gentlemen-courtiers should see beyond the façade of casualness to perceive an underlying artfulness that could be missed by others. Therefore, by repeating Le Brun’s suggested appreciation for rough painting, the reader would be able to present a sophisticated aesthetic discernment. In practice, one type of rough painting – grisailles – attracted the esteem of the cultural elite. Westermann has argued that clients understood Adriaen van de Venne’s (1589-1662) coarse grisaille paintings of destitute peasants as displays of “refined artifice and poetic wit.”104 Despite the low class and poverty of the subjects and the consistently heavy, rugged earthtones with which they were rendered, the paintings themselves were exquisitely executed. The medium of grisaille in particular offered the artist enhanced opportunities to showcase his mastery by eliminating wide-ranging color variation. Working almost in monochrome, even if that core is a muddy brownish yellow, eliminated the possibility that color could distract. Instead, the viewer must confront the brushwork and the manual dexterity communicated by individual strokes. As Westermann suggested, this mode of representation appealed especially to connoisseurs who appreciated artistic execution and those who aspired to appear to have comparably refined tastes and abilities.105 That Van de Venne cultivated grisaille painting specifically for a sophisticated audience that included Constantijn Huygens, Jacob Cats, and Johan de Brune, among others, and that he dedicated himself to this type of art upon his move in 1625 to the court city of The Hague where he catered to the social and political elite corroborates the connections between the media and refined appreciation. In this regard, Van de Venne’s 1628 grisaille portrait of Friedrich V and Elizabeth Stuart Returning from the Hunt (fig. 72) merits special attention. Here, Van de Venne eschewed color variation in crafting his elegant representation of the Elector and his wife in their finery. In its carefully massaged modeling and precise delineation, the painting clearly is not a sketch. Rather, Van de Venne transferred the style he more usually reserved for rough characters to a portrait – a

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Fig. 72. Adriaen van de Venne, Friedrich v and Elizabeth Stuart Returning from the Hunt, 1628. Oil on panel, 154.5 x 191 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

portrait of sitters who exude cultivation and refinement. Van de Venne’s portrait shares much with Hals’s later portrayals. Indeed, Van de Venne’s near-monochrome painting of a reclining figure at a desk appears to have been the inspiration – in composition and execution – for Hals’s late portraits of Willem van Heythuysen whose sizable art collection included four grisailles (figs. 73 and 74).106 Though with more color, Hals too restricted his palette. Fleshtones mark the face and hands with white collar and cuffs setting them apart. Otherwise, muted grays, yellows, and browns dominate Heythuysen’s dress and the interior décor. As a result, Hals’s bold touches, like those that draft the cloak’s shimmering highlights and crevice-like folds, stand very much as easy-to-discern testaments of the artist’s skill. Like Van de Venne’s painting, the limited range of color and ensuing emphasis on handling are used to portray a relaxed, clearly well-dressed, and gentile subject. While the interior is spartan, the baroque swag of drapery, the book resting on the table, and the landscape painting on the far wall fashion the image of a sophisticated aesthete. In short, Van de Venne and Hals employed seemingly rough manners for the portrayal of sitters who sought to present themselves as refined and cultured. Being portrayed roughly must have illustrated the sitter’s artistic judgment more directly than issuing verbal admiration for rough manners. Numerous painters in Holland specialized in portraiture, and even more dabbled in the genre. In mid-century Haarlem alone, a sitter could have chosen Johannes Verspronck (ca. 1606/9-1662), Jan de Bray (ca. 1627-1697), or Hals. Even the most cursory glance reveals that these three artists offered sitters differing products as a re-

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Fig. 73. Adriaen van de Venne, Man Sitting at a Table, 1631. Oil on panel, 40 x 33 cm. Private Collection.

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Fig. 74. Frans Hals, Portrait of Willem van Heythuysen, Seated on a Chair and Holding a Hunting Crop, mid 1630s. Oil on panel, 47 x 36.7 cm. Private Collection, courtesy Richard Nagy Ltd., London.

sult of each master’s technique and style. Verspronck wielded a fine brush to craft immaculately smooth surfaces. De Bray worked somewhat more loosely, but he followed the Van Dyckian model of elegant portrayals. Hals, of course, had the loosest style of all, with vividly bold strokes. Potential customers would have been aware of these differences and would have anticipated the type of painting that they would receive. As such, clients chose not only who portrayed them, but also how they wanted to be painted. David Smith has argued that portraiture in the Dutch Republic operated as a kind of social theater where sitters presented themselves in roles defined as desirable by the period’s social codes and mores.107 In this light, how one was painted must have been a component of the subject’s projected image.108 The wide array of available artistic styles and the inconsistent evaluation of different methods of handling in art literature indicate that there were simultaneous competing tastes in Holland throughout the seventeenth century for which a potential sitter could convey appreciation. In the case of rough styles, being portrayed by bold, unblended strokes marked sitters as individuals who not only possessed knowledge of the arts but also enough taste to recognize the prescribed virtues offered by this method. Perhaps the clearest example of the relationship between rough brushwork and the refinement of a sitter occurs in Hals’s Portrait of a Man now in Boston (fig. 75). The unknown sitter’s silk kimono and his long, curly hair kept in the French fashion present the image of a cultured sophisticate. The handling that complements this representation is among the boldest in Hals’s

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Fig. 75. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1660-1666. Oil on canvas, 85.8 x 66.9 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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entire oeuvre. Hals whipped his brush in short curls to delineate the hair. In the sleeve, the mauve highlight sweeps and daubs of black shadow rest differentiated atop the crimson base. Even from a considerable distance, one can read the individual marks that Hals employed, so that the roughness of execution is unmistakable. Just as it has been argued that Rembrandt’s handling helped to imbue his portrait of Jan Six with sprezzatura, Hals’s particular manner, in conjunction with the sitter’s attire, articulated a sense of elegance.109 In light of the appreciation of rough manners espoused in texts on gentlemanly behavior, the style in which his portrait was painted, like the high society fashion he appears in, must have indicated to others that the sitter possessed a sophisticated taste. Moreover, consistent with the social aspirations of his elite sitters, Hals’s representational method enabled his clients to showcase the cultivated refinement that was central to the civilizing process of the upper strata of Dutch society and to project the image of a virtuoso-liefhebber. Despite the high regard for his works and the appeal of his manner throughout his lifetime, Hals’s commissions decreased dramatically at the end of his career. It is well known that Hals executed relatively few paintings from the early 1650s until his death in 1666 and that he required a pension from the city authorities of Haarlem to meet his living expenses. Pieter Biesboer has attributed this dearth of financial success to the general economic downturn that the Dutch economy experienced during the Anglo-Dutch Wars that began in 1652 rather than to a decline in reputation.110 Biesboer suggested that consumers restrained their art purchasing in this period and, as a result, there were far fewer portrait commissions available. As even Hals’s latest portraits are of elite sitters, as in the Boston painting, Hals’s economic demise does seem to have resulted from a decrease in the quantity, rather than quality, of his commissions. Jan de Bray’s successful emergence as a portraitist in Haarlem in the 1650s may have constricted Hals’s pool of potential patrons even further, but it also hints at a possible shift in taste within the Haarlem elite to the more elegantly composed and classically rendered style practiced by De Bray.111 At least some consumers seem to have preferred his bright, cool palette and classicizing mode to Hals’s dark tones and rough manner, perhaps comparable to the occasional unfavorable written assessments of rouw painting. De Bray’s Van Dyckian qualities may have carried associations of the aristocratic portraiture made famous by the Flemish master, so that being portrayed in such a fashion was thought to mark his sitters as courtly. In this way, at the end of his career, Hals’s method might have been only one among several competing styles that enabled local sitters to project a sophisticated image.

The Self-Aware Virtuoso? In describing Hals’s method, Houbraken did not simply write that Hals finished his paintings with masterful flourishes, but instead stated that when adding the last strokes, Hals himself proclaimed, “Now to give it the master’s touch.”112 In the process, Houbraken presented an image of Hals as an artist who was aware of his virtuosity and the location of it in his final touches. Furthermore, Houbraken’s comment suggests that Hals consciously attempted to craft virtuoso

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works by crowning them with his distinctive marks. As I have shown, Houbraken took considerable license in writing his life of the Haarlem master, so it is imprudent to trust the veracity of this image. At the same time, however, Houbraken’s account prompts the reader to consider whether Hals was aware of the valuations that deemed his technique to be particularly accomplished and what role, if any, Hals may have played in shaping or encouraging that perception. It is difficult to ascertain whether Hals was aware of the positive valuations of rough painting prevalent in seventeenth-century art literature and collecting practices. Scholars have considered Hals to have been generally unaware of theoretical arguments current in his day due to his engagement with the “low” genre of portraiture. Hals left no known treatise, letter, or any other text that can be scoured for direct insight into his views and interests. Nevertheless, learning his trade in Haarlem in the first decades of the seventeenth century, Hals surely must have been familiar with the conceptions of art and artistry espoused by his fellow townsmen Van Mander, Goltzius, and Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem (1562-1638). 113 At the end of the sixteenth century, all three artists returned from abroad with a new regard for painting as a liberal art and a desire to elevate the status of painters from artisans to artists in the northern Netherlands. Even more directly, as Van Mander’s pupil, Hals must have encountered his master’s artistic philosophy, including the belief that rough manners were more difficult to execute successfully than smooth ones. Later, as an independent master, Hals would have been attuned to which manners of representation performed best in the highly competitive art market.114 With commissioned portraits, Hals’s clients must have expressed to him directly their desire to be portrayed with unblended brushwork. Even more than these leading contextual conjectures, Hals’s paintings themselves suggest that he may have responded to the general appreciation of rough handling. The gradual decrease in finish over his career suggests that Hals sought to make the virtuosity of his boldly unblended strokes more apparent.115 The rough manner that we associate with Hals blossomed in the master’s genre paintings from the 1620s and 1630s. In these works created for the open market, Hals experimented with painting his pictures with broad, unblended brushwork.116 This method contrasted with the more subtly massaged color gradations Hals employed to replicate his sitters’ lush fabrics in his commissioned portraits of the same period. Hals discontinued this differentiation of styles in the early 1630s when he began to introduce the rough manner of his genre paintings into his portraits. By the mid-1630s, Hals had ceased painting genre imagery entirely to focus on portraiture, most of which he shaped from progressively more unmistakably bold brushwork. By increasingly exposing individual strokes, it became easier to see how perfectly Hals placed his brush.117 As a result, it is more readily apparent how masterful the execution was. Accentuating the mastery of his handling emphasized Hals’s role as creator of the virtuoso marks. All of the early written responses to Hals focused on the artist’s method. More specifically, writers from De Bie to Houbraken designated Hals’s process as rouw because the sketchy appearance of his paintings that seemingly lacked finish recalled both preparatory works and the practices of revered artists like Titian who were known to have worked in relatively direct manners. These assorted contemplations of Hals’s method necessarily referenced not only the act

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of creation but also the creator. Put a different way, viewers must have appreciated the architect of the marks when lauding individual strokes. As Hals’s decreased finish and frequently limited palette made the virtuosity of these flourishes more apparent, so too must have Hals’s masterful abilities as a painter been thrust forward. By emphasizing his signature roughness, perhaps Hals even encouraged viewers to read his agency in executing these virtuoso touches. It is worth considering whether Hals sought to advance the perception that he was a virtuoso painter through self-consciously unblended brushwork. Since the seventeenth century, viewers have remained entranced by the virtuosity of Hals’s creations. Fueled by the vivacious strokes that deftly evoke the subject’s appearance, audiences continue to contemplate Hals’s technical brilliance. Contemporary responses have surely been affected by the visible brushwork of artists like Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), as well as the modern notion of “art for art’s sake.” Yet the urge to focus on Hals’s bold strokes and to contemplate the master’s method is neither an entirely modern nor post-Romantic phenomenon. Long before then, seventeenth-century writers and sitters valued Hals’s unique method for its revelation of his incomparable mastery. In this light, perhaps it was not the painterly trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that conditioned this type of response to Hals’s works, but it was, as Houbraken suggested, Hals himself who encouraged us all to consider the artfulness of his master’s touch. As the following chapter explores, Hals may have also been motivated to employ his self-referential strokes and rough manner because they offered a range of economic advantages in the competitive art markets of seventeenth-century Haarlem.

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C hapte r 3

PainTing for The MarkeT

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Painting for the Market

As Michael Baxandall has articulated, the economic environment within which both artists and their art operate affects the artists’ goals and their strategies for accomplishing those goals.1 Assuming purposefulness as Baxandall does, economic realities and actual mechanisms of exchange directly impact artists’ intentions, motivations, and actions, as each painter decides how to meet the charge presented by the market. As a result, analyses of the market and a painter’s interactions with it are central to understanding the artist, his or her process, and the resulting artwork. To date, numerous studies have mapped features of the art markets and economic environment present in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, but none – including Pieter Biesboer’s study of those who sat for Frans Hals’s portraits – have explored how Hals or his distinctive rough manner of paintings responded to, and possibly shaped, market forces in his local environment.2 This chapter explores Hals’s individualized virtuoso manner as it operated in the market of seventeenth-century Haarlem for which he worked almost exclusively.3 An analysis of the known sales venues in which Hals participated reveals that Hals first employed his rough manner in genre paintings exchanged in open market outlets. The first section of this chapter tests John Michael Montias’s hypothesis that such painting methods constituted process innovations that decreased production time. Montias’s theory partially explains Hals’s initial utilization of a rough technique for genre paintings and suggests that market conditions may have prompted him to implement this approach. But it fails to account for the artistic sources from which Hals’s manner derives and Hals’s continued utilization of a painterly approach later in his career for commissioned portraits. Section two investigates how contemporary Flemish paintings of the highest quality may have inspired Hals. Emulating artists from the southern Netherlands helped Hals tap into additional segments of the local market by attracting clients who possessed a preexisting taste for high-end Flemish painting and the sketchy aesthetic associated with it. This move enabled him to craft a market identity as a fashionable painter. The final section of this chapter examines how, as the market evolved into one that placed an increasing premium on attributions

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and individuality of execution, Hals employed his rough manner as a signature style, a non-verbal means of expressing his authorship. Consistent application of this signature style allowed audiences to recognize Hals as the author of his paintings. As he rose to prominence on the local art scene and as works by him became increasingly fashionable, this recognizability suited the demands of clients who wanted characteristic pictures by Hals. Exploring Hals’s method as a signature style also explains why Hals transferred a manner initially developed for open market genre paintings and, later, semi-public group portraits to individually commissioned portraits. Together, the three sections of this chapter argue that Hals’s consciously cultivated manner of representation offered a broad range of economic advantages over the course of his career.

A Process Innovation? Montias hypothesized that rough manners offered early seventeenth-century Dutch artists economic advantages because they constituted an innovation in the standard means of artistic production. In his essay “Cost and Value in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,” Montias explored innovation as a response to supply and demand pressures in the art market of the Dutch Republic.4 These responses could take the form of either product or process innovations, which Montias distinguished as follows: Product innovations, as the name implies, generate either totally new products or products whose characteristics depart significantly from those known in the past. Process innovations lower the costs or otherwise improve the technology of making products that were already available or whose characteristics are essentially similar.5

Applied to painting, product innovations are changes in subject matter or the development of a new genre. Process innovations relate to the physical production of an object instead of the finished product itself. As Montias noted, labor was a “prime determinant of cost” for early seventeenth-century Dutch painters.6 Price was often determined by the amount of time an artist required to produce a particular painting.7 Similarly, as a larger painting generally took more time to paint than a smaller one, other price determinants such as the size of the painting and the number of figures represented also indirectly reflected the cost of labor. In comparison, Montias found that the cost of materials was negligible. Given the role of labor in artistic production, Montias argued that a painterly manner was a process innovation because it allowed artists to lower their production time. Focusing on tonal landscape painters, especially Jan van Goyen (1596-1656), Montias argued that decreasing the amount of labor offered an artist an opportunity for financial gain.8 Painterly painters could quickly cover large areas of the picture surface with swift, broad strokes. This method contrasted with that of painters who carefully drafted their compositions before applying paint in a patient, meticulous manner. While some artists would have labored to craft each individual cloud or leaf on a tree, painterly painters could quickly evoke such features with a few

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rough strokes. Painterly artists thus presumably needed less time to paint a single work, allowing them to increase the volume of pictures available for sale. The faster-working painters were thus able to position themselves to reap increased profits when they sped up their production time. Jonathan Israel has shown that the economic advantages that Montias associated with rough manners would have been particularly appealing to artists in the 1620s because of the depressed economic conditions at the time.9 Following Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, who described the period between 1618 and 1621 in the northern Netherlands as one of “commercial crisis” due to deceleration of nearly all of the European markets that resulted from the onset of the Thirty Years War, Israel defined the period between 1621 and 1645 as a “period of crisis and restructuring.”10 Not surprisingly, as Israel noted, these crises in the United Provinces coincided with the end of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1621. The lack of armed conflict during the truce opened trade throughout Europe and the Mediterranean for Dutch merchants, but when war resumed in 1621 these same markets became closed once again. As a result, the commerce that the Dutch had established in the previous twelve years was stifled to such an extent that Israel claimed that the Dutch were “effectively under siege.”11 The sudden diminution of global trade led to several economic setbacks for the Dutch at home. Various taxes were levied in the 1620s to support the standing army and navy required to fight the Spanish.12 Inflation forced real wages to plunge.13 Industry came to a near halt, prompting the Remonstrant leader Simon Episcopius to note in 1627 that “commerce, crafts, and industry are almost at a standstill.”14 Without local industrial production, goods could not be sold and capital could not be generated from those sales. The economic environment was so bleak in 1625 that it caused Hugo Grotius to write “we are experiencing the harshest period we have known in our lifetime.”15 As Grotius’s statement indicates, not only was the economic environment in Holland in the mid-1620s stark, people were also conscious of the economic downturn. Not surprisingly, numerous consumers scaled back their purchases of art, decreasing the overall demand for pictures. Israel argued that artists confronted with these dire economic circumstances needed to respond creatively to make ends meet. Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem (1562-1638), for example, reduced and simplified the designs of his mythological scenes while simultaneously reducing their size.16 Both of Cornelis’s modifications decreased his production time. Cornelis could thus set lower prices for his paintings to make them more affordable to clients whose disposable income had been reduced by the recession. Israel also suggested that some artists also began to alter their palettes as a result of the adverse economic situation. With the trade difficulties, the price of costly foreign pigments – from which vivid coloring derived – rose even higher.17 Most artists were not in a position to cope with the rising cost of materials. This situation may explain in part why artists may have turned to less brilliant local pigments in an effort to lower production costs.18 For example, Van Goyen and other tonal painters employed a limited, somber palette comprised mainly of browns, yellows, and blacks. Israel’s description of the economic environment in the Dutch Republic in the 1620s, and his hypotheses about artists’ responses to it, substantiates Montias’s explanation for the prominence of rough manners at this time. If artists were lowering production costs by reducing the

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Fig. 76. Frans Hals, Lute Player, c. 1625. Oil on canvas, 70 x 62 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

size of their canvases and altering their palettes, quicker ways of painting may also have been part of the artist’s arsenal to combat the effects of the economic recession. In doing so, Montias’s process innovators responded, as their contemporaries did, to the market conditions of the posttruce Dutch Republic. Though neither Montias nor Israel addressed Hals in their studies, Hals seems to have responded similarly to the recession by painting genre pictures roughly in the 1620s. Although Hals introduced sketchy passages such as the flurried bundle of hay and blotched hand that grasps it in his portrait of Pieter van den Morsch from 1616 (fig. 8), he continued to work his portraits more smoothly until around 1630. In contrast, the genre paintings that he produced with increased frequency in the 1620s were executed in a completely rough manner. Hals’s simultaneous practice

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Fig. 77. Frans Hals, Jacob Pietersz. Olycan, 1625. Oil on canvas, 124.6 x 97.3 cm. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague.

of two distinct styles can be seen in Lute Player (fig. 76) and Portrait of Jacob Pietersz. Olycan (fig. 77), both of which are from about 1625. These two works present the viewer with entirely different conceptions. The lute player’s garment relays none of the intricate delicacy that one finds in the meticulously rendered web of lace that rings Olycan’s neck. Hals crafted the collar with a fine brush to capture each strand of thread. Conversely, the trim along the edge of the musician’s left sleeve is noticeably constructed of dabs of red paint that evoke a frill, instead of replicating one. Similarly, the pills of trim near the neck of the jerkin blend together to subvert the delineation of individual forms. The surface directly below the lute is so roughly rendered that the gray and red paint smears together to create a fleeting impression of fabric. In contrast, Hals carefully reproduced Olycan’s luscious black satin garment in detail so that the embroidered patterns and

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background material can be clearly distinguished. Even in the figures’ faces one can immediately recognize the different handling of the brush. In the genre painting, Hals applied the paint to the figure’s face so loosely that even from a distance one can see the indentations left by the bristles of a brush carried quickly across the canvas. In the portrait, every hair and facial feature is registered. The stark contrast between Hals’s execution of his genre paintings in a loose, painterly manner and his concurrently finer finishing of his portraits suggests that he varied his brushwork for different genres. It was only in the 1630s, after nearly ten years of producing roughly rendered genre subjects, that Hals introduced a related manner into his portraits. As only one genre picture by Hals can be dated to the 1610s, the emergence of loose brushwork and other summary techniques coincided with the diversification of his subject matter. One needs to consider the reasons Hals might have had for undertaking such changes in both style and subject in the third decade of the seventeenth century. First and foremost, Hals may not have been financially successful early in his career. A mere ten known paintings can be dated to the first ten years of the artist’s activity, and it was not until 1616 that he landed a major commission. Six years after entering the guild, Hals was selected to portray the officers of the St. George Civic Guard (fig. 16). As Biesboer suggests, Hals probably received the commission through familial relations, since his first wife’s uncle, Job Claesz. Gijblant, served in the Guard.19 Not only the significant fee offered by the militia group to paint the portraits of twelve men at one time but also the hanging of the picture in a prominent, semi-public location must have seemed to Hals like a windfall.20 Despite this opportunity and the modern regard for Hals’s successful treatment of his subject, the St. George Civic Guard picture did not generate subsequent commissions as he must have hoped. The St. George militia did not hire Hals to paint another picture for their meeting hall until 1627, eleven years after his initial contribution. Likewise, no perceptible rise in the quantity or quality of commissions seems to have occurred for Hals in the late 1610s.21 While it is difficult to gauge Hals’s financial status at that time, with four young children to support by 1620, his household could not have been thriving, even if it was not in dire straits. At the very least, it is likely that Hals would have been ill-equipped to cope with the beginning of the economic recession that followed the cessation of the Twelve Years’ Truce. Expanding his repertoire to include genre painting offered the means to combat the encroaching economic difficulties, as it opened new markets in which Hals could sell his wares, generate revenue, and, eventually, create a name for himself. Two documents suggest that Hals’s genre paintings were purchased on the open market rather than commissioned, as portraits were. First, a lottery inventory drawn up by Frans’s brother Dirck in 1634 listed three non-portrait paintings by Hals: a vanitas and two tronies of low-class subjects.22 Second, a list of works to be publicly auctioned submitted by Hendrick Willemsz. den Abt to the Haarlem burgomasters in 1631 mentioned four similar paintings by Hals.23 Den Abt was to auction a tronie (head), a picture of Peeckelharing, and two roundels of unidentified subjects. Given the less-than-healthy economic environment, it seems likely that Hals’s genre works were created exclusively for the open art market and that Hals began to produce them, in part, precisely because they could be sold

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there. To understand the advantages of selling one’s paintings on the open market, it is necessary to examine in some detail the most common means of peddling pictures – lotteries and auctions. Hals used both. A lottery is a contest decided by the chance drawing of lots. Selling paintings by lottery originated in fifteenth-century Bruges. The practice soon spread to Antwerp, Brussels, and eventually Amsterdam in the sixteenth century. The first lottery took place in Haarlem in 1606.24 Early lotteries functioned as fund-raisers for local charities before becoming privatized for the benefit of the lottery organizers. The procedures and mechanisms of these lotteries are scarcely documented, with the exception of the recorded proceedings of a 1626 Utrecht lottery organized by the glass maker Claes Claesz. van Leeuwen.25 Van Leeuwen offered thirty paintings of varying quality for sale by lottery. Before the sale, the Utrecht Guild of St. Luke examined the assortment, determined the five most valuable works, and appraised these five paintings. Van Leeuwen assigned monetary value to the remaining twenty-five works. Presumably, the guild appraised the five most valuable paintings in an effort to set and maintain fair price levels. At this particular sale, the total estimated value was 1,275 gulden and the highest estimated work was St. John the Baptist Preaching by Abraham Bloemaert, valued at 360 gulden. The next step was to determine the number of lots that were to be sold, as there were to be more lots than pictures. The organizer determined this number by estimating the maximum price for which he could expect to sell a lot. In other words, instead of attempting to estimate how many people would purchase the right to participate, the organizer first determined the price he would ask of each customer. In this case, Van Leeuwen set the price at twenty-five gulden for each of the fifty-one lots.26 As this is the only surviving document to be so precise about how a lottery worked, one must base one’s understanding of the process and its ramifications upon it. For consumers, buying lots in a lottery presented a financial risk. In the Van Leeuwen case, there were multiple possible outcomes. One could come away with a painting worth 360 gulden for twenty-five gulden. One could also profit by winning one of the other eleven paintings valued at more than the twenty-five gulden price of a lot. Alternatively, an individual could lose money by buying a lot to one of the nineteen paintings valued under twenty-five gulden. Worst of all, one could purchase one of the twenty-one lots without a corresponding painting and leave with nothing. Since the result of a lottery was determined by chance drawing, participants had no way of knowing prior to purchase which outcome awaited them. As in modern lotteries, buying a lot was a gamble. Montias and Michael North both link the popularity of lotteries to the same mania for speculation that fueled the Dutch Tulip Craze that occurred between 1636 and 1638.27 For the lottery organizers, there was no risk. In our example, as long as Van Leeuwen sold all fifty-one lots, he was guaranteed to acquire the full estimated value of the paintings on sale. Montias and North have argued that Van Leeuwen could turn a profit only if he originally paid less than the subsequent appraised value for the paintings.28 With their extensive knowledge of the market, professional art dealers and informed individuals such as Van Leeuwen certainly would have had little difficulty in acquiring paintings at less than their market value for the express purpose of selling them in a lottery format. One can also imagine the potential for the

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lottery organizer to overestimate intentionally the value of the lower-end works that he himself appraised. Either practice would ensure that the organizer would not only liquidate his stock of paintings, but also that these measures would turn organizing lotteries into a profitable business because, as with any gambling venture, the “house” always holds the advantage.29 Marion BoersGoosens has estimated that the painter Frans Pietersz. de Grebber, a contemporary of Hals’s in Haarlem who was active in organizing lotteries, made as much as 4,000 gulden at a single lottery.30 The lottery organizers were not the only ones who benefited from the lottery system; artists could also reap significant rewards. In many cases, artists like De Grebber and Dirck Hals coordinated lotteries and experienced the same benefits as any other organizer. And under the Van Leeuwen model, as the organizer was allowed to estimate the value of the least expensive works, an artist-organizer could set and receive the asking price for his own pictures. Alternatively, an artist might be forced to lower his price to close sales negotiated directly from the studio. In a lottery, as long as he lured consumers with a few high-end products, the artist-organizer was guaranteed to receive the prices he set for all the paintings in the lottery, as the entire inventory was distributed through the dispersal of the lots. Likewise, with the guarantee of sale, lotteries also provided the opportunity to unload a large volume of works. This liquidation would have enabled artist-organizers to “piggyback” inferior or cheaper works on the reputation of the better-known artists who headlined the event. For example, this format may have facilitated the sales of works by studio assistants. As North observed, lottery sales also created additional exposure for all participating artists, not just those who were also organizers, by displaying their stock to the wide audience that attended these popular events.31 How often and to what extent exposure resulted in increased revenue for an artist is unclear, but the potential for attracting clients surely would have been enough to encourage artists to participate in a lottery that they themselves did not organize. The other open market sales practice in which Hals is known to have participated is selling paintings by auction. Like lotteries, auctions were organized for various charities before they became commercial ventures. Unlike the method of auctioning most familiar today, Neil de Marchi and Hans van Miegroet have found that the method employed in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century most often utilized descending rather than ascending prices.32 In a system of descending prices, the auctioneer established the maximum value for an item by estimating the market value for a work.33 The price was lowered until a single bid was taken from the audience. Whereas ascending prices drive the price of an item upwards depending upon the relative demand for it, the decreasing price method was more uncertain because potential bidders had no idea how high competitors were willing to bid. The seventeenth-century Dutch method also placed a ceiling on how much an item could demand while the ascension method creates no upper limit. Similarly, the Dutch method allowed for the possibility of works selling for less than anticipated if the market demand was overestimated. De Marchi and Van Miegroet have suggested that, as a result of its different format, the Dutch practice often meant that prices were quite low and thus this method was suited to selling a large volume of paintings quickly.34 Artists who produced relatively few, large and expensive works, however, were unable to

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take advantage of the benefits of open market sales. The painters’ guild of Haarlem attempted to ban the art auctions and lotteries in 1642, perhaps for this very reason.35 Under the method of auctioning by descending prices, the cost of a picture could easily fall from the initial bid so that it was sold below market value. Furthermore, selling a limited number of works made it more difficult to recoup losses on an undervalued painting. In lotteries, large, costly pictures by established artists headlined the works available, but as these were the items appraised by the deacons of the painter’s guild there was no chance of inflating their value. As both lotteries and auctions favored the sale of large volumes of cheap paintings, artists who only created a few paintings had neither a cache of cheap works nor an excess inventory to liquidate. It is also conceivable that sales from the studios of the artists who garnered the highest prices suffered as a result of the emergence of auctions and lotteries because consumers could gamble on their opportunity to win a “quality” work at an auction for the bargain price of a lot. Ultimately, artists who produced large volumes of inexpensive works might benefit the most from these sales practices and thereby thrive in the difficult economic environment. For these reasons, painting roughly was particularly well-suited to the sales mechanisms of the open market. For example, Van Goyen – Montias’s icon of the innovative painterly painter – indeed appears to have profited, despite the recession, from decreasing his production time by using a rough manner as well as using fewer and cheaper materials. Eric Jan Sluijter has demonstrated that, despite the fact that prices for individual paintings by Van Goyen were relatively low, the artist was able to generate a sizable income from his craft.36 Starting from Montias’s hypothesis, Sluijter multiplied the low prices of individual paintings by Van Goyen’s estimated prodigious production to determine that the artist must have been as economically successful as the paradigm of the wealthy painter, Gerrit Dou (1613-1675).37 Dou amassed a small fortune by producing intimate, meticulously finished paintings that drew exorbitant prices from an elite clientele. Van Goyen was able to equal Dou’s accomplishments by producing a larger volume of swiftly executed works that sold for much less. Van Goyen’s rough manner facilitated his high output and high earnings. Furthermore, Sluijter argued that Van Goyen was aware of the market conditions and adopted a rough manner that allowed him to increase his production because he foresaw the economic advantages that such a working method offered.38 As a result, Sluijter has suggested that even a cursory awareness of market conditions would have made working in a neat manner a “very risky” proposition.39 Though not likely as prolific as Van Goyen, Hals seems to have generated a sizable stock of paintings, but due to a lack of documentation on the prices of Hals’s pictures, it is difficult to gauge the measure of economic success he enjoyed. The limited amount of manual labor required for each of Hals’s genre pieces would have allowed him to produce a large stock of pictures. Indeed, Boers-Goosens has found that paintings bearing Hals’s name appear in Haarlem inventories more frequently than did those by any other local artist, except his pupil, the notoriously prolific Jan Miense Molenaer (about 1610-1668).40 The sheer number of paintings of children and revelers by the master and his students suggest that Hals did produce a large volume of genre imagery.41 Despite Boers-Goosens’s attempts to determine price ranges for early seventeenth-

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century Haarlem artists, the information available on the monetary value of Hals’s paintings in the period is too scant to draw any definitive conclusions. The prices for only sixteen paintings are known, and the majority of these records date from the latter part of the century so that they may not be taken as accurate indicators of Hals’s income during his lifetime.42 One can infer from the low-grade materials that Hals employed that his genre paintings cost less than did his portraits. The weft of the weave of the canvas supports for portraits ranged from a modest fourteen to an extremely fine twenty-one threads per centimeter while that used for genre pictures was much lower, most often around a coarse nine to twelve threads per centimeter.43 Likewise, the panel supports for the portraits seem to have been prime, radially cut planks with the grain of the wood running vertically, two measures that prevented warping, but those of the genre pictures were less stable, tangentially cut with diagonally-oriented grains.44 For the genre works, Hals also used a limited palette that lacked more expensive pigments such as purple, orange, and green which occasionally appear only in his commissioned portraits. These distinctions in the quality of materials signal that Hals tried to lower production costs and quite possibly sold his genre images for relatively low prices, or at least prices that were lower than what he charged for his portraits. As such, it appears that Hals’s business strategy, like that of Van Goyen, was to sell a large volume of low-priced genre pictures because the open market sales mechanisms favored this type of approach. The income generated from this practice could then be used to supplement that which he gained from portraiture. How much income he was able to earn from open market sales is impossible to calculate given the lack of financial documentation. No records of investments, real estate ventures, or other indicators of personal wealth exist, which suggests he perhaps did not profit to the degree that Van Goyen did. Hals did, however, remain solvent in the depressed 1620s despite a series of small debts, and he seems to have been comfortable enough fiscally to have been able to distance himself from the open market by producing only portraits by the early to mid-1630s. At the very least, his genre pictures must be seen as means to survive a difficult financial period, but they also played a pivotal role in helping Hals establish a market identity that allowed him to carve a niche for himself within the Haarlem community as a desirable artist and portraitist. As Hals’s rough manner first emerged in the genre paintings he created specifically for sale at auctions, lotteries, and possibly other open market venues, his method constituted a means to lower costs for economic gain, but it would be erroneous to conclude that this was his sole motivation or that this manner of painting continued to operate only as a cost-cutting mechanism for the duration of his career. Several art historians have questioned Montias’s process innovation hypothesis, generally and in relation to other artists, for these reasons.45 Reindert Falkenburg’s criticisms are the most salient, as they concern the consumers of rough paintings. As he points out, the Dutch market did not necessarily value innovation merely because it was innovative.46 Why then would individuals have wished to purchase items that were made more cheaply and perhaps looked as if they were made more quickly? Montias’s theory also fails to explain the use of a rough manner for portraits. As these pictures were not sold on the open market but were commissioned directly from the artist with prearranged prices, the cost-saving argument no

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longer applied. With the price predetermined, a painter could have labored with a more finished and meticulous manner over each portrait, as Hals did throughout much of the 1620s, assured of adequate compensation for his time and efforts. Why then would patrons have desired to have been portrayed roughly? For Hals, the explanations may lie in the stylistic similarities between his rough manner and the well-appreciated and sought-for aesthetic of contemporary Flemish painting.

Flemish Inspiration As elements of style, the use of thin layers that take advantage of the underlying ground and modeling as well as the unblended painterly flourishes that ultimately came to define Hals’s rough manner all derive from Flemish sources. As Gustav Waagen, director of the Berlin Mu-

Fig. 78. Frans Hals, Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen, c. 1622. Oil on canvas, 140 x 166.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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seums in the 1850s said of Hals: “In my opinion, the value of this painter in the history of Dutch painting has never been sufficiently appreciated. He was the first who introduced the broad manner of Rubens into Holland.”47 More recently, Koos Levy-van Halm and Karin Groen wrote that Hals’s sketchy technique and use of gray reminded them of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), especially the latter’s oil sketches.48 After a review of Hals’s consistent and enduring engagement with southern Netherlandish art, this section will consider Hals’s indebtedness to Flemish painting within economic and market contexts. Scholars have recognized the indebtedness of Hals’s lively image of a young married couple, probably Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen, from 1622 (fig. 78) to Rubens’s The Honeysuckle Bower of 1609 (fig. 79), but similarities to Flemish paintings appear in Hals’s work as early as 1612.49 If one compares Hals’s pendant Portrait of a Man now in Birmingham (fig. 5) and Portrait of a Woman in Chatsworth (fig. 6) – both from 1612 – with his portrait of Jacobus Zaffius dated 1611 (fig. 80), the differences in the build-up of flesh tones are striking.50 While Jacobus Zaffius displays a cool complexion of grays and whites, Hals used warmer, more robust orange undertones in Portrait of a Man. In this later portrait, a ruddy ground shows through at the edge of the white collar, through the thinly painted white to the right of his chin, and even through the shadowy passages of the skull he holds. Hals applied flesh tones on top of this ground to give a range of hues, but the base filtered through these upper layers yields a warm, vibrant glow.

Fig. 79. Peter Paul Rubens, The Honeysuckle Bower, 1609. Oil on canvas, 178 x 136.5 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek München.

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In Jacobus Zaffius, Hals applied the paint much more thickly, especially in the facial region. The thick, caked-on white highlights around the eyes, for example, mask the underlying layers so that the skin lies flat, remaining more opaque. The sitter of the Chatsworth Portrait of a Woman appears even more luminous than her husband. Here, richer and more complex tones create translucent layers. To achieve this effect, Hals altered his application by brushing each individual layer thinly to let the ground and undermodeling show through in the painting’s final appearance. Hals’s portrait of the officers of the St. George Civic Guard from 1616 (fig. 16) exhibits the same qualities. Here, Hals differentiated each of his twelve sitters to make them appear as individuals, but they all share the glowing robustness seen in the pendant portraits from 1612. The vibrant faces in the group portrait, such as that of Nicolaes Woutersz. van der Meer, the central

Fig. 80. Frans Hals, Jacobus Zaffius, 1611. Oil on panel, 54.5 x 41.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

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figure seated on the near side of the table, clearly show the warm undertones even in his pale forehead. Slive has drawn a comparison between Hals’s treatment of flesh in the above paintings and those in Rubens’s pictures.51 Indeed, in contrast to the methods of local artists that yielded gray, statuesque visages like that of Hals’s Jacobus Zaffius, Rubens utilized warms grounds and lush undermodelling to make his figures’ cheeks blush with life. One can clearly see this approach in the Flemish master’s history paintings as well as in his portraits such as The Honeysuckle Bower of 1609 (fig. 79). Here, both figures’ flesh tones seem to pulsate as a result of Rubens’s complex use of thin layering of translucent glazes atop opaque pinks and light blues. This is the same approach that Hals employed in the Birmingham and Chatsworth pictures. Hals’s earliest genre painting, Shrovetide Revelers from about 1615 (fig. 10), also reveals numerous similarities to southern Netherlandish pictorial traditions and methods.52 This lively scene represents the popular stock figure Hans Worst and a young female companion among other celebrants behaving raucously in the last days before Lent. Hals’s juxtaposition of an elder male with a young girl recalls the tradition of ill-matched lovers. Though the central pair in the Shrovetide Revelers may not have been intended to be romantically involved, which is alluded to by the girl’s admiring gaze at the man leaning behind her who makes an unmistakably suggestive gesture by inserting his right index finger into his closed left hand in return, the two works share a formal resemblance. As earlier Netherlandish artists had, Hals placed a pair of figures locked together in the center of the composition, thrust his subjects close to the picture plane, and rendered them in a large, half-length format. Hals’s characteristic concentration on a limited number of large-scale, half-length characters has been attributed to the influence of the Utrecht Caravaggisti Dirck van Baburen (ca. 1594/5-1624), Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588-1629), and Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656), who made this type of image of young musicians and ruffians popular upon their return to the Dutch Republic after 1620. Predating the circulation of the Utrecht painters’ work, Walter Liedtke has suggested that Hals’s picture was influenced by the early works of the contemporary Antwerp painter Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678).53 Indeed, the large cropped figures and the compact composition of overlapping subjects set flatly near the picture plane resemble those that appear in Jordaens’s Family Portrait from about 1615 in the Hermitage (fig. 81). Jordaens’s application of paint may also have inspired Hals. In Family Portrait, Jordaens’s Rubensian technique of thinly washing color atop a colored ground and punctuating the surface with short dabs of accents is readily apparent. The unblended strokes of dark umber that mark the folds in the red sleeve of the matron are not unrelated to the longer but equally unblended dark slashes in the gray garb of Hals’s leaning figure at the right in Shrovetide Revelers. Likewise, Hals’s daubs of pure white atop the hazily rendered loaf of bread and barely delineated mound of sausages in the foreground as well as those that indicate reflections off the satin fabric of the girl’s sleeve mimic the painterly application of unblended, light strokes that give highlights to the canisters in the left foreground of Jordaens’s picture. The sausages themselves in their almost formless representation more closely follow Jordaens’s execution of the servant’s hands, which seem to melt into the surface of the platter of fruit she holds aloft. These affinities of composition and execution support Liedtke’s claim that Hals drew inspiration from his Flemish counterpart.

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Fig. 81. Jacob Jordaens, Family Portrait, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, 175.2 x 137.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Hals’s so-called Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart dated 1623 (figs. 82 and 83) emulates prototypes by Jordaens and other Flemish masters even more closely. As in Shrovetide Revelers, Hals focused on a centrally placed representation of closely set figures writ large.54 Their broad smiles and his raised glass suggest that they are in a celebratory mood.55 While Slive has argued that the dog in the lower right-hand corner derives from the canine in Jan Saenredam’s (ca. 1565-1607) print The Sense of Smell after Hendrick Goltzius’s (1558-1617) design, the same animal also appears in the bottom register of Jordaens’s Family Portrait.56 Though the orientation follows that of the print, Hals’s method of painting the pet, especially its eyes, almost exactly reproduces Jordaens’s treatment of the dog. Like Jordaens, Hals opted not to paint the white of its eyes; instead, he framed the ocular cavity with a single crescent stroke of red. As crimson lower eyelids do not

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Fig. 83. Detail of Frans Hals, Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, 1623. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 105.4 x 79.2 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fig. 82. Frans Hals, Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, 1623. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 105.4 x 79.2 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

naturally occur and to my knowledge do not appear in paintings by other artists, one wonders if Hals saw this exact painting and borrowed the distinctive feature from his Flemish counterpart. Hals’s thin application of paint, as in the young girl’s white cuff through which the brownish ground peeks, corresponds to the white table cloth in Jordaens’s painting where a yellowish brown underlayer is visible. In fact, like Shrovetide Revelers, Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart retains throughout the heavy brown coloring of the ground upon which the compositions were built. Less obviously, the stove and the third figure to the right in Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart are also executed from gray washes that barely cover the brown underlayers that emerge uncorrupted as backlighting at the man’s left shoulder. The Fruit and Vegetable Seller (fig. 84) by Hals and Claes van Heussen (1599-after 1631) dated 1630 also derives from a particularly Flemish type of secular imagery. As Slive has noted,

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Fig. 84. Frans Hals and Claes van Heussen, Fruit and Vegetable Seller, 1630. Oil on canvas, 157 x 200 cm. Private Collection.

the tiered placement of lavish arrangements of produce staged as a market scene falls closer to sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century southern Netherlandish still lifes than it does to the more modest and sober takes on the genre by contemporary Dutch artists like Pieter Claesz. (ca. 1597-1660) and Willem Heda (1594-1680).57 This type of picture, introduced by Pieter Aertsen (1507/8-1575) and Joachim Beuckelaer (ca. 1534-ca. 1574) and continued by artists like Jan Baptiste Saive (1540-1624) and Frans Snyders (1579-1657), remained popular in Antwerp but never seems to have been favored within the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. The insertion of the vendor painted by Hals into a stall painted by Van Heussen recalls the activating presence of the figural contribution of Cornelis de Vos (ca. 1584-1651) to his and Snyders’s Produce Stall (fig. 85). Indeed, the collaboration of a still life and a figure painter most frequently occurred in Flanders, and Antwerp in particular, as Elizabeth Honig has shown.58 Honig argued that two painters working together on a single picture must have appealed to connoisseurs who were eager to practice and display their emerging skills at distinguishing authorship on stylistic and technical grounds.

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Fig. 85. Frans Snyders and Cornelis de Vos, Produce Stall, mid 1620s. Oil on canvas, 201 x 333 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek München.

Hals’s various images of fisher children like that in Antwerp (fig. 86) relate closely to the Fruit and Vegetable Seller and the Flemish market scenes that inspired it.59 As Slive has stated, these images of youths carrying fish from the sea surely date from the same period as, or shortly after, Hals’s collaboration with Van Heussen.60 In works like Fisher Boy in Antwerp, however, Hals executed the entire picture himself, including the tonal dunes that serve as backdrops for the figures.61 This background, which is unusual in the history of Dutch genre painting, and the youth’s participation in the fishing industry make the boy appear as if he was plucked from one of Snyders and De Vos’s collaborative fish stalls like that in the Hermitage from about 1616-20 (fig. 87). In images such as this, one finds not only a cornucopia of the fruits of the sea and a mature male tending the stock, but also a younger figure delivering a fresh basket of sea life to add to the bounty. Hals’s figure mirrors that of De Vos in costume, occupation, and overall appearance. Although the thinly painted surface covered with a web of painterly brushwork as well as an emphasis on a single figure distinguish Hals’s fisher children from the smoothly worked market scenes and meat stalls like those by Snyders and De Vos, these same features correspond to sketchily rendered tronies by other seventeenth-century Flemish artists.62 The word tronie, literally meaning face, appears frequently in seventeenth-century inventories and texts. From a comparison of usage of the term and the numerous painted heads by northern European artists, the term did not usually refer to a portrait but rather to a painting, often a study, of the head of one who was to appear as a generic type.63 For example, the 1704 inventory of the artist Cor-

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Fig. 86. Frans Hals, Fisher Boy, c. 1630. Oil on canvas, 74 x 61 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.

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Fig. 87. Frans Snyders and Cornelis De Vos, Fish Stall, c. 1616-1620. Oil on canvas, 209 x 343 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

nelis Dusart’s (1660-1704) possessions lists “een mans tronij van Frans Hals” as well as a “portret van Frans Hals,” indicating both a distinction in terminology and the categorization of some of Hals’s works as tronies.64 According to Karel van Mander, the sixteenth-century Antwerp painter Frans Floris (1519/20-1570) kept numerous tronies on hand in his studio so that he could incorporate them into his larger, multi-figure compositions.65 In the first half of the seventeenth century, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens continued this practice of using tronies as studies. As Bernhard Schnackenburg has argued recently, however, the manner of these later artists differed considerably from earlier Netherlandish precedents.66 Artists like Floris used fewer layers of paint in their tronies than they did in their large commissions, but they largely replicated the smooth finish of their completed pictures. Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens, on the other hand, worked their tronies in a much sketchier manner than they did even their most painterly of finished works. Schnackenburg notes that their daubed highlights, thick streams of impasto, and generally unfinished appearance derive from Venetian oil sketches that Rubens encountered when he was in Italy from 1600 to 1608. It seems that either Rubens or possibly Van Dyck’s first teacher, Hendrick van Balen (about 1575-1632), who was in Venice from 1592 to 1598, introduced Venetian-inspired oil sketching to Flanders.67 In short, the seventeenth-century Antwerp trio whose methods in the 1610s and early 1620s were interrelated executed their tronies as sketches.

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Fig. 88. Frans Hals, Youth with a Flute, c. 1626-1628. Oil on panel, 37.5 cm. diameter. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin.

The sketch aesthetic of these works parallels that of both Hals’s mature portraits and his earlier genre paintings. Though Hals gave his figures attributes such as a roemer or a flute, the roundels of exuberant youths in Schwerin from about 1626-28 (figs. 88 and 89) bear all the marks of Flemish head studies. Hals’s emphasis on individual merrymaking in these two works derives in part from the works of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, but the vitality of his subjects and the boldness of his brushwork distinguish Hals’s single-figure genre paintings from Utrecht prototypes.68 Instead, Hals’s pictures more closely resemble study heads, such as Jordaens’s Study of Abraham Graphaeus from about 1620 in Douai (fig. 90). In both Hals’s and Jordaens’s work, the head nearly fills the entirety

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Fig. 89. Frans Hals, Youth with a Roemer, c. 1626-1628. Oil on panel, 38 cm. diameter. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin.

of the panel. The simple backgrounds surrounding the head are thinly washed. Brown grounds repeatedly peek through the surface in each work, such as at the tail of the long locks of hair in Youth with a Flute and again above the same figure’s right shoulder and in the upper right-hand corner of the Jordaens. While the cuffs of Hals’s figures’ sleeves show a minimum of white pigment that evokes a thin fabric but also melds into the sleeve itself, the collars, particularly that of Youth with a Flute are heavily worked up in white impasto comparable to the thick dabs that mark the wrinkles on Graphaeus’s neck. Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens all used thick, white strokes in their sketches, especially at the napes of shirts. In Head from about 1616 (fig. 65), Van Dyck almost smeared a highly con-

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Fig. 90. Jacob Jordaens, Study of Abraham Graphaeus, c. 1620. Oil on wood, 41 x 29 cm. Collection Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai, inv: 198. Photo: Hugo Martens.

densed white to form the figure’s simple collar. In the thick paint used by both Hals and Van Dyck, one finds heavy brush-length tracks where the path of individual bristles remains visible. Likewise, Hals left his highlights unblended. Rather than fuse the brightest of passages, such as where the light catches the crest of the bridge of the nose in Youth with a Flute, Hals left it standing in stark contrast to the ruddier tones beneath, just as Van Dyck did at the hairline in Head and as Jordaens did at the nose and ear in his study of Graphaeus. While Hals’s large umber strokes such as those that mark shadows below and to the right of the youth’s nose in Youth with a Flute are not part of the Flemish artists’ repertoires, his exposure of individual strokes that leaves various tints of juxtaposed flesh lying against each other to relay an effect, rather than a precise visage, is. For comparison, one need only look at the dark strokes that mark the creases

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in the right side of the forehead in Van Dyck’s figure or Jordaens’s dark shadow striations below Graphaeus’s sideburns. Flemish artists painted tronies quickly because they sought to capture their models’ fleeting moments of expression. They therefore employed time-saving practices such as working with fewer layers and working wet-in-wet by applying strokes of color atop tones of a previous base that had not yet dried. Passages that were executed wet-in-wet also can be seen in Hals’s pictures and frequently have been perceived as one of the defining characteristics of his method. In Youth with a Flute, Hals worked up the jerkin in one sitting as one can observe from the occasional smears of differing tones that result from working a stroke into a wet patch of paint. Likewise, in Youth with a Roemer, one can see that the brown rim of the collar is the result of stray flesh tones impinging upon the still wet white of the ruff. Finally, in the effort of speed and efficiency, artists drew their tronies in paint. Rather than using paint only to color in pre-drawn designs, they used paint more efficiently to set and shade their composition simultaneously. In this way, Flemish tronie painters like Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens placed a premium on individual brushstrokes to define forms and features, as did Hals. These elements recur throughout Hals’s genre production in works like the Jolly Toper from 1628-30 (fig. 36) and Malle Babbe from 1630-33 (fig. 26), as bold brushwork propelled the artist’s own aesthetic of active vitality and furthered his projects of conveying movement and revealing his virtuoso touch. Therefore, as the source of the early rough manners of Rembrandt (1606-1669) and Jan Lievens (1607-1674) recently has been located in seventeenth-century Flemish tronies, it is reasonable to conclude that Hals also drew inspiration from archetypes by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens.69 Hals most likely had opportunities to see firsthand the tronies, market pictures, and other types of Flemish paintings from which he drew inspiration. While H.P. Baard believed that Hals employed loose brushwork in his 1627 group portraits in response to Rubens’s visit to the northern Netherlands in 1627, most scholars have argued that Hals fell under the Flemish master’s influence during his trip to Antwerp in 1616.70 Thanks to the legal proceedings brought by Neeltje Leenders against Hals for a debt owed to her, we know that Hals was in Antwerp before August 6, 1616 and returned between November 11 and 15 of that same year.71 This extended period in Antwerp would have provided Hals ample opportunity to familiarize himself with what Rubens had painted since his return from Italy in late 1608 as well as pictures by other masters active in the city. Snyders returned from Italy around 1610, and by 1615 had begun to paint the market pieces for which he would become known. As a child prodigy, Van Dyck fell under Rubens’s influence as early as 1615 and produced numerous rough tronies, like that in Munich, before he left for Italy in 1621. Likewise, a slightly older Jordaens was already painting accomplished pictures, like Family Portrait, by the time Hals is documented in Antwerp. Even as works by this new generation of painters in Antwerp filled the homes and churches of collectors, works by earlier masters like Massys remained accessible. Three months in Antwerp must have yielded numerous occasions to examine a wide array of contemporary pictures as well as those produced in the sixteenth century, even if the goal of Hals’s trip was not specifically to study paintings.

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Some familiarity with Rubens’s art must necessarily predate Hals’s voyage south, however, since the Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard (fig. 16), which reveals an unmistakably Rubensian build-up of flesh tones and exuberant flourishes, can be securely dated before Hals was in Antwerp in August 1616.72 Likewise, the Birmingham and Chatsworth pendants that Slive believes predate Hals’s first group portrait exhibit Flemish elements. Because of this early evidence of Flemish interests, Gerard Davies speculated long ago that Hals may have studied with Rubens’s teacher Adam van Noort (1561-1641) in Antwerp before embarking on his training with Van Mander in Haarlem.73 Davies’s hypothesis is unsustainable, however, because documents place the Hals family in Haarlem by 1591. Much of Hals’s early career is unknown, especially between 1604 when he must have left Van Mander’s studio and 1610 when he entered the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem, but it is possible that Hals made an undocumented trip to Antwerp before 1616.74 It is also possible that Hals came in contact with Rubens’s art in Haarlem.75 Rubens’s art was well known in the Dutch Republic, especially before hostilities with the Spanish recommenced in the 1620s. In his correspondence with Rubens dated October 1611 and again in the spring of 1612, Dominic Baudis, the professor of law and history in Leiden, described Rubens and Snyders’s Prometheus of around 1611-12 in such detail that he must have been familiar with the painting.76 Soon after, this painting appeared in the collection of Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to Holland. One also finds other paintings by Rubens in Carleton’s possession in The Hague before he returned to England in 1625. The stadhouder Frederik Hendrik owned early works by Rubens as well.77 Several artists working in Holland made prints after paintings by Rubens before 1616. In 1611, Willem van Swanenburg (1580-1612) engraved an image of Rubens’s Supper at Emmaus now in St. Eustache in Paris. Petrus Scriverius’s Latin inscription below Van Swanenburg’s image indicates that the painting was in the De Man collection in Delft when the print was made. In 1612, Van Swanenburg engraved a Lot and His Daughters after Rubens, suggesting that this painting also may have been in the Dutch Republic at this time. Rubens made a journey to the northern Netherlands in 1612. Not long before Van Swanenburg’s death in August of that year, Rubens felt the need to recruit another printmaker to reproduce his paintings.78 As the home to a burgeoning printing and publishing industry, Haarlem was a natural destination.79 Rubens selected the Haarlem artist Jacob Matham (1571-1631) to succeed Van Swanenburg. Slive has suggested that Hals could have become familiar with Rubens’s work at this time.80 While it remains to be seen if Rubens painted anything while in Haarlem, he may have brought with him a sketch that could have been extremely influential on the young Hals. Rubens’s modello for his painting of Samson and Delilah (fig. 91) must have been in Haarlem for Hals to see by 1613, when the sketch served as the model for Matham’s reproductive print of that year.81 Through direct and indirect avenues, Hals could have gained access to Rubens’s sketch while it was in Matham’s care. The community of artists in Haarlem was relatively small in the second decade of the seventeenth century when both Hals and Matham were members of the city’s Guild of St. Luke. Their teachers, Goltzius and Van Mander, were friends and may have introduced them at an early age. By 1618, Hals and Matham developed a working relationship, evident in the fact that Matham engraved Hals’s portrait of Theodorous Schrevelius at this

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Fig. 91. Peter Paul Rubens, Samson and Delilah, c. 1609. Oil on panel. Cincinnati Art Museum, Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Leyman Endowment / The Bridgeman Art Library.

time.82 One would be surprised if an ambitious and industrious painter like Hals would not have exploited personal connections to spy even a glance at a work such as the Samson and Delilah sketch, even if, or exactly because, it was originally a preparatory work. From it, Hals would have had the opportunity to familiarize himself with Rubens’s sense of activation, luminosity, and brevity of handling. The Flemish qualities and elements that Hals borrowed from Rubens and other sources may have held particular appeal for the residents of Haarlem, as the city had extensive ties with the southern Netherlands. Amongst the oldest connections between the two locales is the Cathedral of St. Bavo, begun in the thirteenth century and completed in the early sixteenth century, and dedicated to a Flemish saint.83 As a result of the revolt by the United Provinces against Spanish rule and the subsequent Dutch blockade of the Scheldt River that constricted trade in and out of Spanish-controlled Antwerp, people fled Flanders to the new Dutch Republic in waves in the decades around 1600. By the 1620s, Haarlem claimed a sizable population of Flemings. In 1622, fifty-one percent of the Haarlem population was either a first- or second-generation Flemish immigrant.84 This percentage is considerably higher than that of the Dutch Republic as a whole, where it stood at forty-two percent. In fact, Haarlem possessed the third highest percentage of Flemings, behind only Leiden and Middleburg. In size alone, the population of Haarlem more than doubled from 18,000 people in 1572 to 39,455 in 1622.85 While many wealthy merchants from Antwerp emigrated to Amsterdam because it was the commercial center most

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like the home to which they were accustomed, Haarlem primarily lured Flemings who were involved in the textile industry. Attracted by its waterway connections and proximity to dunes that were ideal for bleaching linen, the influx of labor and capital from the south helped solidify Haarlem’s position as the center of textile production in the northern Netherlands. While many of the new Haarlem residents were undoubtedly manual laborers, Biesboer has shown that many of the individuals who assumed leading roles in the municipal government in Haarlem beginning in the 1620s were second-generation Flemish immigrants.86 These individuals who formed the financial and cultural elite exerted a tremendous impact on Haarlem society. Jan Briels has shown that the founders of the book and print publishing industry in Haarlem were indebted to printers and publishers who fled economic hardship in Antwerp.87 Many school teachers and intellectuals also made Haarlem their new home. For example, the Antwerp chamber of rhetoric, De Witte Angieren (The White Carnations), of which Van Mander was a member, relocated en masse to Haarlem. Indeed, Van Mander himself moved to Haarlem shortly before entering the Guild of St. Luke there in 1584. Van Mander was just one of several painters of south Netherlandish ancestry who made a significant impact on the artistic community in Haarlem.88 At the turn of the century, seven of the nineteen painters active in the city had been born in Flanders.89 Later, nineteen of the fortyfive kunstschilders who registered with the guild for the first time between 1615 and 1625 were of south Netherlandish origin, including those who were born in Holland but whose parents were immigrants from the south.90 Between 1625 and 1635, twenty-five of the eighty-four newly registered painters were of Flemish stock.91 As Boers-Goosens notes, many of these newcomers, especially the second-generation immigrants, dramatically affected the local art market.92 Salomon de Bray (1597-1664), who played a significant role in reorganizing the Haarlem guild in 1631 and who served numerous prominent positions within the organization throughout the 1630s, was born in Amsterdam to parents who had recently departed from Aelst. Likewise, the tonal landscape painters Pieter de Molijn (1595-1661) and Jan Porcellis (1584-1632) came from south Netherlandish families. Born in London to a father from Ghent and a mother from Brussels, Molijn joined the Haarlem guild in 1616 and eventually served either as a dean or commissioner of the group in the 1630s and 1640s. Porcellis was born in Ghent before his parents emigrated to Rotterdam. In 1615 he moved to Antwerp and joined the guild there in 1617. Five years later, he settled in Haarlem. Hercules Seghers (1589/90-1633/8) and Esaias van de Velde (1587-1630) spent only a short time in Haarlem, but both were of Flemish descent. Seghers, who registered in Haarlem in 1612 before returning to his childhood home in Amsterdam two years later, was the son of a Flemish textile merchant. Van de Velde, who lived in Haarlem from 1609 to 1618, was the son of a painter and art dealer in Antwerp who fled northward to avoid religious persecution. Perhaps the best-known example of the immigration phenomenon is the Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer (1604/5-1638), who was in Haarlem from around 1626 to 1628 before he returned to Antwerp. Though the nature of his relationship with Hals has been questioned, Brouwer’s art had a transformative effect on the genre painting tradition of Haarlem despite his brief stay in the city.93 Together, these first- and second-generation immigrant painters from the southern Netherlands did much to shape the artistic landscape in Haarlem.

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While the extensive connections between Haarlem, Hals, and the southern Netherlands surely contributed to a general regard for Hals’s rough paintings, the artist’s emulation of Flemish masters may have offered the means to target an elite clientele who collected the work of high-end painters. Eric Jan Sluijter has argued that the Dutch markets avidly consumed inexpensive paintings imported from Flanders and Brabant because the large numbers of Flemish immigrants transferred their habit of decorating their homes with affordable pictures northward, but the works of Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens that inspired Hals can be classified as decidedly higher quality and far from affordable to the average consumer.94 As De Marchi and Van Miegroet have argued, however, the art market was not monolithic; it actually was composed of two distinct segments: one that focused on low-quality, affordable paintings and one that concentrated on expensive paintings of the highest quality.95 In contrast to Sluijter’s model, following high-end contemporary Flemish painting was economically and artistically advantageous as it offered entrée to this second segment of the market by catering to an elite clientele that appreciated a sketchy, Flemish aesthetic. Wealthy Haarlem citizens who valued high-end Flemish painting and the manner associated with it patronized Hals. The 1650 inventory of the impressive collection of the brewer Nicolaes Duyst van Voorhout lists “een tronie van Rubbens” valued at one hundred and nine guilders hanging in the voorhuys, or front room.96 Around 1638, Hals painted Van Voorhout’s portrait that is now in New York (fig. 92). Though it is unknown which picture Van Voorhout owned, Hals’s portrait conveys several elements similar to Rubensian tronies. One finds a ruddy pink underlayer partially exposed at the cheeks beneath a layer of peachier tones around the eyes. In this way, the flesh tones follow Rubens’s method rather closely, although Hals’s palette is warmer. Likewise, Van Voorhout’s gray satin jacket sparkles with painterly flourishes. Though far more controlled, the bold strokes of yellow at Van Voorhout’s akimbo elbow evoke similarly virtuoso passages in Rubens’s oeuvre. As the owner of a Rubens, Van Voorhout surely must have recognized, if not encouraged, the stylistic similarities. The presence of works by both Rubens and Hals in his collection may signal Van Voorhout’s affinity for the painterly aesthetic shared by the two artists. Perhaps Van Voorhout selected Hals to portray him precisely because he painted in a manner related to that of the fashionable Flemish artist. The attribution of paintings in the possession of Hals’s known clients is poorly documented, but one wonders if other clients of Hals might have felt similarly. Van Voorhout was the type of consumer that Hals would have been most eager to cultivate due to his informed taste coupled with the means to procure works of the highest quality. By suiting the desires of clients like Van Voorhout, Hals could pitch his own virtuoso creations as prestigious, costly objects worthy of handsome accolades and rewards of the type enjoyed by Rubens. In Hals’s lifetime, Flemish masters were the most highly regarded and fashionable artists in the Dutch Republic. As they did throughout Europe, these painters enjoyed the patronage of the most exclusive rulers and collectors who in many ways defined the taste of the economic and social elite. As the Dutch-born physician Bernard Mandeville wrote in 1728, the value of works of art was partially defined by “the Quality of the Persons in whose Possession they are.”97

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Fig. 92. Frans Hals, Claes Duyst van Voorhout, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, 80.7 x 66 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Perhaps more esteemed than any other artist in Europe, Rubens received prestigious commissions from aristocrats in Italy, Spain, England, France, and the southern Netherlands. In Holland, Constantijn Huygens, who claimed friendship with Rubens and familiarity with his work, gave the greatest compliment he could by describing the artist as “the Apelles of our time.”98 Although unsuccessful, Huygens and the Dutch court at The Hague attempted to entice Rubens to work for the stadhouder – a move that can be seen as an effort to break into the most exclusive European circles through artistic means. Rubens’s pupil Van Dyck followed his master in quickly earning international fame before becoming official painter to the King of England. In the winter of 1631-32, Van Dyck visited the Dutch court in The Hague where he painted portraits of the stadhouder and his family, which helped spread the taste for the painter’s dashingly elegant portraiture among the elite throughout Holland. Jordaens’s fame did not reach as far, but after Rubens and Van Dyck’s deaths in 1640 and 1641 respectively, Jordaens was the preeminent painter in Flanders. Like Van Dyck, he was even recruited by the stadhouder. By 1652, Jordaens completed The Triumph of Frederik Hendrik and The Triumph of Time for the choicest suite in the stadhouder’s palace, Huis den Bosch. Likewise, though a still-life specialist who occasionally painted figures, Snyders was an elite painter whose reputation resonated in the north. Though all hailed from Antwerp, their works, which cannot be considered among the cheap imports Sluijter described, not only were known in the northern Netherlands in their lifetimes, they also were lauded extensively by those who, following their European counterparts, did much to determine the taste of elite collectors. In this way, high-end Flemish painting came to embody the height of fashion. Not surprisingly given their esteem, pictures by this group of leading Flemish painters garnered some of the highest prices in the Dutch Republic. A work by Rubens was recorded in the 1657 inventory of Amsterdam art dealer Johannes Renialme as being valued at the high sum of five hundred guilders.99 The same document also listed a portrait of the Princess of Orange by Van Dyck as worth three hundred guilders and tagged a representation of cereal eaters by Jordaens at one hundred and fifty guilders. Though surprisingly more modest than those of Van Dyck’s and Jordaens’s, recorded values of Rubens’s work remained high, ranging from twelve guilders for a tronie to one hundred and nine guilders for a more lavish work.100 Even a copy after a multi-figured composition by Rubens commanded an estimate of fifty guilders.101 Likewise, valuations of paintings by Jordaens varied from thirty to one hundred and fifty guilders in other inventories.102 In 1637, “een stuck” by Snyders was estimated at ninety guilders. In contrast, the average price of landscapes listed in Haarlem inventories before 1660 was just over sixteen guilders, while the average price of a genre painting was around twenty guilders in the same sources.103 The lack of documentation on financial value precludes a systematic survey, but these examples clearly suggest that high-end Flemish paintings were often exorbitantly expensive. As such, works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, and Snyders were off-limits to all but the wealthiest of collectors. For Hals, couching his own paintings in the visual language of his esteemed and highly valued Flemish contemporaries may have operated as a means to attract the wealthy clients who could afford to purchase these expensive pictures. Rather than being devoid of meaning, Flemish

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modes of painting bore associations of sophistication and luxury. By emulating some features of these modes, like rough handling, Hals created a product based, in part, upon pre-established definitions of quality within his local market. In addition to catering to the tastes of first- and second-generation Flemish immigrants in Haarlem who desired paintings of the types produced in their homeland, Hals also responded to high-end Flemish art in order to frame his art as fashionable and attractive in its own right to elite clients like Van Voorhout. This strategy of constructing the market image of his paintings through stylistic features may have also enabled Hals to sell his paintings for higher prices. A Flemish-inspired manner, therefore, offered considerable economic advantages as it opened new outlets, catered to the high end of the art market, and consequently, generated more income. As a result, Hals was able to carve a niche for himself as a fashionable painter of the highest rank in the highly competitive market of seventeenth-century Haarlem.

A Signature Style Though Hals emulated a variety of Flemish sources and motifs, he crafted a highly distinctive manner. Other painters such as Adriaen Hanneman (1604-1671) and Lievens as well as Jan de Bray in Haarlem also derived inspiration from the works of Rubens and Van Dyck, yet none of the works of these Dutch artists would have been mistaken for those of Hals, nor are they now. Part of the explanation for the differences lies with Hals’s reliance on the robust approach of Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens from the 1610s, while others followed the more refined style espoused by Van Dyck in the 1630s.104 More so than other Dutch painters, Hals incorporated Flemish elements, rather than an entire aesthetic, and applied them to his program of lively conception and execution to arrive at a completely original pictorial vision. This distinctive synthesis distinguished Hals from his competitors in the local market. In this section, I explore how Hals’s distinctive personal style operated as a signature. As Slive suggested, Hals “rarely put his name or monogram on his paintings; perhaps he was convinced that his inimitable touch made his signature redundant.”105 Hals developed a signature style in a period when consumers increasingly determined value on the basis of authorship. In this way, to meet the new demands of the market, the strategy of employing a recognizably distinct manner allowed Hals to provide clients with not only well-designed and executed paintings, but also pictures that were demonstrably and unmistakably by him. Meyer Schapiro and Richard Wollheim have provided definitions of style that prove useful in examining Hals’s manner. Schapiro defined style as “the constant form – and sometimes the constant elements, qualities, and expression – in the art of an individual or group.”106 In contrast to group style, Schapiro continued “an individual style is a personal expression.”107 While also distinguishing between a general style which can characterize the art produced by a number of artists in a particular place or time, Wollheim similarly articulated that “every artist has an individual style” and conceived of individual style as the fulfillment of the artist’s intentions.108 In contrast to other theories of style or individual style, Schapiro and Wollheim believe that

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the artist maintains agency in determining his or her distinctive pictorial forms. For Wollheim, individual style is the product of conscious and acquired intent, rather than preternatural endowment. The highly individualized and gradually developed character of Hals’s manner suggests that one can apply Schapiro’s and Wollheim’s arguments to the genesis of Hals’s style. The two components of Wollheim’s conception of individual style as personal and intentional can be found frequently in pre-modern sources. Richard Spear has identified the writings of Horace as inspiring discussions of individual style in the Renaissance. As Petrarch retold Horace’s tale of Aesop’s crow donning peacock feathers to gain acceptance by finer birds: “I much prefer that my style be my own, rude and undefined perhaps, but made to the measure of my mind… rather than to use someone else’s style… an actor can wear any kind of garments, but a writer cannot adopt any kind of style…certainly each of us has something naturally individual.”109 In early modern artistic parlance, manner – maniera in Italian and manier in Dutch – was the term used most frequently to describe what today would be defined as style.110 Other terms such as wijse (ways) and handelinghe (handling) also were used to grapple with notions of style.111 As Hessel Miedema has pointed out, for Van Mander, manier referred to an artist’s working method as well as the visible results of that method.112 Indeed, from its etymology in mano (hand), manner indexically refers to the making of an image, and its maker.113 As such, each artist, as an individual, was believed to possess a distinctive manner. As Philip Sohm has noted, Vasari told the readers of his preface that he wanted to help them recognize styles.114 Vasari wrote: I have endeavored not only to record what artists have done but also to distinguish the better from the good, the best from the better, and to note with some care the methods, expressions, styles, brushstrokes, and imaginations of the painters and sculptors, studying as diligently as I know how to help people who cannot find out for themselves how to understand the sources and origins of various styles, and the reason for the improvement or decline of the arts at various times and among different peoples.115

As Sohm has argued, Vasari addressed not only artist’s biographies but also their creations, aesthetics, and, occasionally, their methods, throughout his Vite.116 In this way, Vasari considered an artist’s identity and style to be inextricably entwined. Van Mander followed Vasari’s model in structuring his text around discussions of individual artists as well as in differentiating each painter’s artistic production in stylistic terms.117 For Van Mander, though, personal style was not immutable. In fact, one finds several references to the ability of artists to choose their manner. In Den Grondt, for example, after describing the difference between rouw and net, he wrote, “Here have I, O noble painting-pupil placed before your eyes two sorts of complete manners which you now – according to your talent or spirit – will navigate with your own meanings.”118 While the student ultimately will personalize his or her approach in Van Mander’s eyes, the pupil clearly has a choice in his working method and therefore in crafting his or her personal style. In the biographies that follow Den Grondt, Van Mander continued this thread in passages such as that on Pieter Vlerick (1539-1581) wherein Van Mander

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described how the painter altered his style, moving from following one model to another.119 With a different spin, one of the primary foci of Van Mander’s life of Goltzius centers on the master engraver’s ability to work in the manner of other masters.120 As Van Mander told it, Goltzius executed a series of prints that mimicked, but did not copy, the work of famed artists like Albrecht Dürer (about 1480-1538) and Lucas van Leyden (ca. 1488-after 1533). These prints were crafted with such skill that even highly knowledgeable viewers were deceived. In topoi of this kind, where artists are able to slip the confines of their individual manner to work successfully in that of another, the role of selection becomes clear. An artist like Goltzius who was talented enough to work in any manner he pleased, even those of the most virtuoso engravers of the past, had the power and skill to choose the style he wished to put forth. While the belief that artists possessed an intentionally selected individual style can be found in early modern sources, this does not, in itself, support the possibility that Hals consciously employed his distinctive manner to differentiate his artistic products from those of his competitors in the market. Wollheim’s differentiation between the concepts of individual style and signature, however, provides the base upon which this interpretation is built. For Wollheim, signature elements are distinctive items that reveal authorship but are not necessarily employed intentionally.121 As such, these two features are rarely one and the same, but as Wollheim acknowledged, a particular artist may intentionally employ the distinctive pictorial elements that constitute his or her individual style for the purpose of making his or her authorship known. I call this confluence of Wollheim’s concepts the signature style. There are several pre-modern examples of individual styles being used to signal authorship. In the earliest, the ancient writer Pliny described how the painter Protogenes placed small ships at the periphery of his compositions as self-referential markers that alluded to the artist’s humble beginnings as a mere ship decorator.122 Baxandall explored how fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury German wood sculptors actively differentiated their workshop productions from those of other firms by adding distinctively skillful stylistic elements, such as garment folds, that operated “almost as the artist’s mark.”123 Christopher Wood has examined how similar ideas of intentional insertions of authorial presence within two-dimensional works of art were also at play in Renaissance Germany.124 As Wood noted, Dürer posited that the central ambition of the artist was to reveal himself in his works. As a result, Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538), Hans Burgkmair (1473-1531), and others sought to distinguish their art through both written and other visual signatures. Similar ideas seem to have percolated, if not developed, in Italy. A 1592 letter from the poet Alessandro Allegri (1560-1629) notes that modern painters stopped signing their pictures in the corner because viewers could identify the maker from the style alone.125 Throughout the seventeenth century, artists continued to mark their works as distinct through their manners. Philips Angel wrote in 1641, “Shall we do so [paint naturally] in such a way that we all can see, because it is done in such and such a manner that it is by this master or that? No, most assuredly not, for if that can be seen the master is putting too much of himself into it.”126 Though he advocated that artists not make their identity readily visible through distinctive elements, his admonition suggests that in fact numerous artists were doing so. As all of these examples indicate,

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viewers were accustomed to identifying authorship from artists’ individualized manners. Indeed, Anna Tummers has recently suggested that attributing pictures was a primary concern for many seventeenth-century Dutch collectors.127 The practice of signaling authorship by signing one’s creations was not widespread in the seventeenth century.128 Rudi Ekkart has recently noted a general dearth of signed portraits in the Dutch Republic.129 Without providing numerical analysis, Ekkart suggests that signed portraits were more common in Flanders than in Holland.130 Looking at the three Flemish artists that influenced Hals and his painterly manner, it is clear that Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens rarely affixed signatures. Rubens signed but sixteen of the 1,403 paintings that Michael Jaffé identified as autograph pictures.131 Of the seven hundred fifty-two paintings that Susan Barnes, Nora de Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey attributed to Van Dyck, only fifty-five pictures, or a meager seven percent of the total, bear authentic signatures.132 It is more difficult to quantify due to the lack of a recent catalogue raisonne, but Jordaens also did not place his name on his paintings with any frequency.133 From this brief tally, it is clear that even Flemish painters in Hals’s lifetime did not make a regular practice of signing their pictures. Ekkart has suggested that signatures gradually became more common as the seventeenth century progressed, as the portrait market expanded and painters had a greater need to differentiate their works.134 Nonetheless, placing a signature on a painting and hence signaling authorship with the artist’s name clearly was an emerging rather than established practice. In writing, the presence of a signed name was not a sufficient guarantor of authenticity. Instead, the style of the writing was used to divine authorship. As Jeffrey Muller has illuminated, since the Middle Ages, scribes were not only charged with writing but also with authenticating documents.135 Differentiating between authentic and forged signatures was one of the scribe’s primary charges. To do so, they not only examined the name itself but also how the name was written so that an analysis of visual elements led to an attribution. In turn, scribes and those who issued proclamations and legal documents developed unique, personal, inimitable manners and flourishes that could clearly communicate authorship from the manner of execution. Flourishes, like the virtuoso “master’s touches” that are such a key ingredient of Hals’s signature style, were particularly apt at conveying authorship.136 Wood has postulated that Altdorfer consciously employed “stylish,” non-mimetic strokes at the periphery of his works as deictic traces that call attention to their madeness and, by extension, to the artist who made them.137 For Wood, these marks were heteroclite and unrepeatable, and were clearly recognized as such, distinguishing them from landscape marks by other artists and from each other so that brushstrokes were the seat of the artist’s embedded presence.138 In support of this argument, Wood, like Muller, turned to medieval scribes. For these clerks, the paraph or flourish was the primary means of differentiating and authenticating messages and signatures. These strokes, abstract and unrepeatable, unequivocally linked them to their maker. In this way, they were deemed to be accurate measures of authenticity and authorship.139 These ideas continued to hold sway, as can be seen from Abraham Bosse’s Sentiments sur la distinction des manieres de peinture dessin, et graveure, et des orginaux et coppies of 1649 in which he wrote: “The size and form of these large letters and

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strokes usually depend on the will of those who make them, while the opposite is true of those who want to imitate them because they find themselves constrained and cramped, and so one recognizes that what they have made of it is usually trembling and corrupted in its forms.”140 Bosse said that the same was true for paintings and drawings.141 As Bosse suggested, a painter or draftsman’s individual strokes could operate similarly as they were extraneous, abstract elements that did not aim at optical verisimilitude. The prefatory framing of Houbraken’s life of Hals communicates a similar conception of a single stroke’s ability to reveal the identity of he who made the mark. To introduce his discussion of Hals, Houbraken relayed the oft-retold competition between the ancient painters Apelles and Protogenes to execute the most perfect single line. Pliny first told the tale: [Apelles] went at once to [Protogenes’s] studio. The artist was not there, but there was a panel of considerable size on the easel prepared for painting, which was in the charge of a single old woman. In answer to his enquiry, she told him that Protogenes was not at home, and asked who it was she should report as having wished to see him. “Say it was this person,” said Apelles, and taking up the brush he painted in color across the panel an extremely fine line; and when Protogenes returned the old woman showed him what had taken place. The story goes that the artist, after looking closely at the finish of this, said that the new arrival was Apelles, as so perfect a piece of work tallied with nobody else; and he himself, using another color, drew a still finer line exactly on top of the first one, and leaving the room for the attendant to the visitor if he returned and added that this was the person he was in search of; and so it happened; for Apelles came back, and ashamed to be beaten, cut the lines with another in a third color, leaving no room for any further display of minute work. Hereupon Protogenes admitted he was defeated, and flew down to the harbor to look for the visitor; and he decided that the panel should be handed on to posterity as it was, to be admired as a marvel by everybody, but particularly by artists.142

Significantly, the contest began with Apelles leaving a lone brushstroke rather than his name as his calling card for Protogenes. When Protogenes was confronted with the beauty and mastery of Apelles’s line in the absence of the colleague whom he had yet to meet and who had not left his name, Protogenes was able to divine the authorship of the single stroke from its appearance alone. This tale was repeated by Vasari, Van Mander, and others, solidifying the perception that individual marks operated as signifiers of their creators. As such, this idea must have remained current throughout Hals’s lifetime. Furthermore, as Houbraken prefaced his biography of Hals and criticism of the Haarlem artist’s paintings with the Apelles-Protogenes encounter, Houbraken indicated that signature touches held particular relevance for Hals’s manner. How the relationship between an artist and his personalized brushwork operated in economic terms in the seventeenth century can be seen in Rubens’s frequently quoted letter of 1618 to Sir Dudley Carlton. Here, as part of his negotiations to acquire Carleton’s collection of

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antiquities, Rubens distinguished “original” paintings “by my hand,” “entirely by my hand,” “entirely retouched by my hand,” and “done by my pupils, from originals by my hand… retouched by my hand throughout.”143 In the last two categories, the artist addresses invention, but it is his “retouchings” that he believes, or hopes to convince Carleton, convey his authorship. Like the calligraphic markings of Altdofer, Protogenes, and others, artistic presence was discernible through Rubens’s surface-level brushstrokes. More so, these touches that communicate Rubens’s direct involvement seem to have positively affected the value of the painting.144 Rubens seems to have appended individualized touches that signaled his authorship in works that were largely executed by his studio assistants not only to correct some deficiency, but also to increase their value to viewers like Carleton.145 Corroborating Rubens’s emphasis on manifesting his physical as well as intellectual involvement in the final work of art for financial gain, Montias has found that attributions played an increasingly important role in determining the value of a painting. In his groundbreaking investigation of inventories of the possessions of residents of Delft in the seventeenth century, Montias noted a marked increase in the frequency with which pictures were attributed.146 From his sample, Montias found that only 6.9 percent of all paintings listed in inventories from the 1620s were attributed. In contrast, 9.2 percent of the citations of pictures bore attributions in the 1640s. By the 1650s, the rate increased to 12.8 percent before hitting a peak of 15.4 percent in the 1660s.147 As Montias concluded, these figures demonstrate an increased consciousness of authorship and signal a change in attitude towards paintings.148 The greater attention paid to whom made the pictures, however, was not the only change, as attributed pictures consistently received higher valuations than did those to which no name was given. When analyzing all valued paintings in his sample inventories, Montias found that the average price of an attributed painting was 16.6 gulden while the average price of an unattributed one was 7.2 gulden.149 The relationship also held within individual inventories, as the average price of attributed paintings was higher than that of pictures that lacked an attribution in fifty of the fifty-two examined inventories.150 Therefore, it seems that attribution became a prime indicator in determining the value of a picture. It is reasonable to presume, as Jaap van der Veen recently has, that purchasing decisions followed the emerging trend of attribution-determined value.151 According to Samuel van Hoogstraten, some individuals used authorship as the sole criteria for acquiring works of art. In the introduction to his Inleyding of 1678, Van Hoogstraten derides “naemkoopers,” literally name buyers, in his stated goal of opening the eyes of liefhebbers to the virtues of painting.152 As PousãoSmith has noted recently, Van Hoogstraten hoped that his text would encourage readers to base their judgments and their collection strategies on aesthetic qualities rather than on the names of those who created the pictures.153 From both Montias’s statistics and Van Hoogstraten’s lament, it is clear that authorship played a vital role in the art market in which Hals was active. Indeed, attribution became more relevant over time, as Bernard Mandeville wrote in 1728 that “the Value that is set on Paintings depends not only on the Name of the Master and the Time of his Age he drew them in, but likewise in a great measure on the Scarcity of his Works” as well as who collected them.154 As De Marchi and Van Miegroet noted, not surprisingly, the reputation of the

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artist affected the monetary valuations in this system.155 The case of a monetary valuation of a painting in 1665 in Haarlem illustrates the point. When the painters Dirck Bleecker and Jacob Coolen were asked to evaluate a picture by Bartholomeus van der Helst, they replied, “the painting in question is worth 300 guilders but in view of the master’s name and reputation we have appraised it at 400 guilders and no more.”156 In this instance, the attribution to Van der Helst increased the estimated value by a third. Works executed by painters considered to be the leading artists of the day received the highest values. Not only did paintings by Rubens and Van Dyck fetch astronomical prices, well-regarded Dutch artists like Bloemaert, Hendrik Vroom (ca. 15631640), and others did as well.157 As a result of value being partially determined by attribution, the market best supported works that were recognizably by esteemed artists. In this context, utilizing a signature style provided Hals the means to provide clients with not only a picture but also one that was unmistakably by Hals. Hals’s personal style became recognizable as a result of the wide exposure offered by open market sales mechanisms and the civic guard commissions he received in the late 1620s and early 1630s. The notion of making one’s art public to further one’s career was expounded in the seventeenth century by writers like Van Hoogstraten who devoted a chapter of his Inleyding to “How to Make One’s Art Public.”158 Van Hoogstraten advocated that artists employ means such as circulating prints that reproduced their paintings because he believed that doing so would make an artist’s accomplishments more widely known and promote name recognition. The implication is that such efforts would spread a painter’s fame and increase his sales. Hals occasionally created designs for prints, but, more importantly, selling his genre paintings at auctions and lotteries was a means of making his works and abilities more widely known. As can be seen from the large number of lots sold at Van Leeuwen’s 1626 lottery and in renderings of similar events such as that by Gillis Coignet (ca. 1538-1599) of a lottery held in Amsterdam in 1592 (fig. 93), hundreds of people could be in attendance. Each of these participants and onlookers would have a chance to see every picture sold when the results of the lots were announced. In this way, these venues afforded artists a high level of visibility even if the profits received from each individual work was relatively low. Similarly, until the mid-nineteenth century, Hals’s Haarlem civic guard group portraits hung in the town’s militia hall, the Doelen, a semi-public space where a wide range of viewers, not just members of the guard, could become familiar with his paintings. Contemporary accounts demonstrate the accessibility of Hals’s group portraits. Both Samuel Ampzing and Theodorus Schrevelius, in 1628 and 1648 respectively, described the portraits on display in the Doelen with such assurance that it is clear that both of these local authors had seen Hals’s paintings.159 In 1663 the Frenchman Balthasar de Monconys noted in his travel journal that several grand, forceful portraits of assembled officers were on display in the Doelen in Haarlem.160 De Monconys’s experience indicates that this space was accessible even to foreign travelers passing through town. Though Hals first received a commission from the St. George Civic Guard in 1616, it was a decade later that militia groups chose Hals to commemorate departing officers’ tenure on a semi-regular basis. Hals painted officers from the Haarlem St. Hadrian Guard in 1627 and those

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Fig. 93. Gilles Coignet, The Lottery of 1592, c. 1595. Oil on canvas, 113 x 203.5 cm. Amsterdam Museum.

of the Haarlem St. George Guard in 1627, 1633, and 1639. Even the crossbowmen’s militia of Amsterdam recruited Hals in 1633. Together, Hals painted five group portraits in a little over twelve years that were highly visible, providing the artist with considerable prestige. That exposure must have translated into an increased recognizability of Hals’s lively and vigorously executed personal style. This high level of visibility surely led to the widespread fame that Hals achieved by the time he painted the last of his militia portraits. Though Hals’s fame did not reach the same international heights that Rembrandt’s did, Hals was the most famous artist in Haarlem by the 1630s. As Boers-Goosens has demonstrated, Hals’s name appeared in written texts more often than did any other townsman from his generation, making him unmistakably the best known.161 Though only briefly, the anonymous biographer of Van Mander included Hals among Van Mander’s noteworthy pupils in 1618.162 Similarly, both Ampzing and Schrevelius singled out Hals in their descriptive histories of Haarlem.163 Later, in 1718, Houbraken devoted a sizable passage to Hals even though Houbraken neglected several other masters from Haarlem.164 Hals’s name even appeared in the Flemish author Cornelis de Bie’s Het Gulden Cabinet van de Edel vry Schilderconst of 1662, suggesting that Hals’s work had found some audience beyond the borders of the Dutch Republic in the artist’s lifetime.165 In these published references, Hals’s name and achievements circulated widely and must have been better known than those of any other painter from Haarlem, regardless of specialization, with whom he competed. As fame and profit were interdependent concepts in the market, Hals’s reputation was such that a painting attributed to the master must have been highly valued.166 As a famous and successful artist, it was to Hals’s advantage to emphasize his signature style. As with modern

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museum and personal collection strategies, a representative work by a leading artist holds more appeal and more value than does an immature or experimental one that does not completely correspond to the acknowledged characteristics of the master’s oeuvre. The self-conscious personal style and, in Hals’s case, the signature style provided the means for established painters to market themselves and secure the highest prices possible by playing on their reputations. Creating a work that was easily recognizable as being by Hals as a result of its signature pictorial elements was a way to attract the types of buyers that Van Hoogstraten deplored – collectors who prized the name of the artist over the aesthetic features of his or her painting. In other words, once Hals established a distinctive market identity based on liveliness, virtuosity, and evocations of Flemish aesthetics, it was advantageous for him, in a market sense, to continue to produce pictures that met viewers’ expectations of his manner, and even increasingly to emphasize those elements deemed to be particularly Halsian. The heightened appreciation for Hals’s signature style explains why Hals transferred his characteristic manner from works sold on the open market and those displayed publicly in the Doelen to those portraits of individuals for which he was privately commissioned. It was not until the 1630s in portraits such as that of Pieter van den Broecke (fig. 94) that Hals began to paint portraits in the manner he developed for genre imagery.167 For the remainder of his career, Hals’s portraits showed greater reliance on unblended brushwork and openness of technique. Furthermore, Hals stopped creating genre pictures in the early 1630s. These features suggest that Hals no longer had to rely on the open market because he received enough commissions to thrive and that those who sought out Hals wanted to be portrayed in the master’s signature style. Ernst van de Wetering has made related arguments regarding the appeal of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, positing that they were desirable because they depicted not only the master’s face, but that they were also crafted in his individual style.168 For Van de Wetering, the emerging art lovers at the upper end of the market who possessed connoisseurial interests fueled the demand for these pictures because they wanted “a specimen of his art.”169 Likewise, Hals’s sitters may have wanted to be portrayed in what had come to be known as Hals’s characteristic style so that they could own an example of the master’s method and manner. In this way, Hals’s sitters received not only a fine likeness, but also a portrait recognizable as being by Hals. Just as sitters could enlist Hals to paint them as knowledgeable viewers of art with his broad, virtuoso brushwork, a portrait identifiable as being painted by the master would have operated as a luxury object and status symbol in the local community. It communicated the means as well as the tastes of the patrons who would select and who could afford to have the famed artist paint their portrait. In short, Hals wielded his signature style in his post-1630 portraits to provide his sitters with a work of art that was valuable aesthetically as well as financially. In the later stages of his career, Hals’s rough manner provided an economic advantage in a competitive and often saturated market as it had throughout his early years. Initially, it seems likely that painting in a rough manner lowered production costs for works designed for open market venues that favored the liquidation of large quantities of low-priced pictures. As Hals’s method resembled the sketchy aesthetic of contemporary Flemish paintings of the type from

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Fig. 94. Frans Hals, Pieter van den Broecke, c. 1633. Oil on canvas, 71.2 x 61 cm. The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (English Heritage), London.

which Hals borrowed subjects and compositions, it seems that other motives were also at play. Given the preponderance of Haarlem residents with deep familial ties to Flanders, Hals’s style may have been geared partially toward these consumers. Indeed, as some of Hals’s sitters collected paintings by the high-end masters that Hals emulated, it is likely that employing broad, unblended brushstrokes enabled Hals to cater to those at the upper reaches of the art market who had the taste and means to acquire the highest quality and the costliest works. Emulating artists like Rubens and Van Dyck therefore offered Hals the chance to cast himself as a comparably fashionable painter on the local scene. Finally, as Hals increasingly gained a market foothold and amassed considerable exposure, his distinct pictorial language became valued in itself. As the market moved towards defining value in terms of attribution, Hals’s rough manner operated

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as a signature style. Like those who came before him, individualizing his creations through distinctive elements such as characteristic flourishes differentiated his paintings from those of his competitors, and these touches marked his pictures as being by Hals. In this way, even those who commissioned Hals to paint their portraits received valuable examples of the master’s characteristic style. Various segments of the market thus encouraged Hals to paint roughly and to employ his signature roughness unabashedly. Hals, however, was not just a passive agent. He was also able to shape the market for his works, in effect creating a demand for his distinctly individualized manner.

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Cha p te r 4

T h e h a lS B r a n d

C h a p Te r 4

The hals Brand

Although Hals’s method was distinctive and operated as a signature style, numerous non-autograph paintings were executed in a Halsian manner, including many that are likely to have been produced in his lifetime. Over time, scholars have expunged these Halsian works from the number of autograph paintings in an effort to define Hals’s oeuvre. Pictures have been considered in black-and-white terms as either by Hals or not, or in Mau van Dantzig’s terms as either “true” or “false.”1 The Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), whose task was to define the corpus of Rembrandt’s paintings, began under similar assumptions, but it has found that a significant number of the “non-Rembrandts” were most likely painted by members of his studio.2 In light of this development and the numerous recent studies on early modern workshops that have followed in the RRP’s wake, it is necessary to consider if some of the rejected Halsian pictures are products of the workshop Hals is known to have operated.3 If so, the implications for the understanding of Hals’s rough manner are substantial, as it implies that the artist could have sanctioned others in his studio to employ his personal style. This chapter, then, tackles the paradox that his signature style may have been used by painters other than Hals by closely examining the role of execution and style in the early modern artist’s workshop.4 Given the interdependent instructional and manufacturing functions of the studio, I use the terms workshop and studio interchangeably throughout the chapter to describe both the physical space where pictures were painted and the collective enterprise that collaboratively produced these items. Understanding these dual functions of the studio, it is possible to examine how Hals’s signature style could reference a corporate – or studio – identity as well as a personal one.

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Hals’s Workshop Various sources indicate that Hals maintained a well-populated workshop. Arnold Houbraken’s 1718 compendium of lives of artists provides the most extensive picture of possible studio assistants. In his life of Hals, Houbraken named two pupils – Dirck van Delen and Adriaen Brouwer.5 Additionally, Houbraken concluded his life of Hals by stating that he found the names of several of the painter’s sons – Harmen, Frans II, Jan, and Claes – in the records of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke. Though Houbraken did not explicitly link Hals’s sons to their father’s workshop, the frequency with which a son learned his trade from his father in the period implies the connection. In his treatment of the lives of other artists, Houbraken also described Hals’s brother Dirck, Adriaen van Ostade, Vincent van der Vinne, Pieter van Roestraten, and Philips Wouwerman as Hals’s students. Although Houbraken published De Groote Schouburgh fifty years after Hals’s death and frequently took literary license in his anecdotes, little evidence refutes the picture of the sizable workshop suggested by Houbraken. Indeed, other sources corroborate and amplify Houbraken’s list of students. A document in the Haarlem archives uncovered and published by Bert Sliggers states that Vincent Laurensz. van der Vinne (1628-1702) worked in Hals’s studio for nine months when Van der Vinne was eighteen years old.6 Another set of documents links the accomplished still-life painter Pieter van Roestraten (1629/30-1700) with Hals. In 1651, Van Roestraten appeared before Haarlem authorities as a character witness on behalf of Hals’s wife, Lysbeth. Here, Van Roestraten testified that he had been a part of the Hals household for five years.7 That same year, Van Roestraten entered the guild in Haarlem as a portrait painter. From these two sources, we can ascertain that Van Roestraten received extensive training from Hals. Rather than serving only a short, second apprenticeship as Van der Vinne had, Van Roestraten must have entered Hals’s shop at age sixteen and learned from Hals exclusively. Under such circumstances it is not unusual that he was a part of the household, since apprentices – especially those who entered a master’s shop at a young age – frequently shared a roof with their teacher’s family. Van Roestraten eventually married Hals’s daughter Adriaentje, and Claes Hals served as witness to the wedding. The number of Hals’s assistants and students is not limited, however, to those recorded by Houbraken. As has been noted frequently, the paintings by Judith Leyster (1609-1660) and her husband Jan Miense Molenaer (ca. 1610-1668) could not have developed without an intimate knowledge of Hals’s pictures, though seventeenth-century sources fail to link them to his workshop.8 Leyster staged exuberantly boisterous figures, often half-length, in front of unmarked backdrops as Hals did repeatedly in his genre pieces of the 1620s. In focusing on musicians or grinning drinkers, Leyster even followed Hals’s specific motifs and characters. Likewise, Hals’s work stands as the only precedent for Leyster’s unblended flesh tones, unmodulated highlights, and boldly drawn contours of umber used to define shapes.9 Such consistent imitation and emulation of his paintings and techniques from such an early point in her career, well before she entered the guild in 1633, suggest that she spent time in Hals’s studio. Molenaer’s paintings also suggest a period of tutelage with Hals. Based on the “Halsian laughter” and the strategy of thrusting a limited number of half and three-quarter-length figures against the picture plane

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as Molenaer did in his earliest paintings, Dennis Weller has reasonably argued that Molenaer learned directly from Hals.10 As with Leyster, emulating Halsian elements at such an early stage of his career, likely before earning the rank of master as discussed below, suggests that Molenaer did not simply emulate the work of a fellow painter in Haarlem but rather learned these pictorial strategies from Hals himself. The documented presence of the otherwise unknown Willem Woutersz. in Hals’s workshop raises the possibility that even more painters also studied with the master in Haarlem. In the fall of 1635, Leyster filed two formal complaints with the guild against Hals’s usurpation of one of her students, Woutersz.11 Though Hals did not register Woutersz. as an apprentice with the guild, Hals accepted Woutersz. as a student after the aspiring painter had already begun his term of training with Leyster. The guild wardens initially ordered Hals to release Woutersz. from his studio or pay a fine. As Hals took no action, Leyster resubmitted her claim and was awarded half of the tuition she lost as a result of Woutersz.’s defection. Although it is not explicitly stated in the proceedings, it appears that Hals continued Woutersz.’s instruction. As no further record of Woutersz. as a painter exists, one wonders if Hals attempted to train others who either lacked the talent to become independent masters or who changed professions after beginning their apprenticeship. Furthermore, as Hals skirted guild regulations by failing to register Woutersz. to avoid paying a fee, it is possible, if not likely, that the names of other students have failed to find their way into guild records. It is therefore impossible to estimate accurately how many students undertook training with Hals and can be counted as members of his workshop. Even with the possibility of the existence of other, yet to be identified, pupils like Woutersz., it is possible to begin to sketch a chronology of participation by correlating the probable workshop affiliates with their known entrances to the guild, common ages for undertaking apprenticeships, and the likelihood that they stayed three to five years with the master as was standard practice and as Van Roestraten testified.12 Several of these affiliates must have worked with Hals in the 1620s. Dirck Hals (1591-1657) did not join the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem until 1627 when he was thirty-six years old. Not only is this a relatively late age to set off on one’s own, but his earliest dated painting is from 1621.13 As Dirck would have been banned from selling works in his own name without being in the employ of a master, one wonders if he spent some part of the early 1620s assisting his brother until he had saved enough capital to start his own studio.14 In any event, Dirck’s affiliation with his brother can be dated before his entry into the guild. Van Delen’s (1604/5-1671) mature work – fantastical architectural paintings of elegant palace interiors – seems unrelated to Hals’s production, but both Eduard Plietzsch and Trent Blade have connected Van Delen’s paintings to those of Dirck Hals. 15 Most notably, Blade demonstrated that between 1627 and 1634, Dirck contributed staffage to several of Van Delen’s architectural settings.16 Though it is not known when Van Delen entered the guild, Van Delen’s collaborations with Dirck place him in Hals’s orbit in the 1620s as well. The connection between Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638) and Hals must date between 1623 and 1626 or 1627 when Brouwer lived in Haarlem.17 Marion Boers-Goosens has offered the intriguing possibility that rather than learning the rudiments of painting from Hals in Haarlem

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at this time, Brouwer worked for Hals as a vrije gast, or journeyman.18 Painters with a diverse range of talents and experiences often occupied a master’s workshop at a single time. The most advanced was the journeyman – a painter who had completed his training and therefore earned wages rather than, or in addition to, artistic instruction for his work. Young artists often worked in such capacity, as it allowed them to earn a wage and, in some cases, to sell paintings in their own name. Being a journeyman was a rewarding intermediate step between learning the craft and operating a shop of one’s own. Painters who relocated from one city to another often worked for a period as journeymen, since guilds dictated that artists needed to establish residency in their new city before they were able to set up shop independently. Working as a journeyman enabled a painter to fulfill this requirement while continuing to work and develop a network of potential clients.19 Unfortunately, however, the registers of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke for the years Brouwer spent in Haarlem have not survived, making it impossible to determine if Brouwer joined the guild or not. It is plausible that Brouwer spent at least a portion of his stay in Haarlem working for Hals as a journeyman with quasi-independent status, possibly even in an effort to evade the institutional impediments to selling his works. Van Ostade, Harmen Hals, Leyster, and Molenaer also must have been involved with Hals in the 1620s as well as the early 1630s. Houbraken stated that Van Ostade (1610-1685) served in Hals’s shop alongside Brouwer. As Brouwer was only in Haarlem from around 1623 until about 1626 or 1627, Van Ostade must also have worked with Hals during this time, if Houbraken’s notoriously fictionalized account is to be trusted.20 Bernard Schnackenburg has suggested that Van Ostade entered the guild in Haarlem in 1634, a year after his earliest dated painting.21 Thus, it is possible that Van Ostade was either completing his training or working as a journeyman, possibly for Hals, until that time. While little is known of the life of Harmen Hals (1611-1669), Hals’s eldest son from his first marriage, one can surmise that Harmen most likely served as an apprentice to his father after 1620 based on the common ages of students and trainees in the period.22 As Harmen’s name does not appear in the records of the Haarlem guild until 1702, when a large-scale attempt was made to reconstruct the documents that had been lost, the duration of this instruction remains unknown. By 1633, Leyster had become the first female member of the Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem. As Frima Fox Hofrichter has argued, Leyster must have been a part of Hals’s studio from 1629 to 1633 between her possible time in Vreeland and her entry into the guild. Copies after paintings by Hals from the mid-1620s also suggest an earlier working relation, probably as early as around 1626. Weller has argued that Molenaer was also probably in Hals’s studio in the mid or late 1620s, before entering the guild in 1634.23 As Weller demonstrated, several of his figures from this period have much in common with Hals’s mirthful youths in Schwerin (figs. 88 and 89).24 These images also demonstrate a limited palette and penchant for unblended tones derived from Halsian models.25 If Philips Wouwerman (1619-1688) studied with Hals, it was in the mid-1630s. As the son of the painter Paulus Joostens Wouwerman, Philips most likely received his earliest training from his father. By about 1638, Wouwerman was active in Hamburg, working with the history painter Evert Decker (d. 1647). Not long after, Wouwerman returned to his native Haarlem where he

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joined the guild in 1640. Arguing that Wouwerman’s known oeuvre of nearly one thousand paintings shows no sign of influence of Hals, Frits Duparc has categorically rejected De Bie’s and Houbraken’s claims of a period of study with the master Haarlem painter.26 Gregory Martin, on the other hand, noted that some of Wouwerman’s cabinet-sized stable scenes and horsepopulated landscapes (fig. 95) can be linked to the backdrops of paintings like Hals’s Fisher Boy in Antwerp (fig. 86).27 More so, several unidentified genre scenes and tronies attributed to Wouwerman appear in Dutch inventories as early as 1647.28 The kintstronetje (small head of a child), boere kermis (farmer’s festival), and vrolijk geselschap (merry company) described in these documents are consistent with subjects produced by Hals and other artists associated with his workshop.29 Therefore, it is worth considering the possibility that Wouwerman had studied with Hals before departing for Hamburg. Hals’s sons Frans II (1618-1669), Jan (ca. 1620, active 1635-1654), Reynier (1627-1672), and Claes (1628-1686) all probably served their father in turn, beginning in the late 1630s. Of Hals’s seven sons who lived to maturity, only Jacobus and Pieter did not become painters.30 As BoersGoosens has noted, it was not unusual for so many of his sons to follow in Hals’s professional footsteps, as it was common practice for sons to learn their craft from their father.31 Unfortunately, as with their brother Harmen, almost no information exists about their lives or careers. Based on their ages and, in the case of Jan, formal correspondences between his identified paintings

Fig. 95. Philips Wouwerman, The Horse Fair, c. 1665. Oil on panel, 66 x 88.9 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.

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and those of his father, it is reasonable to venture that Frans II and Jan began their independent careers in the 1640s.32 Consequently, both must have trained for their chosen profession during the latter 1630s. Nine years younger than Frans II, Reynier probably studied painting in the second half of the 1640s. As a youth, Reynier entered the Dutch East India Company, returning to Haarlem from the East Indies in 1645. By 1654 he had moved to Amsterdam. Claes entered the guild in Haarlem in 1655 at the age of twenty-seven. He most certainly remained in his father’s workshop in the early 1650s, but given his age when entering the guild he may have already been active there in the late 1640s. After that, only Van der Vinne and Van Roestraten’s apprenticeships can be dated to the 1640s and after. From the end of Van Roestraten’s professed tenure in 1651 until Hals’s death in 1666, no known artist can be affiliated with Hals. Aside from this final stage of his career, Hals’s studio appears to have had a fairly consistent revolving door of assistants. While reasons for the decreased studio activity are unknown, the large number of assistants in the 1620s may be linked to Hals’s prolific production of genre pictures at that time. Perhaps as a result of experience with Hals’s representations of musicians and carousers, the majority of the artists considered to be his pupils went on to pursue careers as genre painters. Brouwer, Dirck, Harmen, Claes, Van Ostade, Leyster, and Molenaer all specialized in genre pictures, even if their specific approach to painting differed from that of Hals. Only Jan, Van der Vinne, and Van Roestraten painted portraits, and the latter two only did so early in their careers before turning to still life painting. Not surprisingly, the specializations of Hals’s pupils generally follow Hals’s production at the time of their apprenticeship: those connected to Hals in the 1620s and 30s when he was painting genre imagery tended to become genre painters, while those who entered his service when he focused on portraiture exclusively followed that path, if only temporarily. As Hals also painted portraits in the 1620s and 1630s, it may be reasonable to assume that his assistants at that time were not involved in this aspect of the business, but rather only facilitated the manufacture of the genre paintings. As generating a large volume of genre pictures for open market sales outlets was a significant part of Hals’s business strategy, directing his assistants towards this avenue would have been economically advantageous. When Hals limited the range of his merchandise to portraits and transferred his rough manner of genre painting to these commissioned works, he must have also needed to change the distribution of labor within his studio. As the number of portrait commissions increased in the 1630s and 1640s following the economic recovery in Haarlem, he may have required additional assistance with completing these orders. Regardless of the genre in which Hals’s apprentices eventually specialized, each of their styles varied from that of their teacher when they became masters in their own right. With the exception of Jan, whose portraits closely follow those of his father, every other painter utilized a manner of handling in their independent works that was completely different from the one they must have learned from Hals. Some, such as Van Delen and Wouwerman, bear no resemblance to Hals whatsoever. Others, like Brouwer and Van Ostade, worked roughly, but their format, spatial constructions, touch, and highlighting differ from Hals to such a degree that their works

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could not be mistaken for those of their teacher. These stylistic differentiations suggest a conscious decision to deviate from Hals’s manner of painting, at least when working outside his workshop. One finds similar diversification among Rembrandt’s pupils after they left the master’s studio. Each developed personalized styles that in format, subject, and handling of paint differed significantly from that which they must have learned from Rembrandt.33 Only Rembrandt’s last student Arent de Gelder (1645-1727) continued to work in a Rembrandtesque mode as an independent master.34 From the cases of Hals and Rembrandt it appears that it was standard practice in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century for painters to differentiate their manner from those of their teachers and his workshop and to develop their own individual styles.

The Activities and Products of the Workshop Though a review of available sources reveals that Hals operated a sizable studio throughout much of his career, these same sources provide no insight into what any of the assistants painted when they were members of Hals’s workshop. Instead, to understand the activities and products of his studio, it is necessary to compare Hals’s autograph pictures and those non-autograph works closest in spirit and execution to his personal style with what is known generally about early modern artistic production in the studio. In early modernity, artists’ workshops were oriented dually towards education and commerce. Under a guild-regulated master-apprentice system, aspiring painters learned the trade not through academic discourse but by observing and actively participating in a master painter’s studio. Through a series of increasingly difficult responsibilities as well as through practice assignments such as drawing studio props, students gradually became versed in all aspects of pictorial production while helping the master meet demand for his pictures.35 At the beginning of their training, apprentices provided assistance by performing the most rudimentary functions such as grinding pigments, preparing supports, and cleaning the work space.36 The master enlisted older, experienced students to undertake more advanced tasks that ran the gamut from laying on the ground or underlayers to completing passages in the uppermost layers to copying entire works depending on the organization of the studio and the type of picture in which the master specialized. Early-modern Italian and Flemish painters, especially those who received large-scale commissions, frequently divided the labor in the studio so that assistants worked portions of the picture alongside the master’s contributions. These master painters generally devised the design for a project and then delegated elements of the execution of it to various apprentices. In some cases, assistants began to build up the surface by applying stucco to walls that were to be frescoed or by applying colored grounds to prepared panels. In others, apprentices painted background elements to complement the figural arrangements created by the master. Van Dyck, for example, often painted the faces of sitters from life, but then had assistants complete the costumes and hands according to schemata he had traced in chalk.37 Artists from Raphael to Rubens developed such collaborative mechanisms to manage an extensive number of simultaneous commissions and large-scale individual projects.

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Unlike Italian and Flemish workshop products, Hals’s paintings show no evidence of collaboration nor would his particular means of production have benefited from this type of assistance. Hals largely undertook modestly sized projects, but even in the largest of his creations – the civic guard group portraits – only the master’s hand is present. Neither firsthand observation nor technical examination reveals the appearance of multiple hands at work in paintings by Hals.38 His method of developing his paintings, particularly those in his rough manner, circumvented the need for direct collaboration. With rare exception, Hals set his figures against generic backdrops that had no extraneous landscape or still-life elements for a specialist to execute. Hals also worked relatively swiftly, so passing off sections to others would not have done much to speed production. Furthermore, the lack of drawings by Hals and his preference not to set shapes and contours until the end of his projects suggest that he did not possess predetermined designs that could be delivered to assistants. More so, conceiving of such a concrete model to distribute to another painter would have compromised his fluid creative process. Representing the animated, distinctive moment through the pictorial language of the unfinished also meant that that there were no details left for assistants to finalize. Rather than leaving to an assistant the garments or other passages that could be completed without the sitter before him, as Van Dyck did at times, Hals left his images at the point where only he could be trusted with their actualization. In these ways, Hals’s practice differed significantly from the collaborative efforts of Italian and Flemish painters, a fact that has led Slive to question whether Hals can be considered to have operated a workshop.39 The northern European painting and sculpture studios that manufactured copies, variations, and deviations of a master’s original works provide an alternative model, however, for understanding the orientation of Hals’s workshop. In recent years, the widespread manufacture of copies and variants, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has received considerable attention. In economic terms, this practice has come to be understood as the means to expand production and meet increasing demand.40 Lynn Jacobs has described rampant repetition among early Netherlandish carved altarpieces.41 She posited that it was common practice for sculptors to reuse compositions, entirely and in parts, to streamline production. For comparison, she related this practice to the protoindustrial methods employed in the manufacture of Limoges enamels, Tournai fonts, Parisian ivories, and Gothic architecture across Europe. In painting, Jean Wilson studied how several painters in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bruges, particularly Gerard David (ca. 1460-1523), Adriaen Isenbrant (early 16th century-ca. 1551), and Ambrosius Benson (late 15th century-ca. 1550), increasingly replicated their own creations.42 She interpreted this practice as a response to a rising and changing demand for painted pictures, particularly on the burgeoning open market. Patterns and pouncing offered a production method that could be used to repeat successful and popular figures and figural arrangements from commissioned pictures in order to be sold at the open-air mall in Bruges. Importantly, Wilson suggested that painters could thus satisfy larger numbers of people, and also use studio repetition to reach a greater variety of consumers. Like Wilson, but in more nuanced fashion, Arianne Faber Kolb has explored how Joachim Patinir (ca. 1480-ca. 1524) organized his studio to produce both replicas and copy-variants to meet multiple market

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Fig. 96. Workshop of Frans Hals, Lute Player, c. 1625?. Oil on canvas, 67.9 x 58.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

demands.43 Replicas, or precise copies, satisfied the consumers’ desires for known masterpieces. Copy-variants, or items that selectively imitated motifs but reconfigured them, satisfied the demand for the genre practiced by the master more generally. In his study of Dutch merry company painters, Elmer Kolfin has argued that artists continued to re-use stock elements to speed production for works sold on the open market well into the seventeenth century.44 As Kolfin has suggested, it was economically beneficial for painters such as Dirck Hals to combine compositional elements from various pictures into new arrangements because this practice produced what consumers perceived to be new, unique creations while not taxing artists to invent wholly new scenes.45 In this way, copy-variants operated as standard procedure for early-modern northern artists to increase or supplement their incomes.

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Fig. 97. Frans Hals, Peeckelhaering, c. 1628-1630. Oil on canvas, 75 x 61.5 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel.

References to copies after Hals appear as early as 1631.46 The register of pictures designated for auction that Hendrick Willemsz. den Abt compiled on November 17 of that same year lists: “1 piece by Frans Hals a trony, a peekelharing by Frans Hals, 2 roundels by Frans Hals, various copies after Frans Hals.”47 Given the early date of this notation and the fact that it had long been standard procedure for early-modern studios to produce copies, it is reasonable to assume that the pictures described by Den Abt were executed by Hals’s assistants. Unfortunately, it is impossible to identify what pictures Den Abt referred to as copies or what precisely he meant by the word copy. Few seventeenth-century works known to be exact copies of Hals’s works can be found amongst the legion of Halsian derivatives in existence today. In the Rijksmuseum, one finds a precise reproduction of Hals’s Lute Player from about 1625 now in the Louvre (figs. 76 and 96).

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Fig. 98. Frans Hals, So-called Mulatto, c. 1628-1630. Oil on canvas, 72 x 57.5 cm. Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

The Rijksmuseum picture, which has dimensions almost identical to those of the work in Paris, repeats the composition, lighting, and the loose handling of the original.48 Other genre pictures by Hals, like the Laughing Boy in the Mauritshuis, were the subject of multiple copies, some of which may be linked to Hals’s workshop. As for portraits, the picture of Johannes Hoornbeek that mimics the autograph version in Brussels and two versions of Willem van Heythuysen reclining in a chair (figs. 74 and 110) are exceptions.49 Overall, remarkably few of Hals’s pictures seem to have been copied, in the strictest sense of the word. Far more prevalent than exact replicas are variations – pictures that are related to a preexisting model, but do not strictly follow it. Hals’s Peeckelhaering (fig. 97) and So-called Mulatto (fig. 98), both signed, introduce the practice. In these works by the master’s own hand, the same dark-complexioned figure clad in a festive red and yellow jerkin and cap appears. The figure’s

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pose and gesture, however, differ significantly in the two pictures. In Peeckelhaering, his right shoulder turns towards the viewer, his head twists to the right to present the face frontally, and his left hand grasps an open tankard. In So-called Mulatto, the image is nearly mirrored except for the character’s more central placement on the canvas, straightened left arm, and the right hand’s casual pointing gesture. Like Peeckelhaering and So-called Mulatto, the autograph portrayal of Malle Babbe in Berlin (fig. 26) and the rendition of the so-called “witch of Haarlem” in New York (fig. 99) by an assistant but bearing Hals’s monogram, show the same model from different perspectives.50 Though the New York picture reverses the composition of that in Berlin, the two are not mirror

Fig. 99. Workshop of Frans Hals, Malle Babbe. Oil on canvas, 74.9 x 61 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, 1871. Acc.n.: 71.76 © 2011. The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence.

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images. Not only does the New York painting show Malle Babbe’s hands folded in front of her rather than raising her tankard, the turn of the head also differs. Whereas Hals cast his figure’s gaze down and to her left, the New York painter directed her attention more horizontally so that her head appears more level. The latter picture also displays a much more reserved grin in contrast to Hals’s full-mouthed cackle.51 Similarly, in the various renditions of Hals’s invention The Rommel Pot Player from around 1622-25, minor alterations of individual children occur. In the Fort Worth painting (fig. 100) that Slive identifies as the original version, the winking boy at the right of the scene sports a large, floppy red cap, while the corresponding youth in the Chicago picture (fig. 101) that has been

Fig. 100. (Workshop of?) Frans Hals, The Rommel Pot Player, c. 1622-1625. Oil on canvas, 106 x 80.3 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

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attributed to Leyster wears a rounded fur hat.52 Meanwhile, the child in the lower left-hand corner of the Chicago version has curly hair, while the locks of his counterpart in the Fort Worth rendering are straight. Still other versions of the scene add a sixth child just to the left of the entertainer.53 The re-workings of the composition to include additional figures suggest that the reproductive artists consciously deviated from Hals’s original and may have even restaged the scene with alternate models. Even more independence can be seen in the series of fisher children painted in the early 1630s. Rather than slight variations from a single model as was seen in The Rommel Pot Player pictures, the several half-length representations of youths engaged in the local fishing industry set

Fig. 101. Workshop of Frans Hals, The Rommel-Pot Player, c. 1625?. Oil on panel, 39.1 x 30.5 cm. Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection, 1974.78, The Art Institute of Chicago.

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against dunes and open-air backgrounds do not share a common prototype. Each picture focuses on a different child in a different pose. Even though each work displays rough, broad strokes that are clearly derived from knowledge of Hals’s genre pictures of around 1630, even the most cursory glance reveals significant differences in quality between individual paintings, signaling the work of multiple painters. While Numas Trivas and Claus Grimm categorically rejected every Halsian fisher child, Slive noted that not all the fisher children can be by the same hand.54 Slive rightfully retained the boys in Antwerp (fig. 86) and Dublin (fig. 102), and the young girl in a private collection (fig. 103) as autograph works by Hals. Slive also correctly observed that multiple hands can be discerned even among the non-autograph works.55 For example, the same artist seems to have used tightly controlled brushstrokes to paint the girls in Cincinnati (fig. 104) and in Cologne (figs. 105 and 106).56 On the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum, the boy in Allentown (fig. 107) displays overly rough, even clumsy, brushwork that in its attempts to activate fails to model forms or demarcate contours. Thus, at least two artists produced works closely related to the fisher children by Hals’s own hand. Despite being painted by different artists, several of the fisher children, including some not executed by Hals, can be linked to Hals’s workshop. Though signatures can be notoriously misleading, the Cincinnati girl bears Hals’s monogram as does the boy in Allentown, although the latter may be a later addition.57 More securely, the same girl in Cincinnati appears alongside

Fig. 102. Frans Hals, Fisher Boy, c. 1630-1632. Oil on canvas, 72 x 58 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Fig. 103. Frans Hals, Fisher Girl, c. 1630-1632. Oil on canvas, 80.6 x 66.7 cm. Private Collection, New York.

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Fig. 104. Workshop of Frans Hals, Fisher Girl, c. 1630-1632?. Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 63 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum, Gift of Mary Hanna.

Fig. 105. Workshop of Frans Hals, Fisher Girl, c. 1630-1632?. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 56 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Fondation Corboud. Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c011279.

Fig. 106. Workshop of Frans Hals, Fisher Girl (detail), c. 1630-1632?. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 56 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Fondation Corboud. Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c011279.

Fig. 107. Workshop of Frans Hals, Fisher Boy, c. 1630-1632?. Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 56.5 cm. Allentown Art Museum, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961 (1961.36 kg).

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the Dublin boy and the girl in New York in Molenaer’s Beach Scene with Fisher Folk (fig. 108).58 It seems most likely that it was through Hals’s studio that Molenaer gained enough familiarity with these characters to quote them exactly as a group in his own image. Slive saw the appearance of these figures together as evidence that Hals himself had painted a picture of each character and that the original of the Cincinnati model has been lost. No such “original” is known, however, nor is it certain that one ever existed. Instead, as Molenaer was a pupil of Hals, it is possible that Molenaer’s grouping indicates that all three genre pictures were part of Hals’s studio production, regardless of who painted them. Based on the longstanding tradition of replication within northern workshops, it seems reasonable to conclude that the variants of Hals’s genre pictures by another artist’s hand could have been produced in the master’s workshop as a means to increase production and meet increased demand, as well as a way of teaching. In the case of Hals, producing replicas or exact copies would have dampened the sense of spontaneity and resulted in less lively representations. Copy-variants, to use Kolb’s term, on the other hand, allowed the production of studio pieces that more closely replicated the qualities for which his paintings were valued. Similarly, as Kolfin

Fig. 108. Jan Miense Molenaer, Beach Scene with Fisher Folk, c. 1630-1632?. Private Collection.

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has suggested for Hals’s brother, a copy-variant offered buyers a unique work of art, even if, unlike his brother, Hals employed another artist to imitate his inventions. Assigning such projects to his assistants would have provided valuable opportunities for aspiring artists to practice all stages of the painting process. Thus, assigning derivatives of his own creations that imitated Hals’s subjects and style would have helped Hals further the educational and business components of the workshop simultaneously.

Market Identity and the House Brand Categorizing non-autograph Halsian paintings as workshop products implies that Hals willingly extended his signature manner to those in his employ. In terms of manner and execution, both the variants and the more independent fisher children display a clear attempt to imitate the master’s signature style regardless of each artist’s ability or inability to craft virtuoso strokes.59 Copying and varying Hals’s inventions meant replicating not only the subject and composition, but also the handling of the original. More so, the fisher children show that Hals’s manner was imitated in works that were based on a type of image rather than a specific picture. This process of imitation in the non-autograph pictures suggests that Hals directed his assistants to work in his manner. Furthermore, while numerous pupils developed independent styles once they left the shop, these painters likely authored pictures in their master’s manner only when they were in his employ. This raises the possibility that Hals’s version of the rough manner was performed exclusively in Hals’s workshop. The numerous non-autograph Rembrandtesque paintings that bear the master’s signature illuminate how Hals’s signature manner may have operated within the context of his workshop and the paintings produced there. While Rembrandt may have collaborated with assistants at least occasionally, the majority of pictures issued from his workshop are either entirely by Rembrandt or solely by his assistants.60 Despite this distinction in authorship, the RRP identified several pictures as non-autograph despite the presence of an authentic Rembrandt signature. Its conclusion was that by as early as 1634, Rembrandt sold the works of his assistants and pupils for his own profit.61 In his essay on Rembrandt’s workshop for the RRP, Van de Wetering advanced the team’s interpretation by arguing that in the early-modern period, assistants were required to work only in the master’s manner.62 The primary source for Van de Wetering’s assertion is a Utrecht guild regulation from 1644 that expressly forbade painters to practice a style other than that of their master.63 Van de Wetering also cited a 1641 Utrecht guild prescription that stated: “Those who are painting as admitted Masters shall not be allowed to keep or employ any outside or resident persons, as disciples or painting for them and yet not being of their [i.e. masters’] manner and signing with their own name.”64 From these documents, Van de Wetering concluded that it was accepted practice not only for assistants to mimic their master’s methods, but also that these studio products not only could, but were expected to bear the master’s name when sold.65 All pictures executed in a studio could bear the master’s name because the workshop constituted an enterprise that was an extension of the proprietor. In her examination of four-

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teenth- and fifteenth-century painting commission contracts, Michelle O’Malley found patrons were aware of the realties of production.66 Contracts began to stipulate that the master was to be personally involved and to execute specifically identified passages with his own hand, sua mano, relaying an implicit recognition of the role of assistants. Liesbeth Helmus has identified similar contractual clauses in the northern Netherlands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well.67 During Hals’s own lifetime, Jacob Jordaens’s 1648 contract for thirty-five ceiling paintings for the Swedish court illuminates the pervasiveness of the practice. The contract delineates how Jordaens would provide pictures “partly by himself and partly by others, he [ Jordaens] is obliged to paint over to such an extent, that it will be considered Jordaens’s own work and therefore be entitled to bear his name and signature.”68 Clients understood that a master did not solely manufacture a picture, but because he oversaw production, the entire project was considered his. More so, master artists, like other craftsmen, operated their workshops like small businesses where the securing of studio space, acquisition of supplies, and registration with the local guild were all carried out in the master’s name. In short, the entire enterprise, even if manned by numerous individuals, was not only directed by the master, it was also synonymous with his name. As the workshop was an extension of the master, compliance with his personal style by all those involved with a project or with the studio was demanded and expected. Not surprisingly, clients desired objects that displayed a uniformity of execution even if multiple hands were involved. This in turn led to the creation of what Anabel Thomas termed a “house style.”69 As she argued, assistants were not just assigned to paint, but to paint in such a way that their work looked similar to that of each other and the head of the studio. As a result, there existed not only a stylistic coherence internally within a single picture but also externally amongst all paintings created by the workshop. After all, collaboration was not restricted to work on the same picture but could also involve working on independent paintings within the scheme of a large decorative project, such as executing different panels of a ceiling decoration as Van Dyck did as part of Rubens’s commission for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp.70 Another example of stylistic coherence can be found in the Francken workshop. Natasja Peeters has explored how multiple generations of the Francken family working in the same studio practiced the “Francken style” as a shared aesthetic in Antwerp in the first quarter of the seventeenth century that has made differentiating hands nigh impossible.71 Though most examples of this practice come from large workshops outside the Dutch Republic, the activities of Rembrandt’s studio suggest that a similar process may well have been at play in the northern Netherlands as well. Svetlana Alpers and Ann Jensen Adams have explored how Rembrandt’s signature and distinctive manner marked paintings by assistants as extensions of the master’s production. Terming him a “pictor economicus,” Alpers described Rembrandt as an artist obsessed with achieving financial gain on the open market and one whose “enterprise is not reducible to his autographic oeuvre.”72 As Alpers saw it, Rembrandt’s enterprise centered on the commodification of himself – he did not sell pictures by Rembrandt; rather he promoted the concept of Rembrandt as artistic genius embodied in his painting. As Alpers stated: “His merging of invention with execution, his distinctive handling of the paint (or of the etched line), his invention and use of his signature

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presented his works and those of his studio as an extension of himself.”73 Like frequent selfportrayals and continuous re-workings and reprinting of etchings, pictures executed in his manner by members of his studio that bore his signature replicated and multiplied the Rembrandt identity for greater public consumption. Similarly, Adams interpreted the appearance of Rembrandt’s signature on pictures that the artist did not paint himself not as the sign of authorship in the modern sense, but as a guarantor of quality.74 Through a comparison to makers’ marks by goldsmiths and other craftsmen, Adams argued that Rembrandt’s signatures authenticated and validated the work of his assistants for the market. Evolving from the medieval economic system of guild regulations, makers’ marks assured consumers of the quality of the product bearing the mark while also identifying the works of those masters allowed by local guilds to sell their wares in specific markets. Adams contended that, as painters increasingly sold their pictures on the open market in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they turned to the maker’s mark with greater frequency as the means to identify their property and to associate their names with their products. Adams suggested that applying signatures to the works of assistants circulated the master’s artistic identity defined by his particular way of working by making a larger number of pictures in the master’s manner available to consumers. In the process, she proposed that artistic identity was not confined solely to autograph works. For Adams, the signature could act as the “logo of a studio style” – the mark of a distinctive pictorial approach developed by the master and practiced under his supervision.75 Alpers and Adams have thus advocated the position that replication of style could transfer artistic identity to other members of a painter’s workshop. Put differently, especially in the context of the market, style could signal a workshop or corporate authorship, subsumed under the name of a leading artist, rather than a personal one. The construction that Alpers and Adams put forth might resolve the paradox that Hals’s rough manner could operate as a signature for his personal artistic and market identity and simultaneously be transferred to members of his studio. Understanding Hals’s enterprise as a business, it is possible that all products issued from his workshop, if generally uniform in style and subject, could have been considered to be Hals’s paintings, regardless of who manufactured them.76 While Hals’s characteristic unblended brushwork and lively half-length figures signaled the painter’s authorship, assistants’ emulations of these same features also could have recalled the name Hals in consumers’ minds in the same way that studio copies of an artist’s composition were aligned with the inventor of the image. Since the workshop was widely perceived to be an extension of the master in early modernity, Hals’s signature style could have operated as both a desired product and as the means of signaling that pictures were crafted in Hals’s studio. Rough, exposed brushstrokes in a Halsian fashion could signal Hals’s corporate authorship and the Hals brand, to borrow a term from contemporary marketing strategies, even if not actually made by the master himself. In this way, a signature style might have functioned as a logo of the Hals brand, with or without a signature, due to the recognizability of Hals’s manner as a distinctive product on the local market.

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Though pictorial style could indicate corporate rather than personal identity, this did not mean that all consumers were unable to distinguish between pictures executed by Hals and those painted by others under his supervision. To believe otherwise would ignore the issue of quality and virtuosity that was at the heart of Hals’s business strategy.77 Indeed, in 1641 Franciscus Junius wrote that connoisseurs “are wont to prove their knowledge of art by immediately being able to distinguish originals from copies. The works that excellent masters themselves have made after life, are here referred to as original pieces.”78 Jeffrey Muller has shown that several seventeenthcentury sources, like Junius, identified copies as inferior to originals because they were of an inherently lower quality.79 For example, quoting the ancient author Dionysus of Halicarnus, Franciscus Junius wrote in 1638: Originals have in themselves a naturall grace and vigor, … but Copies, though they attaine to the height of imitation, have always something, which being studied, doth not proceed out of nature: and Rhetoricians doe not only discerne Rhetoricians by this precept, but painters doe also by this rule distinguish Apelles his works from their works that imitate him.80

In 1678, Samuel van Hoogstraten argued similarly that kopyen always lacked the harmony and grace of the origineelen.81 While these statements and Muller’s analysis of them focus on the concept of originality in relation to the copy and not workshop variation, the reasons for distinguishing one from the other derive from qualitative judgments. In 1604, in relation to technique, Van Mander considered Titian’s pictures to be better than those of his followers who also painted roughly.82 As discussed in chapter two, the choice to employ bold brushstrokes and exposed grounds made errors more readily apparent, as there was no opportunity to correct missteps by blending in an errant mark. This construction holds for Hals as well. Pictures painted by his assistants display attempts to replicate the master’s brilliant feats with the brush, but these efforts routinely pale in comparison. Comparing the loose right sleeves of the autograph fisher boy in Antwerp (fig. 86) with the workshop version in Allentown (fig. 107), for example, one sees the unblended strokes that sharply juxtapose contrasting tones as is characteristic of Hals’s work. These marks have been drawn straighter, however, so that the sleeve fails to crackle with the intensity of the master’s execution. Likewise, the left hand in the Allentown picture is rendered with an economy of means as per Hals’s fashion, but here it falls flat as a muddled pool of color rather than standing as a demonstration of restraint. In short, Hals’s technique was more accomplished and virtuoso than that of his assistants, making his pictures superior in the eyes of his audience. Indeed, many clients must have recognized the clearly discernible differences and judged the master’s work superior.83 Furthermore, as attribution increasingly determined value as addressed in the previous chapter, many of Hals’s clients who were knowledgeable art collectors would have been able to practice connoisseurship, distinguish Hals’s hand from those of his assistants, and judge the master’s work to be of a higher quality.

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The distinction between autograph works and workshop pieces was translated into monetary value. Neil de Marchi and Hans van Miegroet have suggested that workshop copies routinely attracted but half of the prices of original paintings.84 Workshop paintings were widely considered to be of lesser value so that lower quality garnered lower prices. As Van de Wetering has shown, in 1613 the Guild of St. Luke in Amsterdam issued condemnations of the sale of foreign artists at the local markets because they feared that consumers had been duped into purchasing copies and workshop pieces for the price of autograph works.85 How concerned the guild really was with protecting local clients is a fair question, but the proclamations clearly communicate a perceived discrepancy in value. The lack of recorded prices for paintings by Hals and those by his workshop precludes conducting a comparison, but one can imagine that the prices would reflect the discernible differences in quality between the works of master and pupil in much the same fashion.86 Furthermore, artists themselves assigned values for pictures issued from their studio based upon the level of their direct involvement, as Rubens’s letter to Sir Dudley Carleton demonstrates. Here, as part of his negotiations to acquire Carleton’s collection of antiquities, Rubens distinguished the works he wished to exchange as paintings “by my hand,” “entirely by my hand,” “entirely retouched by my hand,” and “done by my pupils, from originals by my hand… retouched by my hand throughout.”87 Through these designations and accompanying differentiations in prices, the list conveyed a clear hierarchy of value that Rubens communicated to his trading partner.88 Jolanda de Bruijn has suggested that Gerrit van Honthorst communicated related differences in personal involvement, possibly to differentiate value, to clients by varying his signature.89 According to De Bruijn, Honthorst employed one signature to signal sole execution and another to relay that it was the product of collaboration with one or more studio assistants. In contrast to the suggestions by Van de Wetering that Rembrandt attempted to defraud clients by passing off the works of assistants as his own, it is therefore possible that a master selling a workshop piece that bore his name or his signature style did not necessarily price the picture at the same level as those entirely by his own hand.90 It is possible, of course, that some naemkoopers mistakenly purchased workshop pictures as autograph works by Hals’s own hand and overpaid accordingly.91 Varying studio production to include both autograph and non-autograph paintings in Hals’s manner could have created price-based product variation to reach different segments of the market.92 Hals’s style appealed for its ability to evoke liveliness and aesthetic affinities with highly valued models of contemporary Flemish painting. These features could all be conveyed by members of his studio when emulating that manner. Yet the master’s own creations displayed a greater degree of skill and accomplishment in the self-conscious displays of virtuosity. This display, the overall higher level of quality, and the prestige of the master’s direct involvement would have added additional layers of value and made the autograph painting more expensive. Conversely, lower-quality workshop versions by assistants would have been cheaper. In this way, extending his signature style to other painters under his supervision allowed the copy-variants as well as more independent works like the fisher children to reach consumers who could not afford the high prices of a painting entirely by Hals. This extension could create different versions of

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the same product, just as a car manufacturer produces related but independent models that cater to different audiences with varying amounts of disposable income. Diversifying production by tendering both autograph paintings and these workshop pieces offered several economic advantages. In addition to generating income directly, these works also circulated the abilities and aesthetic of Hals and his workshop. Van Hoogstraten included a discussion of copies in a chapter of his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst titled “How to Make One’s Art Public.”93 In addition to advising artists to have reproductive prints made after their pictures, he also advocated that copies, presumably painted, could be used to market one’s abilities and increase name recognition amongst potential clients. According to Van Hoog-

Fig. 109. Frans Hals, Willem van Heythuysen, 1625. Oil on canvas, 204.5 x 134.5 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, München.

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straten, just as artists learned by studying copies of great painters, liefhebbers also gained familiarity with painters through reproductions.94 The implication is that one’s career and reputation would benefit from this increased awareness.95 Studio pictures may also have driven up prices for autograph paintings. A direct comparison between Hals’s and Halsian execution makes the master’s virtuosity and superiority that much more apparent and, consequently, more valuable. Thus, despite the seeming paradox of sanctioned imitations of Hals’s signature style that called to mind the artist’s corporate identity, extending his manner to assistants is likely not to have been a detriment to his emphasis on the self-referential, virtuoso touch, but instead constituted yet another way to navigate the market for financial gain and enhanced reputation. While it is likely that Hals extended his signature style to members of his workshop to create copy-variants and independent genre pictures for the reasons described above, it is not clear that comparable arguments can be made for Hals’s portrait practice. First of all, it is more difficult to place the Halsian portraits within Hals’s studio. As with Hals’s other works, few pictures can be considered copies. Two such cases have come to light in recent years. We can now identify multiple versions of portrayals of Willem van Heythusen and Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan. Scholars had long recognized Van Heythuysen as the sitter in Hals’s grand, full-length portrait in Munich from about 1625 (fig. 109) and a considerably later small-scale picture in Brussels of a man precariously leaning back in his chair (fig. 110). In 2004, a second version of the Brussels painting whose whereabouts had been unknown since it left the Rothschild collection in the early 1960s appeared on the art market (fig. 74).96 Cleaning and scientific examination of the picture reversed the dominant opinion that the Rothschild version was a later copy by another artist.97 In fact, dendrochronology studies of the two paintings show that the Rothschild painting dates to the mid-1630s while that in Brussels could not have been painted before 1650. The tighter handling of the Rothschild painting corroborates this new chronology as well. More importantly, in its newly restored state, the Rothschild and Brussels portraits both stand as autograph paintings, complete with authentic Hals monograms. Aside from some discrepancy in the looseness of execution, the two paintings are nearly identical in size, format, and composition.98 As the Brussels picture had long hung in the regents’ room of the hofje in Haarlem that Van Heythuysen had created in his 1653 will, it appears that the later version was a commissioned copy meant to commemorate the institution’s founder.99 Though not a direct copy, a variant of the portrait of Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan in Sarasota (fig. 25) on loan to the Frans Hals Museum can also be deemed an autograph painting by Hals (fig. 111). As with the Rothschild Van Heythuysen portrait, cleaning and scientific examination conducted when the painting was with the David Koetser Gallery in 2005 have reversed opinions about the picture. The awkward hand that Slive had found troubling was deemed a later addition.100 Elsewhere, varnish removal revealed Hals’s characteristically fluid touches that had been hidden beneath layers of grime. It is also now possible to see clearly the artist’s distinctive means of blocking in forms and building layered fleshtones in the face. Furthermore, dendrochronology dates the panel to 1629. Biesboer has convincingly linked this dating to the different garments

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Fig. 110. Frans Hals, Willem van Heythuysen, after 1650. Oil on panel, 46.9 x 37.5. Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels.

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Fig. 111. Frans Hals, Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan, 1629-1630. Oil on panel, 68 x 56.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem – long term loan from a private collection.

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Olycan wears in the Haarlem and Sarasota portraits.101 Olycan, who became burgomaster of Haarlem in 1630, wears the burgomaster’s fur-trimmed cloak only in the Sarasota version, as he had not yet received the honor at the time of the painting of the Haarlem picture. The Haarlem version has likely been cut down, but other differences in the placement of hands, hairstyle, and, perhaps, age of the sitter’s face indicate that Hals did not copy the earlier painting.102 Rather, they are two distinct portraits of the same individual painted less than a decade apart. Making copies and closely related variants of portraits in the workshop was common practice for numerous early modern portraitists like Van Dyck and Velázquez, but it was mostly limited to courtly patrons. The Van Heythuysen and Olycan reiterations are rarities in Hals’s oeuvre.103 As Biesboer has noted, Hals produced at least eighteen other portraits of members of the extended Olycan clan, but each of these stands as an independent image for the sitter’s personal use and enjoyment.104 Similarly, the likely commemorative function of the Van Heythuysen portrait in Brussels is an anomaly. Hals’s elite but bourgeois clients did not need their portraits to serve as political capital in the same way that princes and rulers did. The Portrait of Paulus Bor now in Aachen (fig. 112) raises the possibility that Hals could have assigned a copy to an assistant. The painting clearly relates to Adriaen Matham’s engraved portrait of the Utrecht notary dated 1634 and inscribed “F. Hals pinxit.”105 The treatment of the eyes as static almond shapes, the lack of locking contour lines, and frequent stippling, all deny an attribution to Hals.106 Rather, as Slive has suggested, it is a copy of a lost painting by Hals.107 The familiarity with Hals’s mode evidenced by the buildup of grayish fleshtones capped by ruddy cheeks, the use of umber in the final layers to mark facial shadows, and the general attempt at abbreviated handling, among other features, place the painting fairly close to the master.108 Moreover, the interlocked signature closely resembles that of Hals himself. The presence of a seemingly genuine signature on a painted copy clearly by another hand may signal that the painting was completed under Hals’s aegis in his studio.109 Rather than copies or variants, most Halsian portraits are completely independent works that, while often lacking the spontaneity of Hals’s touch, display an execution that clearly attempts to replicate his signature manner of exposed brushwork. Among these pictures, only one known example – executed in a manner similar to that of Hals in the early 1630s – bears his monogram.110 Therefore, only proximity to Hals’s style can suggest that other such paintings were produced in the master’s workshop.111 As few of Hals’s known pupils painted portraits once they left the master’s studio, it becomes even more tenuous to consider non-autograph Halsian portraits as workshop products. Even if some of these portraits could be classified as studio pieces, Hals’s signature manner must have operated somewhat differently in these pictures than it did with the genre paintings, as portraits are initially commissioned rather than exchanged on the open market.112 In portraiture, there was direct interaction between producer and consumer in the ordering, making and purchase of the picture. The lack of collaboration between Hals and his assistants precludes the construction that Hals began the design before the sitter and then passed off the completion or auxiliary details to another painter once the patron had left the studio, as Van Dyck did.113

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Fig. 112. Workshop of Frans Hals, Paulus Bor, 1633. Oil on copper, 29 x 24 cm. Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum Aachen. Photo: Anne Gold, Aachen.

Would it be possible then that the Halsian portraits were commissioned from the master’s studio, but not necessarily from the master? Could patrons have employed assistants through Hals’s mediation to paint their portraits for a reduced sum, much as contemporary hair salons maintain a hierarchy of prices based on varying degrees of stylists’ skills and experience? Extending Hals’s rough manner to these works would have provided a modicum of stylistic uniformity that would have insured that sitters received portraits that met their aesthetic preferences. Support for this reading might be found in the operations of the art dealer Hendrik Uylenburgh’s workshop in the early 1630s.114 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam and into Uylenburgh’s residence by 1632.115 During the two to three years that he stayed and worked there, Uylenburgh procured portrait commissions for Rembrandt.116 From the numerous non-autograph Rembrandtesque portraits

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that date from the early 1630s, it also appears that Uylenburgh negotiated the sale of portraits done in Rembrandt’s manner that were painted by other artists known to be in his employ.117 Uylenburgh therefore may have served as mediator for a variety of types of portraits for his clients. Until any of the Halsian portraits can be placed more securely within Hals’s studio, though, these thoughts remain hypotheses. Likewise, it is unclear how the hypothesis that Hals’s rough manner operated as a signature house style relates to a painter like Abraham Diepraam (1622-1670). Houbraken did not associate Diepraam with Hals’s studio as he did with so many other painters, but he described Diepraam’s manner as following Hals’s.118 Although Houbraken deemed Diepraam’s efforts to be inferior to those of Hals, he clearly saw Diepraam as attempting to reproduce the Haarlem painter’s masterful and distinctive handling. Very little is known about Diepraam other than that he was a native of Rotterdam and likely spent his career there.119 His paintings are executed with an open technique, where the grainy brown surface is often left exposed in passages of unblended brushstrokes (fig. 113). The graininess of his finishes and his emphasis on small-scale, lower-class figures suggest a greater debt to Brouwer than to Hals. Diepraam’s rowdy tavern scenes show a clear affinity for Jan Steen (1626-1679) that is obviously divorced from Hals’s emphasis on robust individual figures. Yet in the overall rough aesthetic, one can see how Houbraken could have drawn comparisons to images such as Hals’s Jolly Toper (fig. 36). At the same time, Diepraam’s long, stilted figures, often seen from an acute angle, are distinctive enough that it would be difficult to confuse his authorship for Hals’s. If Diepraam was attempting consciously to work in a Halsian mode, which is far from certain, perhaps he was attempting to reproduce in Rotterdam the tonal low-life genre painting being produced, and actively purchased, in Haarlem. Diepraam’s activities and Houbraken’s characterization of them as Halsian raise several questions. Did Diepraam consider his manner to be Halsian? Did Diepraam seek to profit from the popularity of and demand for Halsian works? Did others? Did these efforts infringe on Hals’s ownership of his personal version of the rough manner? Or was the niche that Hals had constructed of lively and roughly painted figures restricted to his local market of Haarlem? As intriguing as all of these queries are, Diepraam’s case is an isolated one and therefore no conclusions can be drawn. For now, it is enough to consider the possibility that Hals’s identification with his style was not necessarily unchallenged, and that artists outside his studio may have imitated his signature style in his lifetime. From the examination of what can be reconstructed of Hals’s workshop and the paintings most likely to have been produced there, the painter’s signature rough manner seems to have been not just the domain of Hals personally, but of the workshop as a whole. Hals’s distinctive aesthetic created from boldly juxtaposed and unblended brushwork signaled the corporate identity of Hals’s studio and served as the business’s brand. This uniformity of pictorial representation issued from the studio made corporate authorship clearly recognizable to consumers. As the workshop was owned and headed by the master as an extension of himself, it was natural for him to transfer his style to those artists who worked for him as they learned their trade. However, as none of these assistants continued to work in an entirely Halsian manner after leaving the

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Fig. 113. Abraham Diepraam, Peasants Drinking and Smoking at a Barrel, signed and dated 1648. Oil on panel, 30.9 x 26.2 cm. Location unknown. Photo: Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie.

master’s shop, the brand may have remained the exclusive domain of the workshop and its master painter. In contemporary terminology, the signature style seems to have been understood as something akin to the master’s intellectual property. In the way that an artist retained ownership of the compositions executed under his supervision, a painter such as Hals may have “owned” the pictorial strategy that constituted his market niche and was so intimately tied to his name. Studying Hals’s signature style as used by the workshop also reveals that the relationship between execution and authorship was unresolved in the artist’s lifetime. An artist’s style was recognizable and distinct, in Hals’s case self-consciously so, but not always tied to personal authorship, as it could be extended to his studio. On the other hand, attribution and quality of execution increasingly determined value, so that the master’s physical involvement in a picture

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became more important to clients. As such, these two contradictory modes coexisted in the minds of artists and viewers, or diverging views could be held by different individuals at the same time. Therefore, one can conclude that, while modern notions of authorship and attribution began to emerge in the period, they competed with older notions of craft, craftsmanship, and the workshop.

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Cha p te r 5

M o d er niTy

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Though his fame has fluctuated with changing tastes, nearly every posthumous response to Frans Hals and his paintings belongs to discourses on modernity in art. Most explicitly, a Belgian art journal proclaimed in 1883, “Frans Hals c’est un moderne.”1 While Frances Suzman Jowell has studied the revival of interest in Hals in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly Theophile Thoré-Bürger’s role in inspiring this resurrection, the continued characterization of Hals’s art as modern from the eighteenth century to the present has thus far not been examined.2 The multifaceted features of Hals’s manner – roughness, sketchiness, liveliness, seeming spontaneity, virtuosity, calligraphic handling, self-referentiality, and materiality – all came to be, at various times, signs of modern painting. In the process, Hals’s signature style, as the combination of these elements, came to be designated as modern in its own right. In our postmodern moment, “modern” is a contentious and contested term that requires definition. As Briony Fer has argued, what is modern, or considered to be so, is constructed out of a sense of difference, so that the word can be understood as denoting distinction from something else.3 It can be used in a temporal sense to distinguish the present or the recent past from a period long departed. Alternatively, as its usage in relation to Hals demands, this chapter will treat modern as a stylistic term. In this sense, “modern” refers variously to that which was different from the classicizing, the academic, and ultimately, the postmodern – not just in subject, but also in style – as the meaning of modern shifted from the seventeenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Organized chronologically, this chapter traces the history of verbal and visual responses to Hals and his manner as modern. I argue that, though the term was not explicitly applied to Hals until the late-nineteenth century, the concepts embodied by the word were associated with the artist from at least the earliest extended analysis of his work published in 1718, and possibly in his lifetime. This early perception of his rough manner eventually led to critical neglect in academic circles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and likewise may have led

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to Thoré-Bürger’s resurrection of Hals and the painter’s subsequent ascension to the heights of the artistic pantheon in the late nineteenth century. After investigating the entrenchment of the master’s signature style as modern and impressionistic in the twentieth century, it is possible to consider that modernity has not been projected onto Hals’s rough manner, but rather that his style is deeply embedded within what has come to be the modern aesthetic and has thus become inextricably modern.4

Initial Constructions One finds perhaps the first characterization of Hals as modern in Arnold Houbraken’s 1718 compendium of artists’ biographies, De Groote Schouburgh. Here, as elsewhere in the text, Houbraken penned biographical anecdotes that operated as criticism of the master’s art.5 In his life of Hals, Houbraken did not explicitly label the artist as modern, but the author constructed a series of anecdotes that, in the context of the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes, conveyed a classification of Hals as such. The Querelle was a pan-European intellectual debate on human progress – whether humankind was more advanced in antiquity or the present.6 Part of the dispute was between those who favored looking to ancient precedent and those who questioned the authority of tradition and sought to valorize the contemporary.7 In short, the modern was understood as being the polar opposite of that which was antique or classicizing, and, conversely, that which was different from the antique was implicitly modern. In order to recognize Houbraken’s characterization of Hals in terms of the Querelle and to understand the image of the artist that the text formed as it was repeated throughout the eighteenth century, one needs to examine the usage of “modern” as it related to painting in the Dutch Republic. Initially, seventeenth-century Dutch art literature employed only the term ancient, without explicitly stating its counterpart. Franciscus Junius published De pictura veterum in 1637 with his own English translation, On the Painting of the Ancients, appearing in 1638 and one in Dutch, De Schilder-konst der Oude begrepen in drie boecken, in 1641.8 While much of Junius’s text is art historical, it is also an early polemic in favor of antique art. Among his many claims, Junius argued for the timeless and inherent value of ancient aesthetics. Furthermore, he argued that contemporary readers, and artists, could and should learn from classical exemplars. In the process, Junius established a dichotomy between the ancient and the modern even if he never fully articulated what he considered the modern to be. Likewise, as Thijs Weststeijn has recently traced, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s 1678 treatise Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkunst articulated two forms of naturalistic representation – following the ancients and following nature.9 Here, even more directly than Junius, Van Hoogstraten established the antique as one half of an aesthetic dichotomy. In the context of the Querelle, one infers that the alternative mode – following nature – was to work in a modern fashion. Recent scholarship has shown that seventeenth-century sources used the term modern to describe some types of figurative painting. In his examination of Haarlem inventories, Pieter Biesboer found several instances of the word. For example, the May 1636 inventory of Pancras

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Vos lists “a modern painting by Dirck Hals in the main hall” and a 1634 lottery notes “an oval with modern figures by D. Hals.”10 From such inventory descriptions, Biesboer concluded that, to seventeenth-century viewers, modern meant the representation of people in contemporary dress participating in everyday activities. Alison Kettering and Arie Wallert have shown how modern could also characterize the manner, and not just the subject, of a picture. A 1635 letter from Gerard ter Borch the Elder (1582/3-1662) to his seventeen-year-old son Gerard the Younger (1617-1681) offered the following advice: “And when you wish to paint, work up some modern compositions, as surely as you can, putting in your stuff right from the start, because that goes most quickly and stays most beautiful and flowing while drying.”11 As Kettering notes, Gerard the Elder’s letter prescribed modern compositions and a quick, flowing manner of painting, so that the two features of picture making are linked.12 Wallert takes a more technical approach to the letter. He believes that the manner Gerard the Elder described alludes to the method of working directly on the support in a limited number of layers that began to be in vogue among some painters in the early seventeenth century.13 As this approach differed from the older, more laborious mode of extensive layering and preparatory drawing, Wallert argues that modern could also be used to describe Ter Borch’s working methods.14 One should note that Ter Borch completed an apprenticeship with the landscape painter Pieter Molijn (1596-1661) in Haarlem. It is possible, therefore, that the tonal approach popular in the city in the late 1620s and early 1630s – employed by Molijn as well as Hals – was considered modern.15 Though the term modern was not applied to Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) in his lifetime, Lisa Vergara has explored how his paintings of figures in seventeenth-century costumes and interiors may have been considered modern by contemporary audiences.16 Vergara, like Kettering, relied heavily on Gerard de Lairesse’s discussion of modern painting. De Lairesse devoted an entire chapter of his Het Groot Schilderboek (1707) to the subject of antique and modern painting. In a mode comparable to that found in texts on the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in France, De Lairesse juxtaposed what he considered to be aesthetically polar opposites.17 As a firm classicist, De Lairesse favored the antique: I think I cannot better describe the difference between what is antique and what is modern, than by a windball [i.e. a balloon] and an egg, thus: the ball, by being tossed to and fro, and at last bursting, represents short duration, affording nothing but wind; but the egg hatched and opened, produces a living creature; not only a something, but something good; the former, a mere nothing; or, if it have a name, ‘tis vanity, and therefore rather bad than good.18

While De Lairesse felt that the antique mode was preferable overall, he considered the antique and the modern to be competing manners of representing figural narratives.19 What distinguished these differing manners were beauty, duration, and class orientation. Beauty, the goal of all painting according to De Lairesse, could best be achieved not by imitating, but by improving upon nature. The modern manner followed nature too closely to realize this idealization.

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Likewise, De Lairesse argued that artists should strive for timelessness in their pictures. The contemporary should be avoided, as fashion changes so quickly that, like the balloon caught in the wind, the most current styles in dress or interior decoration become out of date as soon as the next fad comes along. In contrast to the ephemerality of the modern, antiquity endures. Lastly, De Lairesse believed that the antique and the modern were connected with the three classes of rhetoric (the genera dicendi): the sublime, the common, and the low.20 Only the antique painter created sublime pictures, but the stateliness that defined the sublime for De Lairesse came from the painter’s engagement with and observation of the upper class. In contrast, the common and the low, both the domains of the modern painter, reflected and depicted the subjects, aesthetics, and moralities of the bourgeoisie and lower class, respectively. Thus the antique and the modern opposed each other in subject, manner, and duration of the end product. While De Lairesse’s chapter on the antique and modern primarily concerned genre and narrative painting, his chapter on portraiture also advised artists to use the antique manner. There, framed by his earlier discussion of antique and modern manners, De Lairesse discussed the problems with following nature too closely. While not favoring an absolute distance from the natural, he advised portrait painters to find a middle ground between idealization and exacting naturalism.21 In practical terms, De Lairesse suggested first sketching the face from life, and then modifying or minimizing any of the sitter’s physical imperfections in the final image.22 Likewise, De Lairesse argued against capturing how a sitter appeared in any particular moment. Instead, he advocated three or four sittings so that the painter could get a fuller sense of the person by observing him or her in different states and moods.23 As he wrote, a portrait should not only depict what one sees instantly in a mirror, but should also present “an inner torment” (een innerlyke kwelling).24 He also believed that sitters should be represented in pseudo-antique dress to project an enhanced aura of sophistication.25 In these ways, De Lairesse’s vision of portraiture required presenting individuals timelessly and in a somewhat idealizing fashion, features that compare to his definitions of the antique manner in narrative painting.26 Therefore, while De Lairesse did not use the terms antique or modern in his chapter on portraiture, the text conveys how portraits could be conceived as being designed and executed in antique or modern manners in the early eighteenth century. Houbraken’s characterization of Hals’s method and pictures a decade after the publication of Het Groot Schilderboek parallels De Lairesse’s conception of the modern in several ways. Though Houbraken relayed a clear appreciation for Hals’s pictures and his masterful, calligraphic handling, several of the anecdotes cast the painter as tending towards the modern. Most blatantly, Houbraken presented Hals as an artist who did not associate with the aristocracy as De Lairesse advised. First, in his fabricated tale of artistic competition between Hals and Anthony van Dyck, Houbraken informed readers that Van Dyck “took some little time to scour the taverns” in search of Hals upon arriving in Haarlem.27 Later, while telling of a practical joke that Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6-1638) and Dirck van Delen (1604/5-1671) played on their master while he was drunk, Houbraken wrote that it was “Frans’s custom to fill himself to the gills each evening” in the local taverns, establishments that the upper classes operated but did not frequent.28 In

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these anecdotes, Hals not only lacks courtly connections but also lives in an unseemly fashion. As Houbraken put it, “His excellent and bold manner with the brush is what apprentices should take as their model and example, not his manner of living, for he was not a good driver of his life’s carriage, which often veered from the center line when he gave his passions free rein.”29 Houbraken emphasizes that Hals chose this base lifestyle. Houbraken wrote, “It is said that Van Dyck went to great lengths to entice him [Hals] to England [to the court of King Charles I], but he would not listen, being too attached to his dissolute ways.”30 Thus, according to Houbraken, Hals had the chance to better himself by entering aristocratic circles through Van Dyck’s mediation, but he refused. Like so many of Houbraken’s passages, the reader must not take the author literally. Hals’s supposedly “low” lifestyle can be read metaphorically as a critique of the painter’s decision to work in an un-aristocratic and un-antique fashion. In light of De Lairesse’s definitions of the modern, Houbraken’s emphasis on the high degree of naturalism in Hals’s works may have also been intended to differentiate the painter from the ancient manner. Houbraken wrote: “The many portraits by Hals which are still to be seen testify to the boldness and vivacity with which his brush caught the natural likeness of human beings.”31 Later, Houbraken claimed that the figures in one of Hals’s civic guard portraits were “so forcefully and naturally […] painted that it is as if they would address the onlooker.”32 Such extreme naturalism contrasts with De Lairesse’s classicist preference for idealization and timelessness. As Houbraken lavished considerable praise upon Hals and seemed to relish genuinely the vivacity of Hals’s paintings, one cannot conclude that Houbraken shared De Lairesse’s opinions on the relative worth of painters who used antique or modern manners. Nonetheless, the repeated characterizations of Hals’s approach as following nature do seem to categorize him as a modern painter in De Lairesse’s terms. Houbraken’s description of Hals’s unblended brushwork as unfinished also worked to align the artist with the modern manner in the minds of eighteenth-century readers. Houbraken concluded his tale of artistic competition with Van Dyck’s evaluation of Hals: “…if he had blended his colors a bit more delicately or thinly he would have been one of the greatest masters.”33 Here, Houbraken called attention to the resemblance between Hals’s rough manner and the unblended handling found in drawn and painted sketches. Such a parallel would have been anathema to an artist working in De Lairesse’s antique manner. For the antique painter, the sketch, especially that from nature, needed to be modified to improve the beauty of the picture and worked over carefully to provide a crisp veneer of timelessness. Sketchiness signified a preliminary stage in the artistic process and thus an unfinished project. In De Lairesse’s dichotomy, the unfinished must have been the terrain of the modern. Houbraken’s image of Hals formed the seed from which all subsequent treatments of the artist grew. As Bart Cornelis has shown, De Groote Schouburgh defined the canon of seventeenthcentury Dutch art, as numerous other writers – in the Netherlands and abroad – based their texts upon Houbraken’s.34 This process of adopting Houbraken’s account holds especially true for Hals, as Jowell has suggested.35 Jowell briefly surveyed eighteenth-century discussions of Hals, but a more thorough examination of these sources and a close reading of the subtle deviations from Houbraken’s life of Hals illuminate how interpretations of the artist began to change.

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While based on De Groote Schouburgh, Jacob Campo Weyerman’s De levens-beschryvingen der Nederlansche konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen, published in three volumes between 1729 and 1769, fundamentally altered Houbraken’s life of Hals.36 Overall, Weyerman followed Houbraken in his selection of artists, organization of the book, and the details and anecdotes of each individual biography. This high degree of indebtedness to Houbraken has led to characterizations of Weyerman’s efforts as an almost literal copy of De Groote Schouburgh.37 For Hals, Weyerman repeated the competition with Van Dyck, Hals’s choice not to pursue courtly commissions, the characterization of the artist as one who associated with the lower classes, the emphasis on the naturalism of Hals’s figures, and the judgments of the artist’s brushwork as particularly masterful even if individual paintings bore an unfinished aesthetic. Unlike Houbraken, however, Weyerman did not begin his biography with the framing device of the battle of virtuosity between Apelles and Protogenes discussed at length in chapter two which conditioned readers to consider Hals’s interactions with Van Dyck as a comparable contest of artistry. The absence of this frame encouraged a more literal reading of the events and thus introduced the opportunity to interpret the encounter in an entirely negative light. Weyerman also eliminated the anecdote about Brouwer and Van Delen’s prank at the end of Houbraken’s text, so that the author’s account of Hals centers almost entirely on the Van Dyck episode. In addition to these deletions from De Groote Schouburgh, Weyerman injected a new element into the description of the artist’s working method – the arrangement of colors on his palette. Weyerman wrote that Hals arranged his palette slovenly, like a waiter who had spilled a tray.38 Weyerman may have intended this description to accentuate Hals’s sketchy manner. It also likely affected readers’ responses, advancing the perception that Hals’s handling or coloring was muddled. In these ways, Weyerman’s treatment of the artist was far less celebratory than Houbraken’s.39 Put differently, the modern elements of Hals’s manner met with even less enthusiasm in Weyerman’s account. Though heavily adapted from De Groote Schouburgh, Weyerman’s biography of Hals proved highly influential in its own right. As Cornelis noted, many authors turned to Weyerman’s derivation rather than to Houbraken as their primary or sole source of information about seventeenth-century Dutch painters.40 In the case of Hals, subsequent authors continued to repeat much of the information, fictionalized anecdotes, and critical appraisals found in Houbraken, but followed Weyerman in expunging the Apelles-Protogenes frame, eliminating Brouwer’s prank, and describing Hals’s palette as disorderly. These elements of Weyerman’s text appear in every subsequent significant discussion of the artist in the eighteenth century. In La vie des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandais of 1753-64, Jean-Baptiste Descamps essentially translated Weyerman’s account, almost word for word, into French.41 In turn, James Burgess co-opted Descamps’s biography of Hals in The Lives of the most eminent modern painters: who have lived since, or who were omitted by Mons. De Piles of 1754.42 In this way, the terms for engaging Hals’s art were set not only in Dutch but also in French and English for an international readership. Hals and his paintings entered the international artistic and aesthetic discourse in the mid-eighteenth century through the writings of Weyerman, Descamps, and Burgess, but also through the art market. During his lifetime and until several decades after his death, interest in

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Hals remained either local or restricted to the northern Netherlands. Before the 1740s, paintings attributed to Hals rarely appeared in non-Dutch collections.43 From 1740 until the end of the eighteenth century, though, paintings attributed to Hals frequently appeared at sales in France and in Britain.44 The high prices that these paintings occasionally garnered testify to their positive valuation. For example, in 1758 a tavern scene sold for forty-three pounds in London, while in 1779 a “head” sold for forty pounds.45 In France, two pendants sold for 700 francs in 1786, a portrait of a man sold for 460 francs in 1787, and another portrait sold for 224 francs in 1774.46 While his paintings may not have been the highest selling pictures in European markets, it is eminently clear that Hals was neither unknown nor completely lacking in admirers. The descriptions of Hals’s work that frequently appeared in eighteenth-century sale catalogues illuminate what audiences valued in his paintings. Taking their cue from Burgess and Descamps, several catalogues positively compare Hals to Van Dyck. The entry on a self-portrait sold in 1782 in London stated: “This picture may, without the least degree of flattery, be ranked with the best works of Vandyck; it is painted with great spirit, and deserves the countenance and esteem Vandyck had for this master.”47 French catalogues from 1759 and 1786 make the same comparison.48 Both English and French sales descriptions also emphasize facile brushwork. For example, a 1736 London catalogue presents a self-portrait by Hals as “spiritedly painted, and full of character.”49 Likewise, a 1773 Parisian catalogue described a portrait of a man as “Ce tableau est d’une touché libre & pleine d’espirit: cet Artiste étoit dans la plus grande force lorsqu’il l’a peint.”50 These examples which are indicative of many other comparable descriptions that span the eighteenth century clearly indicate that Hals’s brushwork defined his paintings.51 They also convey that viewers perceived not only virtuosity, but in their emphasis on character and freedom of execution they also thought they recognized the artist’s distinctive personality behind those touches. Likely as a result of the recent circulation of Hals’s paintings and the positive evaluations of them, several eighteenth-century artists responded to the earlier painter’s work. Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) made at least two drawings after Hals’s paintings: a head of a boy culled from the background of one of the various versions of Rommel-pot players and a copy of the portrait of an unidentified man now in St. Petersburg.52 More indirectly, Alexis Grimou (1678-1733) appropriated a Halsian conception of large-scale single figures. In his self-portrait of 1721, for example, Grimou assumed the pose and comportment of characters like the Jolly Toper and Jonker Ramp.53 Despite the emphasis on Hals’s brushwork in contemporary literature, Grimou did not follow the Dutch painter’s lead in this arena, opting instead to craft his images from tight, controlled brushstrokes. Later in the century, around the time that Hals’s paintings became better known in France, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) engaged the Dutch artist’s works more deeply. In addition to making a drawing after Hals’s portrait of Willem Croes now in Munich, Fragonard emulated Hals’s handling, especially in his series of fifteen fantasy portraits created between 1768 and 1772.54 In each of these half-length figures, Fragonard crafted an aura of energy and vitality through seemingly windswept garments and dynamic compositions based on dramatic diagonals. To further this aesthetic, Fragonard used vigorous, unblended brushwork throughout the

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Fig. 114. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Abbey St. Non, 1769. Oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © rmn / Daniel Arnaudet.

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Fig. 115. William Hogarth, Shrimp Girl, c. 1740. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 52.5 cm. The National Gallery, London.

paintings. While the fantasy portraits developed from diverse sources such as Rubens’s tronies and Tiepolo’s oil sketches, a close examination of Abbey St. Non (fig.114) also illuminates Hals’s influence.55 Like Hals, Fragonard built the forms from layers of overlapping paint and in many passages, such as at the nape of the neck, umber grounds peek through the surface. Fragonard also left individual strokes unblended to create stark juxtapositions rather than brushing out the edges of these marks to create seamless transitions. The white daub that highlights the tip of the nose is a particularly clear example of Hals’s practice. On the Abbey’s right arm one can see thick contour lines that overlap those strokes that flesh out the sleeve’s interior. As with Hals, these strokes indicate that Fragonard locked in the final contours only at the end of the painting process. The Abbey’s extremely sketchy gloved right hand likewise evokes Halsian prototypes in features such as the umber strokes made atop the red forms to demarcate the spaces between

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fingers. Each of these passages, and perhaps the overall structure of working up the picture, relate directly to Hals’s example. Fragonard could have learned these elements either from the growing number of works by the Dutch painter in Paris or on his trip to the Netherlands that may have occurred in the early 1760s.56 With British artists, one finds a comparably small and focused interest in Hals’s paintings. The most conspicuous example is Shrimp Girl from around 1750 (fig. 115) by William Hogarth (1697-1764).57 Here, Hogarth pictured a half-length image of a contemporary lower-class figure hawking seafood. In subject and format, its connection to Hals’s series of fisher children is unmistakable. Though more fractured in its jarring tonal juxtapositions, Hogarth’s handling also followed Hals’s painterly example. Hogarth may have encountered one or more of Hals’s fisher children on his 1748 trip to Holland, if not among the numerous paintings by the artist in London.58 More obliquely, one can argue for correspondence between the art of Hals and that of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). In his early Portrait of the Artist with Wife and Daughter Outside from about 1748 (fig. 116), Gainsborough closely followed Hals’s Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen, albeit on a reduced scale. More so, in his mature, painterly portraits, Gainsborough often employed a sketchy aesthetic that is not unrelated to Hals’s mode. In The Linley Sisters of 1772 (fig. 117), for example, one finds expanses of umber underpainting operating as surface level

Fig. 116. Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of the Artist with Wife and Daughter Outside, c. 1748. Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 70.5 cm. The National Gallery, London.

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background in the trees. In the dresses, Gainsborough scumbled paint and seemingly quickly dashed unblended white highlights atop strokes of blue that only partially cover underlying grays. Likewise, Gainsborough’s 1787 self-portrait (fig. 118), though a completed painting, reads as a sketch due to the grainy underlayers visible to the naked eye and the thin washes of color that suggest, rather than demarcate, form. These features are of the same type as those that define Hals’s approach in such paintings as Youth with a Flute (fig. 88) and Pieter van den Broecke (fig. 94). Moreover, Gainsborough himself described his manner as rough in a way that recalls characterizations of Hals’s manner. In a letter of 1758, Gainsborough wrote to William Mayhew:

Fig. 117. Thomas Gainsborough, The Linley Sisters, 1772. Oil on canvas, 200.4 x 153 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

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Fig. 118. Thomas Gainsborough, Self-Portrait, 1787. Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 58.5 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.

You please me much by saying that no other fault is found in your picture than the roughness of the surface, for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance, and what a judge of painting knows an original for a copy by; in short being the touch of the pencil, which is much harder to preserve than smoothness.59

Though not using the Dutch artist’s name, Gainsborough invoked the trope that seemingly rough touches reveal calligraphic virtuosity. As the writings of Burgess attest, this aesthetic position was associated with Hals in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Rica Jones has recently postulated that Gainsborough may have learned his rough technique from studying paintings firsthand in Holland.60 It is therefore well within the realm of possibility that he modeled his

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approach, in part, on Hals’s example. At the very least, Gainsborough’s painterly manner and the esteem it earned him among many wealthy and knowledgeable clients in England demonstrate that Hals’s mode that likewise depended on seeming roughness and virtuoso touches was artistically current and en vogue at the time. Taking stock of instances of direct inspiration and aesthetic correspondence between Hals’s paintings and those of eighteenth-century artists, several trends emerge that do much to illuminate perceptions, and constructions, of the Dutch painter. First, Hals was not a dominant influence, but those artists that did engage his manner were among the most prominent painters of their day. Second, the instances of emulation convey perceived relations between Hals’s aesthetics and formulations of virtuosity and performativity current in the eighteenth century. Fragonard consciously encouraged readings of his paintings, especially the fantasy portraits, as the products of frenzied artistic activity. On the back of his Abbey of St. Non, an eighteenth-century inscription, possibly autograph, reads: “Portrait of Mr L’abbé de St. Non, painted by Fragonard in 1769 in just one hour.” Similar inscriptions can be found on the reverse of other Fragonard paintings from the same period. These notations and the impression of brisk painting made by his broad sweeps of the brush and overall sketch aesthetic encourage reading the pictures as near spontaneous creations executed in a fury of genius. Using Hals’s manner as a model suggests that Fragonard understood Hals’s brushwork to communicate these very same features or at least to be particularly well suited for the expression of Enlightenment notions of creativity. Hogarth professed a related theory of art in his 1753 treatise The Line of Beauty. In this text, Hogarth advocated the implementation of motion, variation, and virtuosity. The best mechanism for actualizing these features, according to Hogarth, was “serpentine line,” also referred to as “the line of beauty.”61 Keeping with early modern terminology, line referred to elements like compositional form, bodily contours, and brushwork. Hogarth legitimized his serpentine line through the ancient tale of competition between Apelles and Protogenes – the same tale that Houbraken had used to frame his biography of Hals – making the serpentine line the record of a comparable virtuoso performance.62 Hogarth prefigured this formulation in his 1745 self-portrait in which at lower left rests a palette inscribed with the words “the line of beauty” and illustrated with a single stroke of undulating thickness that crests and falls as if a schematic rendering of a wave (fig. 119). In both his self-portrait and his treatise, Hogarth formulated his aesthetic principal as a solitary, boldly-painted mark. While Hogarth does not mention Hals in The Line of Beauty and strokes of the exact kind Hogarth performed in his self-portrait are absent in the Dutch painter’s oeuvre, Hogarth’s emulation of the fisher children does suggest that he saw Hals as exhibiting bravura handling epitomized by individual touches of brilliance, as Houbraken had. It should be noted that Fragonard, Gainsborough, and Hogarth all operated outside the academic system and its increasingly classicist aesthetics. While approved by the French Royal Academy in 1765, Fragonard never sought to be formally inducted into the institution. He opted instead to work for private collectors and the open art market. Likewise, Gainsborough never participated in the British Royal Academy, drawing his commissions from wealthy but unofficial sources. Joseph Burke has argued that as Hogarth was openly at odds with the Royal Academy,

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Fig. 119. William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745. Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm. © Tate, London 2011.

The Line of Beauty can be interpreted as a diatribe against the institution’s aesthetic positions.63 The outsider status of the eighteenth-century painters who emulated Hals’s paintings signals that his work failed to find favor within official academic discourse and that his manner appealed to artists who sought freer expression outside of the confines of the academy, as it would in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the criticisms of Hals initiated by Weyerman and repeated by others became more pronounced. This process of deprecation was intimately tied to the decreasing favor with which the modern was held in official artistic circles. Perhaps the most compelling and informative early, overt criticisms of Hals were issued by Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) and his protégé James Northcote (1746-1831).64 On December 10, 1774, in his sixth discourse delivered to the Royal Academy, Reynolds lamented Hals’s lack of finish:

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In the works of Frank Halls [sic.], the portrait-painter one may observe the composition of the face, the features well put together, as the painters express it; from whence proceeds that strong-marked character of individual nature, which is also so remarkable in his portraits, and is not found in an equal degree in any other painter. If he had joined to this most difficult part of the art, a patience in finishing what he had so correctly planned, he might justly have claimed the place which Van Dyck, all things considered, so justly holds as the first of portrait painters.65

Probably drawing his analysis from Burgess, Reynolds repeated the by now familiar image of the Dutch painter as one who opted not to “finish” his paintings. Northcote took a different tack, writing: For truth of character, indeed, he was the greatest painter that ever existed…Hals made no beauties; his portraits are of people such as you meet with every day on the street. He was not a successful painter – his works were not ornamental – they did not move – they did not give all [that] his sitters were whilst he saw them before him, but, what they did give, they gave with a truth that no man could surpass. I have sometimes said Titian was the greatest painter in the world; … he gave a solemn grandeur which is very fine indeed. But still, if I had wanted an exact likeness I should have preferred Hals…Hals possessed one great advantage over many other men; his mechanical power was such that he was able to hit off a portrait on the instant; he was able to shoot the bird flying – so to speak – with all its freshness about it, which Titian does not seem to have done.66

Northcote identified Hals as surpassing all others in capturing a sitter’s likeness, yet he did not find this to be an entirely positive feature. In fact, Northcote found Hals’s reliance on exact likeness cause for labeling the painter unsuccessful. The sketchiness, the lack of ornamentation, and the perceived truthfulness conflicted with the classicizing aesthetic that Northcote learned from Reynolds and that was increasingly favored in the eighteenth century. In his fourteenth discourse delivered to the Royal Academy on December 10, 1788, Reynolds leveled criticisms against his rival, the recently deceased Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) that reveal the dominant distaste for non-classicizing portraits. In this lecture devoted exclusively to Gainsborough, Reynolds lauded his contemporary for his naturalism, writing: “Whether he most excelled in his portraits, landskips, or fancy-pictures, it is difficult to determine: whether his portraits were most admirable for exact truth of resemblance, or his landskips for a portrait-like representation of nature.”67 For Reynolds, naturalism constituted the antithesis of the “historical style” that in portraiture evoked character and timelessness instead of a strict transcription of a sitter’s visage. Of particular relevance for the reception of Hals’s manner, Reynolds also traced Gainsborough’s high degree of likeness to a sketchiness of execution:

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Now Gainsborough’s portraits were often little more, in regard to finishing, or determining the form of the features, than what generally attends a dead colour; but as he was always attentive to the general effect, or the whole together, I have often imagined that this unfinished manner contributed even to the striking resemblance for which his portraits are so remarkable.68

Reynolds’s text reveals that, since the aesthetic of the unfinished furthered naturalism, sketchiness necessarily distanced a work from the historical. As the spokesman for and chief practitioner of the “historical style,” Reynolds advised the students and fellow academicians in attendance: “However, we may apologize for the deficiencies of Gainsborough, (I mean particularly his want of precision and finishing,) …; you are to remember, that no apology can be made for this deficiency, in that style which this academy teaches, and which ought to be the object of your pursuit.”69 Indeed, Gainsborough’s style clashed with doctrines of the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury academic curriculum not only in Britain but throughout Europe.70 In this context, it becomes clear that Northcote’s and Reynolds’s descriptions of Hals’s naturalism and lack of finish similarly clashed with the classicizing, anti-modern tenants then in vogue. The overt criticisms, like those of Reynolds and Northcote, that denigrated Hals’s distance from historical or classicizing manners led to the painter’s subsequent exclusion from artistic discourse and official academic appreciation. For example, though clearly familiar with the artist’s work as he had discussed it in his sixth discourse, Reynolds barely mentioned Hals in the travelogue he composed during his study voyage through the Low Countries in 1781. More egregiously, John Smith omitted Hals completely from his nine volume Catalogue raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish and French painters of 1829-42.71 Apparently, Hals was no longer considered to be among the most highly regarded artists. Prices for the artist’s paintings declined, and those already in prominent collections were no longer considered prized possessions.72 In 1812, for example, the two pictures of Apostles by Hals that Catherine II had acquired for the Hermitage were shipped from the capital in St. Petersburg and relegated to the provinces in Tavricheskaia, Gubernia – a clear sign of disfavor. Likewise, artistic emulation of Halsian modes virtually ceased as early nineteenth-century artists, inside and outside the academy, consistently employed other stylistic models. As these omissions and relegation towards the art historical periphery occurred during the time in which the classically oriented academies dominated, it is reasonable to conclude that Hals’s manner did not mesh with the dominant aesthetic of official circles. After Houbraken’s initial biography, Hals was consistently considered to be an artist who did not practice an antique manner of painting. Each succeeding author likewise emphasized Hals’s naturalism, sketchiness, and lack of finish and increasingly criticized him for these features. Though the term was never invoked directly, this opposition to the antique served to categorize Hals’s signature style as modern. Furthermore, being implicitly modern ultimately led to exclusion from academic discourses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It thus appears that the modernity of Hals’s rough manner was already established before the

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revival of interest in the artist in the second half of the nineteenth century when his approach was embraced as a modern alternative to academic practice.

The Nineteenth-Century Revival In the second half of the nineteenth century, Hals’s critical fortune changed, especially in France. As Eugène Fromentin wrote in 1876: “Today the name of Hals reappears in our school at the moment when the love of the natural re-enters it with some clamour and no little excess.”73 As pictorial taste shifted and challenges were issued to official, academic art and ideals, the nonantique qualities of Hals’s manner were rediscovered, reevaluated, and ultimately appropriated by artists consciously seeking to cast themselves as modern in opposition to the academic mode. As Jowell has shown, the writings of Theophile Thoré that appeared under the pseudonym William Bürger were highly influential in inspiring interest in Hals and in making his paintings worthy of emulation by contemporary artists.74 Thoré-Bürger was a republican revolutionary and art critic who, as early as the 1830s, espoused a decidedly painterly and colorist viewpoint tinged with political undertones. Throughout his career, Thoré-Bürger championed contemporary painters from the Realists to the Impressionists for aesthetic as well as political reasons. Produced while in exile, his writings on Dutch art as a whole and his seminal publications on Vermeer as well as on Hals contributed to the scholarly study of seventeenth-century painting in the Netherlands.75 As a minor dealer, Thoré-Bürger also traded in Dutch paintings, perhaps helping shape the market for these pictures.76 Thoré-Bürger first addressed Hals in his reviews of the 1857 Old Masters exhibition in Manchester published in Le Siècle.77 In this massive exhibition of Renaissance through eighteenth-century paintings created in Italy, France, Britain, Spain, Germany, Flanders, and Holland that he described as rivaling the Louvre in quantity and quality, Thoré-Bürger singled out the two works by Hals on display, the portrait of a man dated 1630 now in a private collection (fig. 24) and the late male portrait now in the Frick Collection.78 In his widely read two-volume guidebook to the Rijksmuseum, the Mauritshuis, the Boymans Museum, and the Van der Hoop collection published as Musées de la Hollande in 1858, ThoréBürger devoted special attention to Hals’s double portrait Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen (fig. 78) and the Jolly Toper (fig. 36).79 In his 1860 discussion of the Suermondt collection, ThoréBürger used Youth with a Flute (fig. 120) to praise Hals’s achievements generally. These relatively brief descriptions and analyses of Hals’s work culminated in a monographic study of the artist published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1868. Here, Thoré-Bürger gave an overview of Hals’s career and stylistic development as well as a description of the locations of the painter’s works in European collections. In this first extended scholarly treatment of the artist, Thoré-Bürger reappraised Hals’s value and established the schema from which future responses to his paintings would be shaped. Thoré-Bürger’s repeated exaltations drew considerable attention to an artist who had been largely ignored for more than half a century. In his writings, especially in the 1868 Gazette des Beaux-Arts article, Thoré-Bürger consistently praised the spontaneity, vitality, and freedom of Hals’s works and manner. Lavishing

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Fig. 120. Frans Hals, Boy with a Flute, about 1625. Oil on canvas, 62 x 54.5 cm. bpk, Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders.

considerable attention on Hals’s style and technique, Thoré-Bürger posited that the painter practiced a spontaneous working method. For example, in 1860, Thoré-Bürger wrote in response to the Boy with a Flute (fig. 120): He painted so much! He painted so quickly – and so well! …In his exaggerated brusqueness, his risky contrasts, his informal carelessness, there is always the hand of a bountifully talented painter, and even the sign of a certain kind of genius – somewhat superficial, it is true, and inspired by the external appearance of things, by movement, style, colour and effect, by whatever moves and glitters, rather than by the secret and spiritual side of life, even somewhat vulgar, if one can so refer to genius – but frank and bold, as irresistible as instinct.80

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Fig. 121. Gustave Courbet, Copy of Malle Babbe, 1869. Oil on canvas, 86.3 x 71 cm. bpk, Berlin / Hamburger Kunsthalle / Elke Walford.

In such commentaries, Thoré-Bürger combated the prevailing opinion that Hals left his works unfinished due to laziness or as a result of moral or aesthetic defect, instead finding these features praiseworthy. As Jowell has shown, Thoré-Bürger’s estimation of Hals and his manner was consistent with the critic’s position on finish.81 Thoré-Bürger also favored the painterly approaches of artists such as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), Narcisse Diaz (1807-1876), Camille Corot (17961875), and Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891). As Thoré-Bürger wrote in a review of the 1868 Salon, “the best painters had always painted very quickly and impressionistically.”82 In this way, Thoré-Bürger employed the language that had previously been used to denigrate Hals to validate the artist’s style. Thoré-Bürger not only ushered in a reappraisal of Hals, he also helped establish the relevance of the painter’s art in the latter half of the nineteenth century. According to Jowell, Hals was a part of Thoré-Bürger’s political program in which art reflected and shaped the society in which it was produced and consumed. As an ardent supporter of the Realist movement, Thoré-Bürger saw freedom in seventeenth-century Dutch art because it had been created under a republic and not under the yoke of religious or political tyranny. As such, Dutch painting epitomized Thoré-Bürger’s ideal l’art pour l’homme.83 Hals exemplified this ideal in part because of his preoccupation with portraiture. For Thoré-Bürger, these portraits were not just records of individuals, they also functioned as reflections of the free society in which they were painted. Hals’s particular manner of painting also communicated freedom through its distinctive, individualized

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approach and its inherent liveliness. For this reason, Thoré-Bürger encouraged contemporary artists to study Hals’s works. In general, he believed that studying the art of the Dutch Republic could help liberate French painting and society. Thoré-Bürger’s focus on technique and style made Hals’s choice of subjects as well as his manner pertinent for nineteenth-century artists. Widely read in France and abroad, Thoré-Bürger’s writings helped secure a prominent position for Hals in discourses on the history of art and contemporary painting.84 Scholars such as Gustav Waagen, Carel Vosmaer, and, possibly, Wilhelm von Bode benefited not only from Thoré-Bürger’s “rediscovery” of the Dutch artist but also his research on the painter’s life and the current locations of his pictures. Painters, too, became familiar with Hals’s art through ThoréBürger. Jowell has suggested that Thoré-Bürger’s praise of Malle Babbe (fig. 29) in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1868, may have inspired Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) to copy the picture faithfully one year later when he saw it at the International Exhibition in Munich in 1869 (fig. 121).85 Indeed, though Courbet had some prior interest in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, Hals’s paintings seem not to have attracted the French artist prior to this point. As Courbet was at the end of his career when he finally did show interest, Hals had little impact on his oeuvre.86 Courbet’s fellow Realist and former student Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), however, embraced Hals’s art more directly.87 As has long been recognized, Fantin-Latour derived his composition for Homage to Delacroix (fig. 122), which he exhibited at the 1864 Salon, from Hals’s 1627 Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard (fig. 123).88 Here, in this group portrait of the artist’s friends and colleagues – including Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Manet, and James McNeill Whistler – Fantin-Latour emulated Hals’s representation of real people dressed in contemporary clothing and gathered together. Fantin-Latour learned of Hals’s work through a painted copy by the Belgian artist Louis Dubois rather than the original.89 For this reason, Fantin-Latour did not have firsthand knowledge of Hals’s technique, only the composition and figures. The muted palette and hazily rendered figures and objects of Homage to Delacroix and the bulk of Fantin-Latour’s pictures are therefore unlikely to have derived directly from Hals’s example. Many of the most prominent contemporary painters with either realist sympathies or anti-academic inclinations followed Thoré-Bürger’s advice and Fantin-Latour’s lead in studying Hals’s paintings. As Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu has demonstrated, legions of artists from all over Europe, as well as America, flocked to Hals’s hometown of Haarlem in the late nineteenth century after the opening of the Haarlem Municipal Museum in 1862. With the opening of the museum, five of Hals’s six militia portraits and all three of his regent group portraits became easily accessible to the public for the first time.90 Although some notable individuals, such as Thoré-Bürger in 1863, visited the museum in its earliest years, Ten-Doesschate Chu noted that the visitors’ logs indicate that innumerable artists of note took advantage of the opportunity in the 1870s and 1880s. In other words, soon after Thoré-Bürger’s Gazette des Beaux-Arts article was published and not long after Fantin-Latour helped introduce Hals to certain circles in Paris, artists migrated to Haarlem. French painters such as François Bonvin (1868), Claude Monet (1871), Manet (1872), Léon Bonnat (1872), Jean-Léon Gérôme (1874), and Fantin-Latour (1875), to name a few, made the trek. Several German artists including Wilhelm Busch (1873), Franz von

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Fig. 122. Henri Fantin-Latour, Homage to Delacroix, 1864. Oil on canvas, 160 x 250 cm. rf 1664, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, donation Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, 1906 © rmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowsky.

Fig. 123. Frans Hals, Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard, 1627. Oil on canvas, 183 x 266.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson.

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Lenbach (1873, 1888, and 1898), and Max Liebermann (1872 and 1879) also made the voyage. Ilya Repin and others from eastern Europe likewise made a pilgrimage. The names of the American painters Mary Cassat (1873), J. Alden Weir (1875 and 1881), William Merrit Chase (1878), and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1882) can also be found in the logs.91 Ten-Doesschate Chu found that the visitors could be divided into three groups: the realists, the naturalists, and the conservatives. As she has argued, of those who visited the Municipal Museum in Haarlem, the ones who most readily adopted Halsian stylistic elements were those who practiced some form of naturalism.92 The high degree of naturalism and emphasis on the ephemeral in Hals’s pictures appealed to those painters who have been labeled realist and naturalist painters. Ten-Doesschate Chu characterized Fantin-Latour’s interest in Hals as indicative of the first wave of late nineteenthcentury admirers who first and foremost appreciated the Dutch master’s representation of contemporary life. For example, as Whistler said of works such as the Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard (fig. 123): “the great Haarlem groups were true to life as Frans Hals knew it.”93 With few exceptions, all of Hals’s subjects were drawn, or appear as if they were, from his immediate milieu rather than literary or historical sources.94 Moreover, Hals culled his subjects not just from the highest echelons of society but also from the lower class. In works such as Malle Babbe (fig. 26), the earthy, brown garments and ruddy face indicate that the figure was not a member of the financial or social elite. This egalitarianism of subject must have appealed to the realists who were interested in painting truthfully all aspects of contemporary society, including the lower classes. Indeed, Whistler’s estimation recalls the sentiments Courbet described in his so-called “Realist Manifesto” of 1855. There, Courbet stated that he desired “to record the manners, ideas and aspect of the age as I myself saw them – to be a man as well as a painter, in short to create living art – that is my aim.”95 From Whistler’s application of Courbet’s realist tenets to Hals, it is clear that the Dutch master’s version of naturalism struck a contemporary chord. Hals’s paintings executed in his signature rough manner also constituted a model for the representation of the real through their self-conscious materiality. As Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner have argued, Courbet proclaimed artifice in his paintings through heavy dabs of paint.96 This approach contrasted with the manner supported and institutionalized by the French Academy with its slick, licked finish that hid the trace of the artist’s hand and the materiality of the paint used to craft the picture. Rosen and Zerner reasoned that this manner of representation also distanced a painting from reality by being too precise and by denying the artifice of creation. Thus, a picture in the academic mode failed to convey the artifice of painting or the materiality of the painting itself; it operated only as an image and not as a painting created by someone. Rather than masking his role as creator, Courbet’s methods emphasized the act, the process of painting. As a result, it became impossible for viewers not to recognize that his pictures were paintings. As Rosen and Zerner wrote: “The ‘unfinished’ texture… implied a phenomenological realism, a faithful representation of the process of vision and an emphatic sense of the material presence of the work of art.”97 For Rosen and Zerner, Courbet’s manner affirmed the “reality of art” and the “reality” of what was represented. The same can be said for the realist and naturalist

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Fig. 124. Edouard Manet, Artist’s Parents, 1860. Oil on canvas, 110 x 90 cm. rf 1977-12, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, acquis grâce à la générosité de la famille Rouart-Manet, de Mme Jeannette Veil-Picard et d’un donateur étranger, 1977 © rmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowsky.

painters in France and Germany who followed Courbet’s example. Though each of these artists employed a distinctive style, they shared a gritty aesthetic utilizing either thick impasto or thinly applied layers – developed from passages of unblended brushwork. Rosen and Zerner’s argument, therefore, can be applied to mid- and late-nineteenth-century realist and naturalist painting as a whole. Similar features animate Hals’s paintings and Thoré-Bürger’s description of them. The self-conscious virtuosity of the highlights, contours drawn atop forms, and unblended brushstrokes divorced from illusionistic functions that populate Hals’s genre pictures and his painterly portraits after 1630 all proclaim the materiality of the paintings. Thus, Hals’s manner offered a pictorial syntax for rejecting academic precepts for handling and offered validation through historical precedent.

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Hals’s subjects and manner also attracted the sustained attention of Eduoard Manet (18321883), whose groundbreaking approach to painting owes much to the Dutch painter.98 During a trip to Holland, Manet fell under Hals’s spell.99 As Manet’s lifelong friend Antonin Proust recounted after the artist’s death: “The conscientiousness of the Italian primitives moved him and the boldness of Frans Hals’s forceful manner made such an impression on him in Holland that, back in Paris, armed with all those memories, he decided to take on frankly the diverse aspects of Parisian life.”100 Proust identified the influence of Hals’s work on Manet’s submission to the 1861 Salon, Portrait of the Artist’s Parents (fig. 124).101 Proust must have intended to compare Manet’s portrait with Hals’s marriage portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen (fig. 78) that the French painter most likely saw in the Rijksmuseum, but the similarities between the two pictures are superficial. Though truncated to the right, Manet repeated Hals’s figural arrangement with the couple appearing side by side, with the man on the left. Manet’s parents lack the vivacity and the intimacy of Massa and Van der Laen in their downcast gazes, trodden expressions, and overall lack of warmth. Perhaps the flattened figures of Madame Manet’s left hand, the strident folds of her white sleeve, and some of the modeling of Monsieur Manet’s face such as the light-toned crescent that shapes his upper cheekbone make passing reference to the Dutch painter’s breaks from strict illusionism. The overall plasticity of the forms and controlled brushwork, though, bear little resemblance to their supposed source. Though the similarities are not profound and though Proust only referenced Hals in relation to the early Portrait of the Artist’s Parents, some of Manet’s later works display a greater degree of indebtedness to the Dutch painter. Manet’s submission to the 1873 Salon, Le Bon Bock (fig. 125), is a clear updating of Hals’s Jolly Toper (fig. 36). Having just returned from his fourth trip to Holland in 1872, Manet undoubtedly had a picture in his head, if not a sketch in his hand, of Hals’s example that had been on view in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam since 1819. In both pictures, a single figure dressed in contemporary garb holds a glass of beer in his left hand and tilts his head to the left, facing outward. Manet’s handling of paint also recalls that found in the Jolly Toper. Though of a lighter complexion, the rosy tint of Manet’s figure’s cheeks and the juxtaposition of unblended jabs of flesh tones mimic those Hals employed to model his subject’s features. Similarly, the bold black strokes that mark the creases of the man’s waistcoat and the thin application of browns atop a dark ground in Manet’s picture parallel the build-up of paint in the Jolly Toper’s jerkin and the fringe of his sleeves. The references were not lost on those who attended the Salon. In response to Albert Wolff ’s criticism that Manet had put “water in his beer,” Alfred Stevens countered by saying that, if so, it must have been “pure Haarlem beer.”102 Manet continued to engage Hals’s art throughout the duration of his career. This can be seen, for example, in the French painter’s Self Portrait (fig. 126) from 1878. While it has been suggested that the pose derives from Velázquez’s example, much of Manet’s handling is Halsian.103 As in Hals’s sketchiest works, Manet lavished far more attention on the face than he did on any other element of the body. The attention to detail diminishes as the eye moves down from the face through the shoulders to a roughly worked-up torso until the left handle dissolves into an indecipherable smear of reds, browns, and grays. Also like Hals, though even less inhibited,

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Fig. 125. Edouard Manet, Le Bon Bock, 1873. Oil on canvas, 94.6 x 83.2 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mr. & Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson Collection.

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Fig. 126. Edouard Manet, Self-Portrait, 1879. Oil on canvas, 85.4 x 71 cm. Steven A. Cohen, Greenwich, Connecticut.

Manet drew atop modulated volumes of color to give shape to his forms, as in the umber marks that delineate the shoulder seam, the perimeter of the collar, and the notch in the lapel. Likewise, the meshwork of short, unblended color jabs in the face are closer to Hals than to Velázquez. By this point in his life, Manet had digested his various sources and synthesized them into a distinct personal style, but one can continue to discern the particular influence of Hals. Like Courbet, Manet may have invoked elements of Hals’s rough manner not only for their self-conscious materiality, but also for the performativity they implied. Echoing the earliest descriptions of Hals and his work, writers in Manet’s time imagined Hals in the act of painting and employed active language to focus the reader’s attention on it. Among the most evocative characterizations, Thoré-Bürger wrote in 1860: “One could say that Frans Hals painted as if fencing, and that he flicked his brush as if it were a foil. Oh, the adroit swashbuckler, extremely

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amusing to observe in his beautiful passes!”104 Also using the metaphor of swordplay, the critic Zacharie Astruc described Hals in 1866 as a “duelist with the brush… who builds, who sculpts, who gives impasto the palpitation of flesh.”105 Thoré-Bürger’s and Astruc’s comparisons of the artist’s brushwork to swordplay indicate that the critics were reading Hals’s act of painting from the pictures before them. Moreover, they imagined the performance to be a single, perhaps spontaneous, fixing of the image at a specific moment in the past, the antithesis of classical timelessness.106 If not cognizant of descriptions such as Thoré-Bürger’s and Astruc’s, Manet must have read Hals’s method directly from the self-referential, calligraphic marks, interested as he was in manifesting his process of creation. Richard Brettell has recently argued for the centrality of performativity, through emphasis on the act of painting, in Manet’s art.107 Like many artists in the 1860s and 1870s, Manet opened his studio to visitors while he was working. In doing so, he made a spectacle of his process and emphasized execution over conception.108 Viewers marveled at his facility with the brush. To encourage such responses, Manet often relied on facture and gesture. In small, commercial pictures like Peonies of 1864 (fig. 127), Manet worked with wet paints rich in oil and emphasized the tracks of the bristles so that each gesture was perceptible, as was the direction of the stroke.109 As Brettell has argued, even Manet’s more finished Salon submissions always contained bravura passages of gestural prowess where the artist’s execution was laid bare.110 In short, in nearly all of his pictures, Manet worked in bold, thick strokes that enable one to read and imagine how he constructed each object and each form. Furthermore, as Brettell has suggested, the roots of Manet’s gestural emphasis can be found, in part, in Hals’s paintings.111 Manet’s intentional exposure of gesture and handling led critics to characterize his paintings as unfinished, just as Hals’s work continued to be labeled as such in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne wrote in 1873, for example: “Has reality ever resembled these soft, shapeless mannequins, pallid, purplish, or black, crudely portrayed by means of sloppy and vague planes, without harmony or unity, which he [Manet] tries to offer us as the last word in modern art?”112 Likewise, Albert Bertall described Manet’s 1880 Salon submissions as “formless sketches, imperceptible outlines, representing without any reason or necessity such frightful and vulgar types, which haven’t even observation and truth for an excuse.”113 Manet’s choice to leave the brushwork exposed and colors unblended contrasted with official practice. As Albert Boime has explored, these features corresponded to sketches and the generative phase of painting.114 Academic practice encouraged the use of sketches in various stages of the process of creation, but these were studies – intermediary steps towards the completion of a project. They were not finished, completed pictures worthy of display or exhibition. The Academy’s preferred mode of representation was fini, or highly finished. This style offered minute details and smooth, licked surfaces. As the exhibitions of the Salon largely displayed only highly finished works and as government support went exclusively to artists sanctioned by the Academy and its Salon, fini became aligned with the academic and the official in France in the nineteenth-century. Thus, to be considered unfinished signaled a distance from the aesthetic and ideals of the Academy. Furthermore, as Rosen and Zerner have argued, utilization of a manner that was sketchy and “unfinished” conveyed not only an unacademic stance but also a rebellious, anti-academic one.115

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Fig. 127. Edouard Manet, Peonies, 1864. Oil on canvas, 56.8 x 46.2 cm. rf 1996, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, legs du comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911 © rmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowsky.

Manet also may have appropriated Hals’s use of contemporary subjects, implied performativity, and seeming lack of finish because he was interested in modernity in general. In his lifetime, Manet was widely recognized as a modern painter and leader of the modern school of painting. Noting the connection to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Theodore de Banville wrote: “Baudelaire was indeed right to esteem Manet’s paintings for this patient and sensitive artist is perhaps the only one in whose work one discovers that subtle feeling for modern life which was the exquisite originality of the Fleurs du mal.”116 More so, De Banville perceived the “intense quality of modernity” in works by Manet.117 After 1879, Manet figured prominently in reviews and articles in Emile Bergerat’s journal La Vie moderne.118 By April 1880, Manet received a large solo exhibition at the gallery owned and operated by La Vie moderne as part of the journal’s

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efforts to complement and promote its championing of modernity.119 Even those, or particularly those, who objected to Manet’s lack of finish, such as Ernst Duvergier, considered the artist to be the ultimate modernist.120 In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Manet’s friend and supporter Charles Baudelaire advocated that artists turn from the academy and its emphasis on the antique and the eternal by representing that which was modern. Baudelaire explained: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”121 As it was in the eighteenth century, modern was a term of difference; one that can be best understood as being in opposition to that which does not change. Lamenting the general state of artistic production at the time he wrote his essay, Baudelaire encouraged painters to immerse themselves in the present and to depict the ever-changing world around them in all its vitality. As he declared: “Once more to attempt a definition of the kind of subjects preferred by our artist, we would say that it is the outward show of life…”122 Furthermore, Baudelaire advised that a frenzied or spontaneous execution was ideal for painting these fleeting, vivacious moments: It is the fear of not going fast enough, of letting the phantom escape before the synthesis has been extracted and pinned down; it is that terrible fear which takes possession of all great artists and gives them such a passionate desire to become masters of every means of expression so that the orders of the brain may never be perverted by the hesitations of the hand and that finally execution, ideal execution, may become as unconscious and spontaneous as is digestion for a healthy man after dinner.123

In this way, subject and style were interdependent and the modern painter had to choose both a subject and a style that were implicitly modern. Already in the late nineteenth century, Hals’s art was acknowledged as a fundamental source for Manet and modern painting. Edgar Degas (1834-1917) supposedly said, facetiously, that Manet “did not paint fingernails because Frans Hals did not depict them.”124 As early as 1865, Astruc expounded upon modern painters’ relationships with Hals: The reputation of this master [Hals] will owe much to the modern school which he has greatly impressed and which celebrates him everywhere as an inspiration. The truth is that he represents a healthy and invigorating approach, he is true to his vision and it is now or never that the sincere path must be followed if the domain of French art is to be strengthened and expanded.125

Other writers in France around this time, such as Fromentin and Eugéne Véron, also recognized Hals’s importance to contemporary painters working outside the prescriptions of the academy who were self-consciously attempting to position themselves as moderns.126 For this reason, as Jowell stated, Hals figured prominently in late nineteenth-century discourses on modern art.127 As Astruc noted at this early date, however, the emulations of modern painters, such as Cour-

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bet and Manet, also affected the standing and perception of Hals at the end of the nineteenth century. As an acknowledged and recognized model for modern painters, Hals became categorized as modern in his own right in nineteenth-century terms. The most explicit example of this emerging conception appeared in an anonymous article published in 1883 in the Belgian periodical L’Art Moderne titled, “Le Modernisme de Frans Hals.”128 This article unequivocally praised Hals for his remarkable paintings and the impact they had on nineteenth-century artists. Specifically, the author compared Hals favorably to Manet: “Vision large et emue qui ramene la nature a ses elements synthetiques, caractere distinctif de Manet.”129 Building upon the relationship between the two artists’ works, the unknown author continued: “Frans Hals c’est un moderne. Son esthétique, son coloris, son dessin, ses procédés, appartiennent à notre époque.” As this passage indicates, Hals had become deeply ingrained in the aesthetic discourse as a modern painter by the 1880s. Moreover, this classification depended on his coloring, his drawing, and his overall aesthetic so that it was his rough manner that made him modern. Though the 1883 Belgian article is the first known description of Hals as specifically modern, such a characterization mirrors eighteenth-century constructions of the painter as being at odds with the classical and academic traditions. As Thoré-Bürger employed elements of prior criticisms but reversed them to read as positive attributes, the eighteenth-century image of the Dutch painter remained largely unchanged a century later. The difference was that attitudes had changed so that being modern or displaying a modern aesthetic had become valued traits for a growing number of viewers. One wonders, therefore, if Hals was embraced by self-consciously modern writers and artists because criticism had long made him an alternative to the academic mode. Alternatively, Hals may have appeared intrinsically modern independent of knowledge of the prior constructions, through his boldly unblended manner of juxtaposed calligraphic strokes that clashed with the classicizing styles supported by the academy. In either case, the widespread admiration of Hals and his paintings as modern cemented the artist’s newly won reputation. Indeed, subsequent constructions of his manner in the twentieth century recognized Hals as a key link in the developing tradition of modern painting.

The Modern Tradition Once Hals and his manner were widely perceived as modern, self-conscious modernists inevitably looked to his paintings. The most devoted and influential follower of Hals after Manet was Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). In her 1981 dissertation, Griselda Pollock examined Van Gogh’s intense, formative relationship with the art of Hals and the Dutch Golden Age.130 While in Drenthe, until around 1885, Van Gogh found the art of his countryman to be an antidote to the Barbizon and The Hague School painters with which he was familiar. Hals’s influence first appears in Van Gogh’s character heads such as that now in the Van Gogh Museum (fig. 128). Here, Van Gogh focused on a solitary individual and restricted his composition to the head only, as not even the shoulders entered the boundaries of the frame. Van Gogh’s painterly application and

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Fig. 128. Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Woman, 1885. Oil on canvas, 42.5 x 29.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

deep tones of browns and blacks seen in both Head of a Woman and the Potato Eaters were derived consciously from what he observed in the works of Hals. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “But tell me, black and white, may they be used or may they not, are they forbidden fruit? I don’t think so; Frans Hals has no less than twenty-seven blacks.”131 As George Keyes has noted, Van Gogh justified his dark mode through Hals’s exemplary use of black.132 Van Gogh was also taken with the speed and lack of finish he perceived in the Old Masters: What struck me the most on seeing the old Dutch pictures again is that most of them were painted quickly, and that these great masters, such as a Frans Hals, a Rembrandt, a Ruysdael [sic.] and so many others – dashed off a thing from the first stroke and did not retouch it so very much. And please note this too – if it was right, they left it as it was. I have especially admired the hands by Rembrandt and Hals, certain hands in “The Syndics,” even in “The Jewish Bride,” and in Frans Hals, hands that lived, but were not finished in the sense they demand nowadays. And heads too – eyes, nose, mouth done with a single stroke of the brush without any retouching whatever.133

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Van Gogh sensed the technical mastery and confidence of abilities in pictures by the Dutch Golden Age painters he admired. Hals, Rembrandt, and Van Ruisdael possessed the talent to work quickly without missteps. By linking these concepts to lack of finish in the hands painted by Rembrandt and Hals, Van Gogh saw the distance between their manners and those of his contemporaries. As he also wrote: I am more convinced than ever that the true painters did not finish their things in the way which is used only too often, namely correct when one scrutinizes it closely. The best pictures, and from a technical view the most complete, seen from near by, are but patches of color side by side, and only make an effect at a distance.134

To Van Gogh, Hals and other seventeenth-century Dutch artists were the most technically accomplished painters and this ability was unmistakably discernible in their fluid working methods, bold application of paint, and tendency to not overly finish their works. As such, Van Gogh attempted to emulate their examples. Pollock has demonstrated that the relevance of Hals’s art increased for Van Gogh after moving to France in 1886.135 Once there, Van Gogh altered his approach, quickly developing a lighter palette and employing strokes of unmodulated color. These changes can be related to Van Gogh’s encounters with the works of Manet and the Impressionists but also the writings of Thoré-Bürger and others that praised Hals. As Pollock has shown, Van Gogh frequently referred to Thoré-Bürger, Fromentin, and Blanc in his letters to his brother Theo, focusing especially on their discussions of the techniques of the Dutch Old Masters. Thus, Van Gogh engaged Hals through the constructions put forth by contemporary critics who transformed his own thoughts on the old master. Van Gogh came to see following Hals as the best path toward creating truth, and a new art. Perhaps the best examples through which to examine Van Gogh’s responses to Hals’s paintings are the portraits of the Roulin family that he painted in Arles. During his brief stay in the southern French city from February 1888 to April 1889, Van Gogh executed around three dozen portraits, most of which were of the local postman Joseph Roulin and his family.136 In Postman Joseph Roulin now in Boston (fig. 129), Van Gogh modeled his subject upon Hals’s Jolly Toper (fig. 36), as Pollock has convincingly argued. Though lacking the roemer of beer, the frontal pose of this comparably common figure rendered in contemporary clothing as well as the fluid, graphic handling of paint all derive from Hals’s precedent. In particular, the flushed cheeks framed by radiating striations of shadowy umbers, the layered jabs of short strokes that give volume to the figures’ facial hair, and the use of blacks to define the boundaries of shapes such as shoulders, and even the application of small swatches of pure red to accent the hands appear in both paintings. In other portraits of the Roulin family, Van Gogh similarly depended upon Halsian prototypes. Portait of Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle (fig. 130) recalls Catherina Hooft and Her Nurse (fig. 9) whereas Augustine Roulin (La Berceusse) repeats the pose of the pictures such as the portrait of a woman in Washington. Pollock argued that Van Gogh utilized recognizably Halsian

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Fig. 129. Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin, 1888. Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 65.4 cm. Photograph © 2011, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

conventions and handling to position his pictures in relation to the newly minted modernity of Hals.137 In this way, Van Gogh could proclaim his admiration for all that his countryman had come to stand for, but by adding a brighter, expressive color scheme he could also demonstrate his distance from historical precedent. As Van Gogh believed, it was through contemporary color theory that one could take the next step in the evolution of painting.138 Postman Joseph Roulin also relates to Manet’s Le Bon Bock (fig. 125), a riff on the Jolly Toper in its own right. The three-quarter length format that shows the figure sitting and the frontality of the chest and shoulders has far more in common with Manet’s picture than it does with Hals’s. Thus, Van Gogh simultaneously responded to both Manet and to Hals. In the process, Van Gogh illustrated his connection to, but also his difference from not one, but two of the most acclaimed modern masters. In this way, Van Gogh seems to have been positioning himself within an established modern tradition, an artistic lineage that could be traced back to Hals. Van Gogh considered himself to be part of an

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Fig. 130. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle, c. 1888-1889. Oil on canvas, 92.4 x 73.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of L.

artistic continuum, or as he put it, “a link in the chain of artists.”139 His models suggest that Van Gogh considered himself a link in the chain of modern art. The first extended analysis of Van Gogh continued the artist’s project of defining his artistic ancestry, in part, in relation to Hals. In 1890, Albert Aurier wrote of Van Gogh: “He is truly and completely Dutch, of the sublime lineage of Frans Hals.”140 As Pollock has examined, this comparison couched in terms of familial relation provided Aurier with the means to define Van Gogh’s art to an audience that was unfamiliar with his paintings.141 Characterizing Van Gogh as an artistic descendent of Hals informed readers that the nineteenth-century artist painted contemporary subjects with a rough, bravura brush and validated him for doing so. Aurier was not the only writer to attempt to champion or praise a contemporary artist by comparing him to Hals. In 1884, Paul Mantz wrote of Hals that he was an “ever-glorious ancestor” of modern artists.142 Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Mantz looked back to find the roots of his present condition. Likewise, in praising Manet’s Bar at the Folgies Bergere in 1882, Louis de Fourcard wrote: “It is one of the best, the most original, most novel, and most harmonious paintings he has produced…For a long time the most talented painters have done justice to Manet. The time will come when he will be ranked as the Goya of France, endowed with some of the virtues of Frans Hals.”143 This process of comparison continued into the next century and was not restricted to France. For example, in 1909, the cultural critic Kenyon Cox considered John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) to be the modern counterpart to Hals: “The masters with whom it is

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inevitable that he [Sargent] should be compared are Hals and Velasquez [sic.]; and if it must be left to posterity to say how nearly he has equaled them, we can be sure, even now, that his work is more like theirs than any other that has been produced in the past century.”144 Cox, like Mantz and Foucard, legitimized a contemporary painter through positive comparison to Hals reinforcing the Dutch artist’s connections to modern art. As the above examples indicate, Hals had become part of the tradition of modern painting. As part of efforts to validate contemporary artistic endeavors and manners, painters and writers at the end of the nineteenth century crafted an artistic ancestry for themselves. Rather than appearing as solely avant-garde, they traced connections back to artists who employed elements or styles similar to their own. More so, they forged artistic roots, orienting themselves in relation to what was already considered modern. The result was a lineage of modern artists and a tradition of modern painting. Manet, the ultimate modern artist of the nineteenth century, had found his personal aesthetic through engagement with Hals’s manner. Over time, Van Gogh himself ascended to these ranks, in part through his deliberate engagement with the art of Hals and Manet. Thus, a lineage of painterly painters – each of whom was considered modern – was formed, each building on the accomplishments of the other in an almost self-consciously dialectical and evolutionary sense. This lineage of self-consciously modern artists was defined and proclaimed through stylistic associations. While the impact of this process on the development of modern art lies beyond the scope of this study, Hals’s prominent position in this modern tradition significantly affected responses to the artist, his paintings, and his manner in the twentieth century. As various modern painters engaged with Impressionism were characterized as artistic descendants of him, Hals, by extension, came to be discussed in Impressionist terms. Throughout the twentieth century, writers on Hals routinely focused on the elements that Impressionist artists such as Manet had appropriated and that critics had labeled as Impressionistic. Among the more interesting and perhaps more influential cases of this development is the writing of Heinrich Wölfflin. Though not a monographic study, Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichte Grundbegriffe of 1915 propelled the Impressionist image of the artist.145 Daniel Adler has argued that Wölfflin’s work was influenced by the malerisch aesthetic of contemporary German painters such as Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900), Franz von Lenbach (1836-1904), and Max Liebermann (1847-1935) whose naturalist programs were heavily dependent upon Hals’s style and the displays of the Dutch painter’s pictures in the Berlin museums.146 At the core of Wölfflin’s seminal approach to the history of style are a series of binary oppositions. Among the most important is linear versus painterly.147 As Wölfflin defined the distinction between the two concepts: “The linear style is the style of distinctness, plastically felt…The painterly style, on the other hand, has more or less emancipated itself from things as they are. For it, there is no longer a continuous outline and the plastic surfaces are dissolved.”148 The plasticity of the rendered subject also held a temporal component for Wölfflin:

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While the strongly stressed outline fixes the present moment, it lies in the essence of a painterly representation to give it an indeterminate character: form begins to play; lights and shadows become an independent element, they seek and hold each other from height to height, from depth to depth; the whole takes on the semblance of a movement ceaselessly emanating, never ending. Whether the movement be leaping and vehement, or only a gentle quiver and flicker, it remains for the spectator inexhaustible. We can thus further define the difference between the styles by saying that linear vision sharply distinguishes form from form, while the painterly eye on the other hand aims at that movement which passes over the sum of things.149

Whereas a linear work displays concentration on form and volume, the painterly produces “the general impression of movement” or what he termed “the painterly impression.”150 Wölfflin’s choice of terminology was not coincidental. For him, Impressionism was one type of painterly method: “Although we are accustomed to describe only the higher degrees as impressionism, we must always bear in mind that these do not signify something especially new. It would be difficult to fix the point at which the merely ‘painterly’ ceases and ‘impressionist’ begins.”151 Impressionist and painterly paintings were, at some level, essentially one and the same for Wölfflin. As Adler has argued, this linkage of the painterly with a recent artistic movement whose impact was continuing to be felt at the time of publication indicates that Wölfflin considered the painterly to be more advanced and therefore more modern than the linear.152 Likewise, that which was painterly, regardless of when it was produced, was also, to some degree, Impressionistic. The painterly, and hence the modern, however, was not restricted to Impressionism or the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for Wölfflin. He instead focused on the painterliness of Baroque art as it contrasted with the linearity of the Renaissance.153 To illustrate his arguments, Wölfflin employed a comparison between a portrait by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and one by Hals, with the Dutch artist acting as the prototypical painterly painter.154 Given Wölfflin’s articulation that the painterly was Impressionistic and modern, the underlying assumption was that Hals was too. In this conception of the painterly artist as modern, or perhaps proto-modern, Wölfflin’s dichotomy seems to be a derivation of the binary stylistic opposites of ancient/modern and academic/unacademic. In a sense, Wölfflin popularized new terms and set limits for a new discourse on style, but the ideology of his language perpetuated old constructions. Wölfflin was not alone; other, more explicit descriptions of Hals’s distinctive manner as Impressionistic, or proto-Impressionistic, occurred throughout the first half of the twentieth century. For example, in 1909 Wilhelm Valentiner wrote for an American audience: “His brushwork displays a self-consciousness and individuality undreamed of by an earlier artist. He was the most “modern” of his time, knowing that with his fluid, sketch-like brushstrokes he obtained a mobility and animation never before reached, and realizing that his colors seemed thereby more luminous and deeper.”155 Valentiner implied a correlation between Hals’s vigorously fluid brushstrokes and the art of the late nineteenth century. In the same year, Charles Caffin was more direct:

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Yes, he was an Impressionist. The term, as we know, is modern, dating from about 1871, but the idea involved in it has been derived from the example of Frans Hals and of his great contemporary Velazquez… It did not survive their generation, for the artists of the next century turned again to Italy, and Hals and Velazquez were practically forgotten, until the early sixties of the nineteenth century when Edouard Manet rediscovered Velazquez, and the study of him led to the recognition of Hals, so that both became an example and inspiration to modern art.156

For Caffin, Hals not only influenced Impressionism and modern art, he was also an Impressionist himself. In his catalogue raisonné on Hals published in German in 1921, Valentiner essentially repeated his earlier estimations, but this time he also stressed and endorsed Hals’s importance by relating him to the Impressionists.157 There, he noted how Impressionist painters and the collectors of their art guided a new appreciation for the Haarlem master’s paintings.158 Conceiving of Hals in relation to nineteenth-century painters or describing his manner in Impressionistic terms was not restricted to the first decades of the twentieth century. These ideas continued to resonate, finding their way into the most recent scholarship on the artist. Most notably, in his 1990 study, Claus Grimm devoted considerable attention to Hals’s relationship to the art of the late nineteenth century. Seeing Hals’s manner as not only distinctive, but also “a peculiar quirk” in the artist’s lifetime, Grimm focused his comparisons on later painters.159 Describing Hals as a “precursor of Manet” and “a first anticipation of Paul Cézanne’s way of painting” while also linking the Dutch painter to Courbet, Leibl, and Van Gogh, Grimm wrote: “The peinture, the prominence of the individual stroke, is eventually the bridge between the tradition of representing a commissioned subject and the subjective enjoyment of abstract patterns of color and shape.”160 Even more directly than noting these influences, Grimm described Hals in relation to these later inspirations, calling him “a painter of visual impressions.”161 In this focus on the afterlife of Hals’s paintings, at the expense of considering its appeal to the artist’s contemporaries, Grimm’s discussion follows the longstanding pattern of emphasizing a perceived modernity. Written texts were not the only location where Hals’s image was fixed as that of a modern painter. Exhibitions of his paintings also participated in the process. In the twentieth century, several exhibitions devoted entirely or largely to Hals’s pictures developed from the widespread acquisition of the painter’s works by public museums and galleries initiated in the last decades of the nineteenth century.162 Valentiner staged two major exhibitions of Hals’s pictures: at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1935 and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1947. In these shows, Valentiner repeated, in some cases verbatim, his earlier characterizations of the artist. For example, Valentiner wrote in the catalogue for the display in Detroit: When we recall that even in the sixteenth century, with artists like Pieter Brueghel [sic.] for instance, the firm outlines and compact technique of the primitive masters reigned everywhere, we become conscious that Frans Hals with his art of instantaneous expression and of personal brush stroke destroyed tradition and introduced a new epoch of subjective conception and technique.163

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Similar conceptions occurred in the exhibition staged in 1962 in honor of the centennial of the founding of the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. Throughout the introduction to the accompanying catalogue, H. P. Baard, director of the museum, included descriptions of Hals’s brushwork as “that free, impressionistic touch which made him immortal.”164 Likewise, Baard validated Hals’s achievements by writing of the artist’s manner: “The import of this phenomenon cannot be adequately grasped unless one compares it with the touch of nineteenth-century impressionists.”165 Unlike similar proclamations found in scholarly texts, those in exhibitions addressed not only scholars, but also a wider swatch of the public at large. Throughout the twentieth century in formats and media as diverse as Valentiner’s monograph, Wölfflin’s general art historical study, and exhibitions for the public, the image of Hals and his manner became fixed to that of Impressionist painters. In all of these outlets, Hals was continually linked to these groundbreaking artists of the late nineteenth century, and his works were persistently described in terms that evoked comparison with those painters. These continual associations entrenched the idea of a tradition and the positions of different artists within that tradition. For Hals, this entrenchment process cemented the conception of the artist, and his manner, as modern or proto-modern.

“Fated Always to Look Modern” From the early eighteenth century, possibly even in the artist’s own lifetime, through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hals’s manner of painting has consistently been considered to be modern. As Hals and his signature style bear the weight of the historical associations of the term, responses have oscillated between the positive and negative based on changing reactions to the concept of modern. In this way, the modernity of Hals and his signature style is perhaps not a construction or projection, but rather he is inextricably interwoven into the discourse on the modern and into the modern aesthetic itself. Hals’s art has played a pivotal role in shaping the aesthetic that has come to be understood, even now, as modern. Clement Greenberg, the champion of Abstract Expressionism and artists such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), most influentially verbalized the aesthetic concerns of avant-garde art in America in the mid-twentieth century. In 1965 Greenberg described modernist painting: Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting – the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment – were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Modernist painting has come to regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly.166

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By emphasizing rather than masking the flatness of the surface, the shape of the support, and the properties of the pigments, a modernist painting affirmed its materiality and its madeness.167 Richard Wollheim has offered a similar definition of modern art: My suggestion is this: that for the mainstream of modern art, we can postulate a theory that emphasizes the material character of art, a theory according to which a work of art is importantly or significantly, and not just peripherally, a physical object. Such a theory, I am suggesting, underlies or regulates much of the art activity of our age, and it is it that accounts for many of the triumphs and perhaps not a few disasters of modern art. Within the concept of art under which most of the finest, certainly most of the boldest, works of our age have been made, the connotation of physicality moves to the fore.168

Concurring with Greenberg and working from his postulations, Wollheim believes that selfconscious materiality defines or distinguishes that which is modern in art from that which is not. Though he encouraged Pollock and others to take painting in new non-representational directions, Greenberg perceived continuity between contemporary art and what had come before it. Indeed, Greenberg traced the modernist aesthetic back to Manet.169 Although Manet’s art was representational, his paintings emphasized their materiality through gesture and flatness, affirming their status as paintings. For Greenberg, Manet constituted an early step toward a completely abstract and modern art. Greenberg’s identification of Manet as the father of modern art is not an isolated one. Today, numerous histories of “modern art” begin with Manet.170 In genealogical terms, if Manet was the father of modern art, then the painters from whom he developed must be its grandfathers, or at least occupy some branch of the modernist family tree. Indeed, aesthetic relationships exist between Hals’s paintings and Greenberg’s conception of modernist art. Greenberg wrote, “Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first.”171 Though the critic never addressed Hals’s paintings or differentiated him from other old masters, much of what Greenberg defined as modernist painting appears in the Dutch artist’s works, and the history of written estimations of them.172 In his attention to the specificity of the medium and the ensuing formal elements that result in paint, Greenberg’s view rephrases several of the key features of Wölfflin’s characterization of painterly painting of which Hals’s work stood as the primary example. To wit, one finds flatness, materiality, and perhaps even a formalist approach in Hals’s pictures executed in the painter’s signature rough manner, such as the Fisher Boy in Antwerp (fig. 86) and the Portrait of a Man (fig. 75) in Boston. The sleeves of each figure’s loosely fitted garments dissolve into passages of unblended brushwork that call attention to the virtuosity of the execution, but fail to give volume to the arms beneath. Below the long locks of the Boston Portrait of a Man, one encounters a terrain of mauves, reds, and blacks that lies flat upon the surface of the canvas. Even from a distance, these marks appear as brushstrokes rather than folds or crinkles in the man’s silken robe. Though not as abstracted, the deep blacks and heavy grays that function as shadowy passages also confirm their status as traces of Hals’s brush. In short, there is an implicit affirmation that each work is a painting.

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Greenberg’s contemporary, and sometime rival, Harold Rosenberg argued that in midtwentieth-century Modern Art, pictures were not just paintings, but were products and records of the act of painting. As early as 1952, Rosenberg identified what he coined “action painting” to be the defining aesthetic of his time. At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture, but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.173

Rosenberg’s conception of the action painter certainly holds for an artist like Pollack. Pollock did not just flatten pictorial space and work in a completely abstracted manner, he self-consciously applied paint in theatrical drips, flings, and drizzles. One can read this process from Pollack’s paintings, but the relation was strengthened by Hans Namuth’s photographs that captured the artist at work. From the beginning, these images and/or Namuth’s video of Pollack painting appeared alongside reproductions of the drip paintings, as they do today in art history texts. In this way, the new art that Rosenberg described and that we now understand as modern is inherently tied to the self-conscious making of art. In other words, the recognition of the object as a product and record of the creative process has come to be widely accepted in the latter half of the twentieth-century as a feature, if not a defining feature, of art of the modern era. New art, art that we now understand as modern, is self-consciously about the making of art. Hals’s paintings have consistently stood as registers of the act of painting. From the earliest descriptions of Schrevelius and Ampzing through Houbraken’s oft-repeated topoi to ThoréBürger’s enthusiastic musings and beyond writers have imagined Hals at work when faced with his paintings. Viewers read the lengthy, unblended brushstrokes as strokes, marks made by the master, and as touches. The terminology is crucial. In every instance, the lines of paint appear in the mind as intertwined with Hals’s direct physical intervention on the canvas. These interpretations variously anticipate and recall Rosenberg’s “action painting.” One also finds formal similarities between many modernist paintings produced in the mid-twentieth century of the type favored by Greenberg and Rosenberg and those by Hals. While there is no reason to believe that mid-twentieth-century artists such as Abstract Expressionists like Pollock and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), among others, drew inspiration from Hals’s paintings, their emphasis on gesture bears some similarities to Hals’s calligraphic handling. The use of unblended brushstrokes divorced from illusionistic functions that implicitly reference the act of making them is a defining feature of much modern painting. Likewise, Hals’s sketchiness and nearly abstracted passages of unmodulated color have formal counterparts in twentieth-century artistic practice. As a result, though motivations for employing these related

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elements in the mid-twentieth century differed tremendously, Hals’s paintings look modern, or at least proto-modern, in relation to much of the art produced in the 1940s and after. Through modernist formal elements, Hals’s manner also reveals other, though not all, topologies, or patterns of discourse – both visual and textual – of modernity. Most immediately, Hals’s distinctive pictorial means reflect subjectivity. As Jonathan Hay has explored in relation to the seventeenth-century Chinese artist Shitao (1642-1707), reflexive subjectivity lies at the heart of the modern condition and can be embodied in gestural painting.174 Taking his conception of subjectivity and its manifestations in modernity from the writings of the sociologist Anthony Giddens and the philosopher Andrew Bowie, Hay argues for the modernity of Shitao’s paintings, in part, for its embedded subjectivity – an individual’s authorial presence in a work of art.175 Giddens, in particular, has argued that subjectivity is the defining feature of modernity.176 In contrast to the pre-modern where the individual is not necessarily or not always self-aware, the dynamism of modernity is played out through the self-conscious individual. As Giddens has posited, in modernity the self is a “reflexive project.” 177 For Hay, it is the calligraphic handling of gestural painting that operates as the author’s trace, exposing the subject because it reflexively calls attention to the maker of the marks. Hay’s postulations recall critics like Rosenberg as well. Rosenberg similarly argued for mid-twentieth-century art wherein once a painting is recognized as the product of an act, that act becomes inseparable from the biography and identity of the artist.178 Hals’s paintings and the history of criticism of them both register subjectivity in much the same terms. Over the course of his career, Hals increasingly employed dexterous touches that stand apart from all other marks and consequently beg imaginative consideration of the artist who applied these strokes. Since the artist’s lifetime, viewers have read Hals’s presence from these reflexive marks. As Theodorus Schrevelius noted in 1648, only Hals’s authorship could be read from these touches as Hals’s manner was “uniquely his.”179 In 1718, Houbraken similarly intuited that Hals self-consciously applied these marks as “the master’s touch.”180 In the nineteenth century, Thoré-Bürger’s imagining of Hals wielding his brush as if it were a fencing foil and even the present study’s concentration on method indicate how his paintings have continued to encourage consideration of the artist at work. Put differently, Hals’s paintings register the painter’s subjectivity, thereby positioning them as modern. Hals’s art may also reveal the modernity of the time in which it was produced. To recall the example of Shitao once more, Hay has argued that the artist’s modernity not only developed from, but also signals the modern conditions of seventeenth-century China.181 Similar arguments can be made for Hals and the Dutch Republic. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude have recently defined the country as having “the first modern economy.”182 They based their assessment on the republic’s pre-industrial, yet modern economic growth that was evidenced by rationality, conscious efforts to maximize economic well-being (by individuals, corporations, and political bodies), and dynamic and innovative social processes that improved the efficiency of production and distribution (urbanization, education, mobility, and monetization). The reflexive subjectivity embedded in Hals’s signature rough manner developed in relation to these market conditions.

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The commodification of Hals’s paintings that resulted from the specific economic environment of seventeenth-century Haarlem is another topology of modernity. As Paul Wood as has written, “A case can be made for modern art’s having been forced onto its characteristic terrain of subjectivity, expression, authenticity, and abstraction because of the absolute sway of the commodity in the historical experience of modernity.”183 A market economy that relies on the production and consumption of commodities is widely understood as one of the leading conditions of modernity.184 In art, this condition manifests itself as the commodification of art and culture.185 Wood defined commodity as “the term given to products when the process of production is centered on market exchange.”186 For art to be a commodity, therefore, the artwork needs to be fundamentally conceived of and produced with the explicit intent of selling it for money. Throughout this study, I have argued that economic motivations, especially those of the market, were often a driving force in Hals’s art. For example, the initial development of the rough manner for genre paintings intended to be sold at various open market outlets signals that Hals understood his paintings to be commodities as does his repeated efforts to target specific clienteles. In this way, Hals’s artistic and business strategies are, in many ways, modern. De Vries and Van der Woude’s argument, in effect, extends beyond the economy, to the society as a whole since their claims for the modernity of the economy develop directly from their study of societal factors. By arguing for the modernity of the economy, they concurrently make a case for the modernity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch society.187 In support of De Vries and Van der Woude’s position, many, though not all, of the features of the Dutch Republic meet the conditions for modernity as posed by Malcolm Waters.188 The history of criticism of Hals’s paintings indicates that individuals have frequently read this context in which the pictures were created from the works of art. Thoré-Bürger’s perceived what he considered to be the freedom and individuality of the people of the Dutch Republic from Hals’s figures and Valentiner’s imagining of the Dutch colonists from these same pictures are two examples of the phenomenon. The implicit understanding of, and support for, Hals’s signature style communicated by roughly painted portraits of wealthy Haarlem burghers likewise has been taken as a reflection of the modernity of the society in which this art could and did develop. This book can also be counted amongst the efforts to understand aspects of the modernity of Hals’s time through the artist’s paintings, style, and artistic processes. These varied sources suggest that Hals’s paintings can and have appeared as illustrative, if not representative, of the modernity of the Dutch Republic. In the postmodern cultural environment, it is no surprise then that an artist so interwoven into discourses on modernity would fail to strike a chord. In comparison with the 1996 Vermeer exhibition, Slive’s 1989 Hals show at the National Gallery of Art generated far less interest, both popularly and scholarly. At the same venue, over 130,000 more people saw Vermeer than attended the exhibition of Hals’s paintings.189 Likewise, Michael Kernan’s 1994 novel The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals is the only counterpart to the series of widely successful fictions that continue to flood the market in the wake of Vermeer.190 Aside from a couple of articles and numerous studies on artists from Hals’s circle in Haarlem, the present study is the first monographic treatment of Hals in twenty years, while examinations of Vermeer have exploded. The reason for this may lie

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in the styles of the two artists. Vermeer’s engagement with optics, ambiguous and open-ended narratives, and seeming lack of artistic presence within the picture all appeal to the postmodern mindset. Alternatively, the emphatic self-referential brushwork and blatant materiality of Hals’s canvases that exhibitions and written estimations have cemented as the marks of an icon of modernity seemingly fail to resonate as soundly with contemporary audiences’ postmodern sensibilities. 191 Likewise, Vermeer achieved interiority by crafting thinking, privately autonomous individuals that seem current in their quiet introspection.192 Hals’s bravura brushwork and its concomitant energizing of figures that are in almost every way oriented externally rather than internally disrupt any sense of comparably detached contemplation As Jürgen Habermas wrote of modernism in 1981: “this spirit of aesthetic modernity has recently begun to age. It has been recited once more in the 1960s; after the 1970s, however, we must admit to ourselves that this modernism arouses a much fainter response today than it did fifteen years ago.”193 In even stronger terms, as Habermas also noted, the postmodern, while an equally nebulous term as modern, can at its base often be considered to be anti-modern.194 Most notably, critics, theorists, and artists have attempted to deconstruct the subjectivity that is so central to the modern. The diminished appeal of Hals’s work in the postmodern period, therefore, may stand as evidence that his manner remains modern. As Hals’s art continues to reveal topologies of modernity as it has since at least the early eighteenth century, and possibly the artist’s lifetime, one must consider whether the painter’s manner is always already modern. The contemporary British painter Lucian Freud (1922-2011) stated as much when he said that Hals is “fated always to look modern.”195 Freud’s choice of tense agrees with the history of criticism. Although the definition of modern and consideration of it as a positive or a negative term seem to be far from stable, Hals’s rough manner appears to be inextricably linked to conceptions of the modern and the modern aesthetic. In this way, Hals’s paintings have appeared, do appear, and perhaps always will appear to be modern.

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T. Schrevelius, Harlemias ofte, om beter te seggen, de eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem (Haarlem: Thomas Fonteyn, 1648), 383. Arnold Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, vol. 1, ed. Petrus Theodorus Arnoldus Swillens (1718-21; repr. Maastricht: Leiter-Nypels, 1943), 73. Among the numerous examples, see Eugene Fromentin, Les Maitres d’Autrefois. Belgique, Hollande (Paris: E. Plon, 1876), trans. Mary Robbins as The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland (New York: Schocken, 1963); Zacharie Astruc, “Trésors d’art de Paris: Exposition Rétrospective, Portraits.” L’Etendard 23 July 1866, reprinted in Sharon Flesher, Zacharie Astruc: Critic, Artist and Japoniste (New York and London: Garland, 1973), 299; and Valentiner, Frans Hals (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1923). Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, trans. Jürgen Riehle (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 86. Pieter Biesboer, “The Burghers of Haarlem and Their Portrait Painters,” in Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 23-44. Meyer Schapiro, “Style,” 1953 in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: George Braziller), 103-34. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Walter Liedtke, “Style in Dutch Art,” in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 116-128. Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Eric Jan Sluijter, “Didactic and Disguised Meanings? Several Seventeenth-Century Texts on Painting and the Iconological Approach to Dutch Paintings of This Period,” in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 78-87. Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt. The Painter at Work (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 135. Conservators at the Frans Hals Museum conducted significant technical analysis of the master’s paintings prior to and during the 1989 Hals exhibition in Haarlem, Washington, and London. The results of these studies are available in Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks’s essay for the exhibition catalogue and, more extensively, in an unpublished report available at the Frans Hals Museum and the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague. Groen and Hendriks, “Frans Hals: A Technical Examination,” 109-27; and Ella Hendriks and Koos Levy-van Halm, “Report Concerning a Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings Exhibited During the Frans Hals Exhibition, Held From May 11 to July 22, 1990 in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, 1991” (unpublished report). Ella Hendriks, “Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck: the technique of a seventeenth-century Haarlem portraitist,” Leids Kunsthistorich Jaarboek 11 (1998): 227-67; and E. Melanie Gifford, “Jan van Goyen en de techniek van het naturalistische landschap” in Vogelaar, ed., Jan van Goyen, 70-79.

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Richard Brettell, Impression. Painting Quickly in France 1860-1890 (London: The National Gallery; Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; and Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2000). Schrevelius, Harlemias, 383. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 36. Stephan Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioing: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Though roughly worked and seriously abraded, Seymour Slive has argued that the portrait of Descartes in Copenhagen is the sole, autograph original. Seymour Slive, Frans Hals, (London and New York: Phaidon, 1970-74), vol. 3, 175. The finely painted and well-preserved portrait of Descartes in the Louvre that has served as the standard image of the philosopher follows a Halsian prototype, possibly that in Copenhagen, but is by another hand. H. Perry Chapman, Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits. A Study in Seventeenth-Century Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt: The Artist and His Studio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot, eds., Rembrandt By Himself (London: The National Gallery and The Hague: Mauritshuis, 1999) and Alan Chong, ed., Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt. Art and Ambition in Leiden, 1629-1631 (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2000). See especially the essay in the former by Ernst van de Wetering (“The Multiple functions of Rembrandt’s Self Portraits,” 8-37) and those in the latter by Arthur Wheelock (“Rembrandt Inventing Himself,” 13-24) and Mariët Westermann (“Making a Mark in Rembrandt’s Leiden,” 25-50). Mariët Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1997) and Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Chapman also explored Steen’s self-fashioning in his embedded self-portraits in her essay “Jan Steen, Player in His Own Paintings,” in Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller, ed. Perry Chapman, Wouter Kloek, and Arthur Wheelock (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; and Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1996), 10-23. “Le style c’est l’homme même.” Georges-Louis le Clerc, Histoire Naturelle (Paris, 1753) VII. p. xvii. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1960), sect 27. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2005), 87-110. See, for example, John Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft. A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Marion Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt: Haarlem 1600-1635” (Ph.D. diss. Universiteit van Leiden, 2001), 46. Ibid., 48. Ann Jensen Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009): 59-61. For more general discussions of how modern ideas of self and subjectivity originated in the seventeenth century, see William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) and Seigel, The Idea of the Self. Michel de Montaigne, Les essays de Michel seigneur de Montaigne (Leiden: Jean Doreau, 1602). K.R. Gallas, “Recherches sur les rapports littéraires entre la France et la Hollande pendant trios siècles,” in Revue de la literature comparée 7 (1929), 316-335 and G. Knuvelder, Handboek tot de geschiedenis der Nederlandse letterkunde, 4 vols. (’s-Hertogenbosch: Malmberg, 1970-76).

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René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia (Amsterdam: Ludovicus Elzavirius, 1642). See P. Dibbon, “Constantijn Huygens et le ‘Discours de la Méthode,” Glanes (1950), 17-26 and Hans Bot, ed., Constantijn Huygens. Zijn Plaats in Geleerd Europa, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1973). John Locke, “Extrait Philosophique, concernant l’entendement,” Bibliothéque Universelle et Historique, Amsterdam, vol. 8 ( January 1688): 49-142 and vol. 17: 399-427. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Many of their positions can be traced back to Max Weber’s famous attempt to locate the roots of modern economic systems to early Protestant societies. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 2002). The longstanding perception is that modernity and industrialization, which is itself an outgrowth of capitalization, are one and the same. See for example, Krishan Kumar, “Modernization and Industrialization,” in Modernity: Critical Concepts, vol. 1, ed. Malcolm Waters (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 72104. This position has, however, begun to be questioned. See, for example, De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Paul Wood defined commodity as “the term given to products when the process of production is centered on market exchange.” Wood’s definition develops from Karl Marx’s discussion of commodities and the distinction between “use value” and “exchange value.” Paul Wood, “Commodity,” in Critical Terms for Art History, Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 258. Acknowledgement of this condition can be found at least as early as 1936 in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 512-520. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Wood, “Commodity.” “A nostri giorni, non si costuma tra Professori di questa, che garire tra di loro della maniera, del gusto, e dello stile…” G.B. Passeri, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti che hanno lavorato in Roma, morti dal 1641 fino al 1673, (Rome, 1673-79) 11 as translated in Sohm, Style, 19. Peter Hecht, “Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: A Reassessment of Some Current Hypotheses,” in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 96. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Art and Literature no. 4 (Spring 1965), 193-201, reprinted in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, ed. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Harper and Row, 1982). Anonymous, “Le Modernisme de Frans Hals,” L’Art Moderne 111 (September 23, 1883), 301-3. Frances Suzman Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” in Seymour Slive, ed., Frans Hals (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; London: Royal Academy of Arts; and Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum, 1989), 61-86. “[Freud’s] portraits record his fascination with Frans Hals, an artist [according to Freud] ‘fated always to look modern, to the point of coarseness – when people are shocked by Hals, I think they have a real sensibility.’ Thinking about Hals attuned Freud’s tonic sense of protuberance and flattening, the elastic vigor of form, and what it could gain from direct strokes with stiff bristles.” Robert Hughes, Lucian Freud: Paintings (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 18.

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Theodorus Schrevelius, Harlemias ofte, om beter te seggen, de eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem (Haarlem: Thomas Fonteyn, 1648), 383. Schrevelius sat for Hals at least once, in 1617. The portrait is now in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. See Seymour Slive, ed., Frans Hals (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; London: Royal Academy of Arts; and Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum, 1989), 141-143 and Martin Bijl, “The Portrait of Theodorus Schrevelius,” in Marieke van den Doel, Marieke van Eck, Anna Tummers, and Thijs Weststeijn, eds. The Learned Eye. Regarding Art, Theory, and the Artist’s Reputation (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 47-58. Slive also suggested that Hals painted Schrevelius again in 1628. Seymour Slive, Frans Hals (New York and London: Phaidon, 1970-74), vol. 3, 31-32. Gregor Weber, Der Lobtopos des “lebenden” Bildes: Jan Vos und sein ‘Zeege der schilderkunst’ von 1654 (New York: G. Olms, 1991). For Hals’s relationship to the conventions of marriage portraiture, see David Smith, Masks of Wedlock: seventeenth-century Dutch marriage portraits (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 91-116. Hals’s genre pictures are notoriously difficult to date. Hals only dated two genre images: the so-called Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart dated 1623 (fig. 82) and the Fruit and Vegetable Seller (fig. 84) collaboration with Claes van Heussen dated 1630. The So-called Mulatto (fig. 98) in Leipzig can be dated before 1629, as it was engraved by Jacques de Gheyn II who died in that year. Similarities in handling and, as Numas Trivas pointed out, the fact that the subjects of the genre pictures fit closely with the development of genre painting in the Dutch Republic in the 1620s allow us to place the remainder of Hals’s genre pictures in that decade. For a more comprehensive discussion of the dating of Hals’s genre paintings, see Numas Trivas, Frans Hals (London: Phaidon, 1941), 16; and Seymour Slive, Frans Hals (1970), vol. 1, 72-111. Representations of such unequal couples were common in northern European genre painting. For example, see Quentin Metsys’s Ill-Matched Lovers from about 1520-25 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Pieter Biesboer and Martina Sitt, Satire en Vermaak: het genrestuk van Frans Hals en zijn tijdgenoten 16101670 (Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum and Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2003), 10. Hendrik Pot as well as Jacob Duck and Jan Miense Molenaer continued the practice in Haarlem. Pieter Codde and Adriaen van de Venne, among other painters active in urban centers outside Haarlem, also employed this technique. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, translated by Evelyn Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 209. Ibid., 209-15. See for example Frans Pietersz. de Grebber’s civic guard paintings from 1600, 1610, and 1618-19 now in the Frans Hals Museum. The temporality of Hals’s works relates to those in Rembrandt’s narrative group portraits the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp and The Nightwatch. Both create a sense of the momentary through activated figures. One should remember that Rembrandt’s paintings, from 1632 and 1641 respectively, postdate those by Hals. Harry Berger, Jr. Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt’s “Nightwatch” and Other Dutch Group Portraits (New York: Fordham University, 2007), 20-22. Ann Jensen Adams, “The Three-Quarter Length Life-Sized Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Cultural Functions of Tranquilitas,” in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 157-94. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983), 26-71.

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S.H. Daniel, “Seventeenth-Century Scholastic Treatments of Time,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42, no. 4 (October-December 1981), 587-606. Susan Donahue Kuretsky, “Dutch Ruins: Time and Transformation,” in Susan Kuretsky, ed., Time and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Poughkeepsie, NY: Frances Loeb Art Center, Sarasota, FL: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and Louisville, KY: The Speed Art Museum, 2005), 40-42. Slive has argued that Massa’s pose is the earliest known example of a single portrait of an informally seated sitter resting his arm across the back of a chair and that the recurrence of the pose in portraits from that point forward ultimately derive from Hals’s prototype. Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 190-92. One can find, however, related poses in the work of Giovanni Battista Moroni (ca. 1525-78). Active in Bergamo, Moroni staged portraits like that of Portrait of a Cleric in the National Gallery of Art, where his sitter sits in a chair placed parallel to the picture plane, but rotates his body a quarter turn to casually engage the viewer. Like Massa, the cleric appears comfortable despite the illusion of momentary distraction. Moroni’s relaxed portraits are the only known precedent for Hals’s lively conception. Whether Hals knew of Moroni’s work or arrived at a similar pictorial solution independently remains to be seen. As Hals did not travel and as no paintings by Moroni are known to have been in the northern Netherlands in the Dutch painter’s lifetime, he could have only known of Moroni’s work through an intermediary source. Van Mander did not mention Moroni in his lives of Italian artists in Het Schilderboek. Van Dyck sketched the relaxed posture of the man (now in the National Gallery of Art) in 1622 when he was in Italy. See Gert Adriani, Anton Van Dyck, Italienisches Skizzenbuch (Vienna: Schroll, 1940), plate 108. As Van Dyck did not return from Italy until late 1627, however, Hals could not have encountered Van Dyck’s drawing before painting Massa’s portrait. In the seventeenth century, Moroni’s painting hung in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, one of the most visited picture galleries in Rome, so that it would have been possible that another Dutch artist returned from Italy with a similar record of the painting’s appearance. David Smith has suggested a relationship between De Keyser’s portrait of Huygens and a page with the painting by Moroni of a similar subject in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, though the latter picture seems to have remained in Bergamo until the nineteenth century. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 272. Similarly, Amy Golahny has suggested that Rembrandt based his 1631 portrait of Nicolaes Ruts in the Frick Collection on a now lost painting by Moroni. Amy Golahny, “Rembrandt’s Ruts and Moroni’s Bearded Man.” Source 10, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 22-25. Unfortunately, Golahny presents no evidence for how Rembrandt could have known the Moroni portrait. For further explorations of connections to paintings by Utrecht artists, see Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: Entwicklung, Werkanalyse, Gesamtkatalog (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1972), 63-69. I thank Perry Chapman for reminding me of Bernini’s animated portrait drawings. Bernini integrated this theory into his practice. Apparently, Bernini encouraged his sitters to converse and gesture during their initial sittings with him. For example, Paul Fréart de Chantelou recorded in his diary that Bernini “asked for some clay in order to make studies of movement” while setting to work on his bust of Louis XIV. Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s Visit to France, 1665, edited and with an introduction by Anthony Blunt, annotated by George C. Bauer, translated by Margery Corbett (Princeton: Princeton University, 1985, June 11). For more on Bernini’s movement, see Maarten Delbeke, “Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Bel Composto: The Unification of Life and Work in Biography and Historiography,” in Bernini’s Biographies, eds. Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy, and Steven Ostrow (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 251-274. Andrea Bacchi and Catherine Hess have recently exposed how the frequent characterization of Bernini’s portrayals of Scipione Borghese as speaking likenesses are modern constructs rather than seventeenthcentury estimations. Andrea Bacchi and Catherine Hess, “Creating a New Likeness: Bernini’s Transforma-

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tion of the Portrait Bust,” in Andrea Bacchi, Catherine Hess, and Jennifer Montagu, eds., Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum and Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2008), 20-29. Grimm also briefly suggested Bernini as an analog to Hals. Grimm, Frans Hals (1972), 63. Bacchi and Hess, “Creating a New Likeness,” 4-8. Ann Sutherland Harris, “Vouet, le Bernin, et la resemblance parlante,” in Simon Vouet, Actes du colloque international, Galeries nationales du Gran Palais, February 1991, ed. Stephane Loire (Paris: Documentation Française, 1992), 192-208. Hals’s portrait of Verdonck in The National Gallery in Scotland also compares to Vouet’s painting. Honthorst was a prolific portraitist, but in these pictures he practiced a smooth, aristocratic, and Van Dyckian mode. No portraits by Baburen or Ter Brugghen are known. A 1637 inventory described a now lost painting as “een counterfeytsel van Ter Brugh.” As Franits points out, though, there is no certainty that this work is a portrait in the modern sense or if it is a single genre figure. Leonard Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrik, 1588-1629: catalogue raisonné (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2007), 273. Hals’s visualizations of momentary activity differ from those of De Keyser, Rembrandt, and Van der Helst that picture an individual engaged in a thoughtful activity of the kind Adams has examined. In his portraits, Hals generally omitted books, musical instruments, or other accoutrements that signaled active, mental engagement. Adams, Public Faces, 93-112. Mariët Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1997), 254-76. Of course, not all individuals in the Dutch republic shared this conception. Many clung to the belief that the individual should exhibit unwavering stoic resolve. Adams has postulated that some patrons in Amsterdam wished to be portrayed as exhibiting tranquilitas. Ann Jensen Adams, “The Three-Quarter Length Life-Sized Portrait in Seventeenth-Century Holland: The Cultural Functions of Tranquilitas,” in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 157-94. Johan de Brune II, Iok en Ernst, dat is, allerlei deftige hofredenen, quinkslagen, boertyeryen-en al wat dien gelijkvormigh met de naam van apophtegmata verstaan wort (Amsterdam: Joost Hartgerzen, 1644). Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen, 263. Frank Fehrenbach has also located the roots of lively imagery in early modern Italian art to Aristotle’s conception of enargia. Frank Fehrenbach, “Color NativusColor Vitalis: Prolegomena zu einer Ästhetik des “Lebendigen Bildes” in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Ulrich Pfisterer and Max Seidel, eds., Visuelle Topoi: Erfindung und tradiertes Wissen in den Künsten der italienischen Renaissance (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2003) 151-170. Adams has argued that active representation conveyed a particular identity, one that enabled sitters to convey worldly engagement, a feature that she links to the projection of personal Protestant and/or Neostoical beliefs. Adams, however, focused on images of individuals whose thought or work is interrupted, particularly those by Rembrandt and De Keyser. Hals’s active portrayals often do not picture the figure as interrupted. Rather they are in the very process of performing an action or they seem to be active in a more general sense. For these reasons, I am hesitant to extend her provocative conclusions to the Haarlem artist. Ann Jensen Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland: Portraiture and the Production of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009), 96-101. Weber has partially traced this awareness, but only in relation to liveliness, not the momentary. Weber, Der Lobtopos des “lebenden” Bildes: Jan Vos und sein ‘Zeege der schilderkunst’ von 1654, 195-254. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 74.

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38 39 40 41

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Karel van Mander, Den Grondt der edel vry Schilderconst, 2 volumes, trans. Hessel Miedema (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker and Gunbert, 1973), 125-26 (IV 39, and 40). This statement was recorded by the artist’s son, Domenico Bernini, as quoted and translated in Rudolph Wittkower, Bernini’s Bust of Louis XIV (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 72. See Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients/De Pictura Veterum, ed. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 266; and Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst (Rotterdam: Francois van Hoogstraten, 1678; reprinted Doornspijk: Davaco, 1969), 44-47. Pliny, the Elder. Natural History, trans. H. Rackham. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1952) 35-59. Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities, 96. See Smith on the convention of the active male in Dutch marriage portraiture. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 44-49. In addition to unaided visual examination, use of a daylight spectrum lamp, microphotographs, X-radiograph assemblies, and infrared reflectograms yielded results. Paint samples were taken from three paintings: the Peeckelhaering from Kassel, and the pendant portraits in the Taft Museum in Cincinnati from the late 1640s. Ella Hendriks and Koos Levy-van Halm, “Report Concerning a Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings Exhibited During the Frans Hals Exhibition, Held From May 11 to July 22, 1990 in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, 1991,” (unpublished report). A copy of the report is also available to the public in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorisch Dokumentatie. Full documentation of the examinations are on file in the Frans Hals Museum. I would like to thank Mireille de Mareveld for enabling access to these. Claus Grimm has offered a considerably different interpretation of the size of Hals’s output, attributing but 145 paintings to the artist. Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989). While one might take issue with some of Slive’s attributions, scholars have concurred with Slive’s expanded catalogue more frequently. This number includes Hals’s Laughing Boy which bears many characteristics that locate it closer to genre painting than to portraiture. I would like to thank Petria Noble and Jørgen Wadum for letting me peruse their findings prior to publication. Their results can now be found in Ben Broos and Ariane van Suchtelen, eds. Portraits in the Mauritshuis 1430-1790 (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2004). Hals’s small portrait of Willem Croes now in Munich and that of Frans Post recently acquired by the Worcester Art Museum are two examples. It should be noted that Hals also painted three works on copper: his portrait of Theodorus Schrevelius now in Haarlem, Portrait of a Man in Berlin, and Samuel Ampzing. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm, “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 5-8. Ibid., 8. For example, it has been argued recently that Titian varied his supports, opting in his later career for ever more coarse canvases to accentuate texture. Jill Dunkerton, “Titian’s Painting Technique,” in Titian, ed. David Jaffé (London: The National Gallery, 2003), 44-59. Hendiks and Levy-van Halm, “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 20. For detailed color descriptions, see ibid., 40-44. Ibid., 44 and 51. Ibid., 37-39. The nineteenth-century mythology of Hals’s manner and working methods is examined in detail in chapter five. Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, October 1886, in Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958), 424, letter 428.

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Hendriks and Levy-van Halm, “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 27. Melanie Gifford, “Jan van Goyen en de techniek van het naturalistiche landschap,” in Jan van Goyen, ed. Christiaan Vogelaar (Leiden: Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, 1996), 70-79. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm, “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 12-15. This sketch is only visible occasionally, as Hals used dark strokes of paint that are undetectable in X-rays, rather than chalk or lead white. Ibid., 24. Grimm has argued for underdrawing in Hals’s practice. Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, trans. Jürgen Riehle (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 37-38. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm refuted Grimm’s interpretation of the evidence, arguing that he mistook the pits of collapsed crackle for pin marks from a drawing transfer. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm, “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 20. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 38. Irene van Thiel-Stroman, “The Frans Hals Documents: Written and Printed Sources, 1582-1679,” in Slive, ed. Frans Hals (1989), 389-90, doc. 73-75. Martin Bijl, “‘The Meagre Company’ and Frans Hals’s Working Method,” in Slive, ed. Frans Hals (1989), 103-108. A. H. Kan, De Jeugd van Constantijn Huygens door hemzelf beschreven (Rotterdam: AD. Donker, 1946), 81-2. Ibid., 81-2 as translated in Christian Vogelaar, et al., Rembrandt en Lievens in Leiden (Leiden: Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, 1991), 134. Edward Norgate, Miniatura or the Art of Limning, ed. Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 71-81. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 80. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm, “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 27-31. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 33. Maurits van Dantzig, Frans Hals: Echt of Onecht (Amsterdam and Paris: H.J. Paris, 1937), 7. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: the problem of the development of style in later art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: Henry Holt, 1932), 43-44. Ibid., 29-32. Sarah Friedman and Marguerite Stevenson, “Perception of Movement in Pictures,” in The Perception of Pictures, ed. Mary Hagen (New York and London: Academic Press, 1980), 243-45. Studies indicate that perceiving this type of indicator as communicating movement is culturally conditioned by the Western canon of pictorial representation. Europeans readily recognized it, but neither rural nor urban African communities understood it in this way. Ibid., 229-30. Philips Angel, “Praise of Painting,” 1642, trans. Michael Hoyle, Simiolus 24, no. 2/3 (1996): 244. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 1797, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 259. Compare Reynolds’s statement with how Umberto Eco has described how such lack of definition can increase the vividness of a depicted subject: “[T]o give the impression of inner animation, the sign becomes imprecise, ambiguous. But not so the forms themselves. The ambiguity of the sign lends them a vibrant quality, and, by blurring their contours, puts them into closer contact with other forms, a source of light, and their general surroundings.” Eco linked ambiguity with vitality, but he also recognized that imprecision could heighten a viewer’s response. Eco, “The Open Work in the Visual Arts,” in The Open

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Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 85. Eco’s analysis also mimics those of Wölfflin who noted that “elusiveness, the lack of definition” is a defining quality of painterly approaches. See Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 33. For more on Rembrandt’s early work, see A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. 1, ed. Josua Bruyn, Bob Haak, Simon Levie, Pieter J.J. van Thiel, and Ernst van de Wetering (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986); Alan Chong, ed., Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt. Art and Ambition in Leiden, 1629-1631 (Boston: Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum, 2000); and Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg, eds., The Mystery of the Young Rembrandt (Amsterdam: Museum het Rembrandthuis and Kassel: Staatliche Museen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, 2001). Golahny, “Rembrandt’s Ruts and Moroni’s Bearded Man,” 22-25. Jan Emmens, “Ay Rembrandt, Maal Cornelis Stem,” in Emmens, Kunsthistorische Opstellen I (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot 1981), 61-97. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and The Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 31-33. “Hy eens een pourtret geschildert heft daar de verw zoodanig dik op lag, datmen de schildery by de neus van de grond konde opligten.Dus zietman ook gesteente en paerlen, op Borstcieraden en Tulbanden door hem zoo verheven geschildert al even of ze geboetseerd waren.” Arnold Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, vol. 1, ed. Petrus Theodorus Arnoldus Swillens (1718-21; repr. Maastricht: LeiterNypels, 1943), 269. Given Houbraken’s propensity for embellishment, it is dubious as to whether such an utterance was ever issued by anyone other than Houbraken. On Houbraken’s anecdotes operating as art criticism, see H. Perry Chapman, “Persona and Myth in Houbraken’s Life of Jan Steen,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 1 (March 1993): 13550; and Christopher Atkins, “Frans Hals’s Virtuoso Brushwork,” in Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 53 (2005): 281-307. Bernard Schnackenburg, “Young Rembrandt’s ‘Rough Manner’: A Painting Style and Its Sources.” Mystery of the Young Rembrandt, 92-121. Schnackenburg identified Flemish head studies as probable sources for Rembrandt’s rough manner. Ibid., 106. Hals’s indebtedness to these same sources is discussed at length in chapter 3. Thus, it is possible that Hals and Rembrandt arrived at their painterly aesthetics independently, from shared sources. Ann Jensen Adams explored the “genre portraits” of the Amsterdam painter Thomas de Keyser such as Constantijn Huygens Receiving a Letter from 1627. For Adams, the full-length representations of sitters placed in completely described interior spaces marked De Keyser’s paintings of this type. Like Hals before him, De Keyser activated the image through the representation of a staged action, in this case the delivery of a message. Rather than concentrating on the implied vitality of the piece, Adams attempted to place De Keyser’s conception within the tradition of portraits from Holbein to Titian of individuals posed as members of their profession whether it be an author writing at a desk or a sculptor holding a statuette. These precedents were not particularly lively, nor did Hals follow these models, as he never provided comparable settings. Furthermore, with the exception of the calligrapher Jean de la Chambre, Hals never portrayed his sitters with attributes of their trades or accomplishments. It should be noted that De Keyser always applied a smooth, meticulous finish for even his most animated portraits. Ann Jensen Adams, “The Paintings of Thomas De Keyser,” (Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 1985), 97-237. For Hals’s reluctance to leave Haarlem, see my discussion of the commission for The Meagre Company in this chapter, pages 56-57. Biesboer focused on Hals’s exact contemporaries and therefore did not address the conventions established by Cornelis. Biesboer also mentioned Cesar van Everdingen only in passing, prematurely dismissing the

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painter’s impact on the local art scene. Pieter Biesboer, “The Burghers of Haarlem and Their Portrait Painters,” in Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 23-44. Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilderboek (1603-04), vol. 1, ed. Hessel Miedema, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore (Doornspijk: Davacao, 1994-99), 426-32. Pieter J.J. van Thiel, Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem 1562-1638. A Monograph and Catalogue Raisonné (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1999), 149. This staid presentation may have suited Van Souwen as the last Commander of the Holy Order of St. John in Haarlem. The traditional stylization of the representation matches that of Cornelis’s portrait of the previous commander Cornelis van der Goude. Ibid., 393-94. De Grebber also trained his daughter, Maria de Grebber (ca. 1602-80). Maria became a painter of some repute. Though not a specialist, she did paint portraits such as that of Priest Augustinius de Wolff now in Museum het Catharijnconvent in Utrecht. Frans de Grebber also trained Peter Lely (1618-1680) in Haarlem before the latter left for London around 1647. Lely’s early English paintings were heavily influenced by the manner of the Haarlem classicists, but no portraits from his Haarlem period are known. For Lely’s artistic activities in Holland, see Jacques Foucart, “Peter Lely, Dutch History Painter,” Hoogsteder-Naumann Mercury no. 8 (1989): 17-26. In 1649 the Haarlem printer Pieter Castelyn published a broad sheet of eleven rules of art written by De Grebber. These practical suggestions directed at painters, draftsmen, and aspiring pupils address neither portraiture nor the rendering of individual figures, lively or otherwise. The intent behind De Grebber’s brief statement that relies heavily on Van Mander’s Den Grondt remains unclear. A transcription and facsimile reproduction of the Regulen can be found in Pieter J.J. van Thiel, “De Grebber’s regels van de kunst,” Oud Holland 80, no. 2 (1965): 126-31. Biesboer has attributed De Grebber’s focused commissions to the fact that De Grebber himself was also Catholic. Biesboer, “The Burghers of Haarlem and Their Portrait Painters,” 34-35. See also Paul Dirkse, “Pieter de Grebber: Haarlems schilder tussen begijnen, kloppen en pastors,” Jaarboek Haerlem 1978 (1979): 109-27. These features of De Grebber’s art have often been compared to those of Rembrandt. For this phase of De Grebber’s career, see Peter Sutton, “Rembrandt and Pieter de Grebber,” in Cynthia Schneider, William Robinson, and Alice Davies, eds., Shop Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1995), 241-44. Ed Taverne, “Salomon de Bray and the Reorganization of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke: 1631,” Simiolus 6 (1972-3): 56-69. The left half of the composition is in the Toledo Museum of Art, while the right half is in the Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels. Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 156. Moltke suggested repeatedly that De Bray trained with Van Mander, Cornelis, or Goltzius, though, as he has acknowledged, no record of such an arrangement exists. J.W. von Moltke, “Jan de Bray,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 6-7 (1938-9): 421-523; and J.W. von Moltke, “Jan de Bray,” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, May 1, 2003, http://www.groveart.com. More recently, Friso Lammertse has seconded Moltke’s conclusions without offering any further evidence. Lammertse, “Salomon de Bray: Painter, architect and theorist,” in Painting Family: The De Brays, ed. Pieter Biesboer (Frans Hals Museum: Haarlem and Dulwich Picture Gallery: London, 2008), 10. Rudi Ekkart identified two paintings of guardrooms and a still-life picture as the only exceptions. Rudolph Ekkart, Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck: Leven en werken van een Haarlems portretschilder uit de 17de eeuw (Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum, 1979), 81-82.

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Ibid., 32-40. Biesboer, “The Haarlem Burghers and Their Portrait Painters,” 39. Ekkart, Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck, 32-37 and 56-58. Ibid., 32-37. Archers’ Gathering (1642) and the Assembly of Militia Officers (1644) are now in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. Biesboer, “The Haarlem Burghers and Their Portrait Painters,” 39. See Saskia Kus’s entry on the painting in Jan Baptist Bedaux and Rudi Ekkart, eds., Pride and Joy: Children’s Portraits in the Netherlands, 1500-1700 (Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum and Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2000), 240. Biesboer, “The Haarlem Burghers and Their Portrait Painters,” 38. It is not within the bounds of the current study to examine De Bray’s classicizing pictures exemplified by numerous historiated portraits that postdate Hals’s lifetime. As Biesboer notes, these bear greater debt to Verspronck than to Hals. Biesboer, “The Haarlem Burghers and Their Portrait Painters,” 39. More recently, Biesboer has argued for their wholly original and independent character. Pieter Biesboer, “Jan de Bray: A most versatile artist,” in Pieter Biesboer, ed., Painting Family: The De Brays (Frans Hals Museum: Haarlem and Dulwich Picture Gallery: London, 2008): 18-26. For a more thorough treatment of Verspronck’s methods, see Ella Hendriks, “Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck: the technique of a seventeenth-century Haarlem portraitist,” Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 11 (1998): 227-67. No significant or systematic study of De Bray’s method has been undertaken thus far. As such, my characterization of his technique derives exclusively from surface level examination. The best, and most extensive, analysis of a tonalist method is Melanie Gifford’s study of Van Goyen’s landscapes. Gifford, “Jan van Goyen en de techniek van het naturalistiche landschap.” Brouwer is documented as being in Haarlem in 1626. It is not known how long he resided in the city, but he was registered in the Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp by 1631. Bernard Schnackenburg, “Das Bild des bäuerlichen Lebens bei Adriaen van Ostade,” in Herman Vekeman and Justus Müller Hofstede, ed., Wort und Bild in der niederländischen Kunst und Literatur des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Erfstadt: Lukassen, 1984), 30-42. Adams, “The Three-Quarter Length Life-Sized Portrait.” Sarah Schroth, “Re-presenting Philip III and His Favorite: Changes in Court Portraiture 1598-1621.” Boletin del Museo del Prado XVIII, no. 36 ( June-July, 2000): 38-50. Walter Liedtke, “Style in Dutch Art,” in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 116-128.

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An earlier version of this chaper appeared as “Frans Hals’s Virtuoso Brushwork” in Virtus, virtuositeit en kunstliefhebbers in de Nederlanden 1500-1700 (Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, Volume 53). Waanders, Zwolle, 2005, 281-307. The modernity of Hals’s manner and the relationships between it and late nineteenth- and twentiethcentury art is addressed at length in chapter five. Thomas Carson Mark, “On works of virtuosity,” The Journal of Philosophy 77 ( January-December 1980), 28-45. Arnold Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, volume 1, ed. Petrus Theodorus Arnoldus Swillens (1718-21; repr. Maastricht: Leiter-Nypels, 1943).

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“Hoe wacker schilderd Frans de luyden naer het leven!” Samuel Ampzing, Beschryvinge ende lof der stadt Haerlem in Holland (Haarlem: Adriaen Rooman, 1628), 371. “Hier kan ick oock met stille swijghen niet verby gaen, Frans ende Dirck Hals Ghebroeders, van de welcke d’eene, die deur een onghemeyne manier van schilderen, die hem eyghen is, by nae alle overtreft, want daer is in sijn schildery sulcke forse ende leven, dat hy te met de natuyr selfs schijnt te braveren met sijn Penceel, dat spreecken alle sijne Conterfeytsels, die hy ghemaeckt heft, onghelooflijcke veel, die soo ghecolereert zijn, dat de schijnen asem van haer te gheven, ende te leven.” Theodorus Schrevelius, Harlemias ofte, om beter te segggen, de eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem (Haarlem: Thomas Fonteyn, 1648), 383. Joseph Leo Koerner, “Factura,” Res 36 (Autumn 1999): 5-31. “Hy [Philips Wouwerman] heft gheleert by Franchois Hals oock noch in’t leven ende tot Haerlem woonachtich is die wonder uytsteckt in’t schilderen van Pourtretten oft Conterfeyten, staet seer rou en cloeck, vlijtigh ghetoetst en wel ghestelt, plaisant en gheestich om van veer aen ten sien daer niet als het leven en schijnt in te ontbreken.” Cornelis de Bie, Het Gulden Cabinet van de Edel vry Schilderconst (Antwerp: Juliaen van Monfort, 1661), 281-82. “Wat pooght ghy ouden Hals, Langhelius te maalen? / Uw ooghen zyn te zwak voor zyn gheleerde, strall; / En Uwe stramme handt te ruuw, en kunsteloos, / Om’t bovenmenschelyk, en onweêrgaadeloos / Verstant van deeze man, en Leraar, uit te drukken. / Stoft Haarlem op uw kunst, en jonghe meesterstukken, / Ons Amsterdam zal nu met my ghetuighrn, dat / Ghy ‘t weezen van dit licht, niet hallef hebt ghevat.” H. Waterloos in Tobias van Domselaar, Hollantsche Parnas, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Lescaille, 1660), 408. Hals’s portrait of Langelius is now in the Musée de Picardie, Amiens. Due to non-regularized spelling in the period, rouw also was spelled ruuw and ruw. Maria Isabel PousãoSmith, “Concepts of Brushwork in the Northern and Southern Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1998). Jan Emmens, “Natuur, onderwijzing en oefening,” in Josua Bruyn, Jan Emmens, Eddy de Jongh, and Derk Persant Snoep, eds., Album Amicorum Discipulorum J. G. van Gelder (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 125-36. “Hier heb ick / o edel Schilder scholieren / Voor ooghen willen beelden en stellen / Twederly / doch welstandighe manieren / Dy dat ghy met lust u sinnen mocht stieren / Tot het gheen’ uwen gheest meest sal versnellen: / Maer soude doch raden u eerst te quellen / En u te wennen / met vlijtighe sinnen / Een suyver manier/ end’ een net beginnen.” Karel van Mander, Den Grondt der edel vry Schilderconst, vol. 1, trans. Hessel Miedema (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker and Gunbert, 1973), 261. “Maer ten lesten met vlecken en rouw streken / Ginck hy zijn wercken al anders beleyden / Welck natuerlijck wel stondt / als men gheweken / Wat verre daer van was / maer niet belen / Van hy en wou wesen / het welck verscheyden / Meesters willende volghen in’t arbeyden / En hebbender niet vab ghemaeckt te weghe. / Sy meenden den wel gheoeffenden hachten / En hebben miswanich huyn self bedroghen / Om dat sy zijn wreck sonder arbeydt dachten / Te wesen ghedaen / daer d’uyterste crachten / Der Consten met moeyt’ in waren gheloghen: / En bedeckt met verwen verscheyden reysen / Meer moeyt isser in als men soude peysen. / Maer dees maniere van doen uyt bysonder / Goet oordeel en verstandt van tizianen, / Is schoon en bevallijck gheacht te wonder: / Want (sent Vasary) den arbeydt daer onder / Groote Const bedeckt is / en dat soodanen / Schildery te leven men schier mocht wanen / En als gheseyt is / dat zijn dinghen schijnen / Lichtveerdich/ die doch sijn ghedaen met pijnen.” Ibid., 259-61. Pousão-Smith, “Concepts of Brushwork,” 97-107. Ibid., 100; and Karel van Mander, Het Schilderboek, 1604 (reprint Utrecht: Davaco, 1969), folio 288v-89r. Pousão-Smith, “Concepts of Brushwork,” 103-4; and Van Mander, Het Schilderboek, folio 259r-v. These inconsistencies and contradictions might indicate that Van Mander’s opinion of rough handling was unresolved or in flux. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst (Rotterdam: Fransois van Hoogstraten 1678; reprinted Doornspijk: Davaco, 1969). For Pousão-Smith, by acknowledging the strengths of

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both rouw and net, Hoogstraten’s text indicates that rough painting could still be appreciated late into the century (Pousão-Smith, “Concepts of Brushwork”). This is in contrast to Emmens who saw rouw as being systematically derided in the second half of the century. Emmens, “Natuur, onderwijzing en oefening.” Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, 239. Pousão-Smith notes the relationship between rouw and sketchiness only in passing. Pousão-Smith, “Concepts of Brushwork,” 101. Ibid., 237. From inventory records it is impossible to determine whether a schets was drawn or painted. Lydia de Pauw-de Veen, De Begrippen ‘Schilder,’ ‘Schilderij,’ en ‘Schilderen’ in de Zeventiende eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1969), 97. “Als ghy nu uwe Schets ten ruwsten, doch evenwel voorsichtig beworpen hebt, siet dan met een gesont oordeel of uwe schickinghe goet is, ende of ghy de Actien, ende Werckinghen, van het Beeldt oft Beelden, diese in u Principael hebben, oock in uwe Schets kondt sien. Want de Actien moeten sich in de alder-eerste ende rauwte Schets als al seer sterck vertoonen, al eer ghy u van wat goets mooght verseeckeren, aenghesien de werckende Actien de ziel van de Schilderye is, ende by-gevolgh oock van uwe Teyckeninghe. Dit dan hebbende, soo begint uwe Schets al wat nader ende netter te besnoeijen, hier een weynigh afnemende, daer wat aen lappende, want men dat met Teyckenkool bequamelijck doet, aenghesien sy haer Iaet uytwissenm daerom sy wel een gezegent middel tot de Teycken-konst mach genoemt werden.” Michael Kwakkelstein, Willem Goeree: Inleydinge tot de al-gheeme Teycken-konst: een kritische geannoteerde editie (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 1998), 102. Philips Angel, “Praise of Painting,” trans. Michael Hoyle, Simiolous 24 (1996): 246. Schneider and Ekkart identify this as a sketch for the painting of the subject now in Braunschweig. Hans Schneider and R.E.O. Ekkart, Jan Lievens: sein Leben und seine Werke (Amsterdam: Israël, 1973), 92. Sketches were not appreciated as independent works of art until the late seventeenth century. See Ronni Baer, “Rembrandt’s Oil Sketches,” in Cliff Ackley, ed., Rembrandt’s Journey (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts and Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2003), 39-41. Aside from several small-scale portraits, such as the diminutive portrayal of Frans Post in the Worcester Art Museum that probably served as modelli for printmakers, none of Hals’s paintings can be properly classified as preparatory sketches. Seymour Slive, ed. Frans Hals (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; London: Royal Academy of Arts; and Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum, 1989), 345-47. Wilhelm von Bode and Moritz Binder, Frans Hals, His Life and Work, vol. 1, trans. Maurice Walter Brockwell (Berlin: Photographische Gesellschaft, 1914), 14. Hals almost always painted clothing more thinly than he did facial regions in the same portrait. See Ella Hendriks and Koos Levy-van Halm, “Report Concerning a Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings Exhibited During the Frans Hals Exhibition, Held From May 11 to July 22, 1990 in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, 1991,” (unpublished report), 19. Ibid., 32. This is in contrast to a portraitist like Johannes Verspronck who worked from a clearly delineated underdrawing from which he rarely deviated. See Ella Hendriks, “Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck: the technique of a seventeenth-century Haarlem portraitist,” Leids Kunsthistorich Jaarboek 11 (1998), 227-67. For example, see Mau van Dantzig, Frans Hals, Echt of Onecht (Amsterdam and Paris: H.J. Paris, 1937), 5-38. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm, “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 50. Bernhard Schnackenburg has recently explored the relationship between Rembrandt’s rough heads and those of Rubens and Van Dyck. See Bernhard Schnackenburg, “Young Rembrandt’s Rough Manner, A Painting Style and Its Source,” in Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg, eds., The Mystery of the Young Rembrandt (Kassel: Staatliche Museen Kassel and Amsterdam: Museum het Rembrandthuis, 2001), 92-121. Van Mander, Den Grondt, folio 175.

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One cannot say with certainty whether Van Mander had firsthand knowledge of Titian’s late manner or whether he knew it only from Vasari’s ekphrasis. Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1997), 16365. Pousão-Smith has argued that the allegory of distant viewing could also be applied more generally as stock praise of painters who avoided fine detail. Pousão-Smith, “Concepts of Brushwork,” 107-14. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 2, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (1568; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 794. Walter L. Strauss and Marjon van der Meulen, The Rembrandt Documents (New York: Abaris, 1979), 167. J.G. van Gelder determined that Van Dyck had been in Holland from the second half of 1628 to early 1629 working at the Stadhouder’s court in The Hague. In 1632, Constantijn Huygens recorded in his journal that he had had his portrait painted by Van Dyck in The Hague. This entry and the presence of several new Van Dyck paintings in the Stadhouderlijkkwartier in 1632 demonstrate that Van Dyck ventured northward again around this time. No visit by Van Dyck to Haarlem during either period in the Dutch Republic has been identified. Similarly, no evidence of another trip to the northern Netherlands between Van Dyck’s known periods in Italy and England has come to light. Of course, the two artists could have been familiar with each other’s works without direct personal contact. J.G. van Gelder, “Anthonie van Dyck in Holland in de zeventiende eeuw,” Bulletin Koniklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten 8 (March-June 1959): 43-86. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 96-97. “Dat, indien hy in zyne vermenginge wat meer van het teere, of dunne gehad had, hy een der grootste meesters zoude hebben geweest; want dat hy zyn weerga niet kende, die ’t penceel zoo tot zyn wil had, dat hy, na hy een Pourtret had aangeleid, de vaste wezenstrekken, hoogsels, en diesels met een penceelzet, zonder verzagtinge of verandering zoo hun behoorlyke plaats wist te geven.” Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh, trans. Michael Hoyle in Seymour Slive, ed. Frans Hals (1989), 17. Jeffrey Muller, “The Quality of Grace in the Art of Anthony van Dyck,” in Arthur K. Wheelock, Susan J. Barnes, and Julius S. Held, eds., Anthony van Dyck (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 27-36. Interestingly, Van Mander referred to the panel on which Apelles and Protogenes had performed their competition as “eenen ruuwen doek” when he noted its hanging in Caesar’s palace. Van Mander, Het Schilderboek, folio 78r. “Men zegt, dat hy voor een gewoonte had, zyn Pourtretten vet, en zachtsmeltende aan te leggen, en naderhand de penceeltoetsen daar in te brengen, zeggende: Nu moet ‘er het kennelyke van den meester noch in.” Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh, 73. Twenty-five paintings underwent examination prior to the exhibition and another fifty-six during the course of the show. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 37. See “Stages in the Painting Procedure.” Ibid., 37. Early in his career Hals’s painted faces opaquely while leaving the garments more open. Later, he brushed even the faces thinly to take advantage of underlying tones. Ibid., 16. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm follow Van Dantzig in noting that the fluid stroke that is pushed thin through the middle is characteristic of Hals’s method. Hendriks and Levy-van Halm “Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 50; and Van Dantzig, Frans Hals: Echt of Onecht, 18-20. “Nat met goet oordeel.” Van Mander, Het Schilderboek, folio 174. “Want men siet zijn dinghen overghetoghen / En bedeckt met verwen verscheyden reysen, / Meer moeyt isser in als men soude peysen.” Ibid., folio 175, trans. Walter Melion in Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilderboek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 107. Ralph Mayer, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques (1969; reprinted New York: Barnes and Noble 1981), 185.

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Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks, “Frans Hals: A Technical Examination,” in Seymour Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 119. Van Dantzig also noted this feature. Van Dantzig, Frans Hals: Echt of Onecht, 33. Although – as Groen and Hendriks have argued – Houbraken underappreciated Hals’s rather direct buildup of paint layers and swift method that just as much as the finishing touches were “the hallmark of the master.” Ibid., 121. Anna Tummers, “’By His Hand’: the paradox of seventeenth-century connoisseurship,” in Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, eds. Art Market and Connoisseurship: a closer look at paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008) 50-51. “Les porfils, les gestes, les symmetries et proportions, et mines et bonnes contenances sont celles qui donnent bruit au pinceaux; et le point principal de tout c’est cela. Le dedans se fait aisément, mais le pourfil, les derniers traits, et l’arrondissement de la besogne est mal aisée.” Pierre le Brun, “Recueuil des Essaies des Merveilles de la Peinture,” 1849, in Mary Merryfield, Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting, vol. 2, (New York: Dover, 1967), 772. For a discussion of the relationships between evidence of mastery and seventeenth-century valuations, see Tummers, “’By His Hand’”, 49-50. Jerrold E. Seigel, “Virtu in and Since the Renaissance,” in Philip P. Wiener, ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 4 (New York: Scribner, 1973), 476-86. Also see Joanna Woodall, “In Pursuit of Virtue,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, vol. 54 (2003): 7-26. Hendrik Hexham, Het groot woordenboeck: gestelt in ’t Neder-duytsch, ende in ’t Enelsch (Rotterdam: Arnout Leers 1648), unpaginated. For Van Mander’s rare use of deugdt in Het Schilderboek, see Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilderboek (1603-04), vol. 3, ed. Hessel Miedema, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore (Doornspijk: Davacao, 1994-99), 145. Hessel Miedema, Karel van Mander: De Kerck der Deucht (Amsterdam: Kunsthistorisch, 1973), 12. Ibid., 36. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome: Heredi di Gislotti, 1593), n. 315. Miedema, Karel van Mander: De Kerck der Deucht, 44. Virtu derives from vir (man). Thus, Hercules as the symbol of masculine strength and accomplishment became associated with virtue. Ripa distinguished between virtue and heroic virtue, advising representing the latter with a depiction of Hercules. Ripa, Iconologia, 317. Larry Nichols, “Brushes and Oil: The Paintings 1600-1617,” in Hendrick Goltzius: Drawings, Prints, and Paintings, ed. Huigen Leeflang and Ger Luijten (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Toledo: The Toledo Museum of Art, 2003): 290-93. Eddy de Jongh, “Realism and Seeming Realism in Seventeenth-century Dutch Painting,” trans. Kist Kilian Communications, in Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1997): 35-40. As translated by De Jongh in ibid., 39. “Ick wete seer wel Goed-jonstighen LESER, datter veel…niet en sullen aenghelockt werden, om den Loff der SCHILDERCONST met verstand te aenmercken, uyt redenen datter veel Menschen vyandt van deze Const zijn, ende ook niet gheren hooren jemandts lof uyt spreeken, als door een jngheboren belgh-sucht ende hooverdy t’ selve benijdende, sal my nochtans troosten met het Latijns spreeckwoordt seggende: Ars nullum habet jnimicum nisi ignorantem, dat den ontwetenden alleen vyandt vande Const is.” De Bie, Het Gulden Cabinet van de Edel vry Schilderconst, 12. De Jongh used the term after Werner van den Valckert’s motto “Cunst heeft haters.” Ibid., 38. Nichols, “Brushes and Oil: The Paintings 1600-1617,” 291. See Miedema, Karel van Mander: De Kerck der Deucht, III, 218. Marten Jan Bok, “Art-Lovers and their Paintings: Van Mander’s Schilderboek as a Source for the History

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of the Art Market of the Northern Netherlands,” in Ger Luijten, et al., Dawn of the Golden Age, Northern Netherlandish Art 1580-1620 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1993): 136-66. Zirka Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 71. Ibid., 219, n. 39. In 1642 in Teutonico-Latino-Gallicum, Cornelis Kilianus defined liefhebber der konsten as “philomusus, philogus, qui artis amores tenetur, discendique studio flagrat, amateur des arts.” Ibid., 219, n. 39. Edward Norgate, Miniatura or the Art of Limning, ed. Jeffrey Muller and Jim Murrel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 175. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (1622; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 105. Ibid., 109. Junius’s text was first published in Latin in 1637 as De pictura Veterum. In 1638 it was translated into English as The Painting of the Ancients and into Dutch as De schilderkonst der oude in 1641. This quotation is taken from the English edition. Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients/ De Pictura Veterum, ed. Kevin Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl (Berkley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 309. Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, 3. In a sense, Van Hoogstraten set up a dichotomy between economic value and aesthetic value – where the latter was accessible only to the learned viewer. Van Voorhout’s portrait is now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Although his works were well known and highly prized in Holland through reproductive prints, this is one of only a handful of paintings by Rubens securely documented in the northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century. I would like to thank Pieter Biesboer for sharing and discussing his numerous findings from the Haarlem archives with me prior to their publication. Most of this material is now available in both the Getty Provenance Index and in Pieter Biesboer, Collections of Paintings in Haarlem 1572-1745, ed. Carol Togneri (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 2002). For the Heythuysen inventory, see the Getty Provenance Index, http://piweb.getty.edu, GPI N-3650. GPI N-418. Hals’s portrait of Roosterman now resides in the Cleveland Art Museum. GPI N-4112. Hals’s portrait of Berck is now in The Baltimore Museum of Art while that of her husband is in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. Elizabeth Honig, “The Beholder as Work of Art: A Study in the Location of Value in SeventeenthCentury Flemish Painting,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 46 (1995): 253-97. Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550-1700, 54. Elizabeth Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 206. As Pieter Biesboer has meticulously lain out, Hals’s sitters, especially those from his late period, constituted the social and economic elite of Haarlem. Pieter Biesboer, “The Burghers of Haarlem and Their Portrait Painters,” in: Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 23-44. Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation:Soziogenetische und pschogenetische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1939). For the aristocratization of the Dutch middle classes, see Henk F.K van Nierop, The Nobility of Holland: From Knights to Regent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 212-17. Herman Roodenburg has explored how in Holland gestures and postures were carefully choreographed so that individuals could present themselves as socially adept. Like their European counterparts, Roodenburg asserts that the Dutch “ruling classes, certainly those in the towns of Holland…readily adopted the new rules of civility.” Herman Roodenburg, “On ‘Swelling’ the Hips and Crossing the Legs: Distinguishing

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Public and Private in Paintings and Prints from the Dutch Golden Age,” in Arthur K. Wheelock and Adele Seeff, eds., The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Newark, DE and London: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 68. Baldasarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959). Ibid., 77. Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman. For the various manifestations and incarnations of Il Cortegiano, see Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge: Polity Press and Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Peacham follows Castiglione in giving practical advice on how to draw and paint, as well as providing a brief history of lives of famous ancient and modern painters. Ibid., 104-137. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Den eerlyken Jongeling of de edele Kunst van zich by groote en kleyne te doen eeren en beminnen. (Dordrecht, 1657), 25-28. Van Hoogstraten’s text is based on Nicolas Faret’s L’Honnête homme ou l’art de plaire à la cour published in Paris in 1630, which is itself a variant of Castiglione’s Cortegiano. See Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 56-57. Stephan Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Somewhat curiously, behavior books did not appear in the Dutch language until rather late. That does not mean, however, that the social recommendations found in these texts were inaccessible to all Dutchmen. Herman Roodenburg has argued that because members of the Dutch elite were proficient with foreign languages they could have accessed a variety of treatises on how to acquire and present an image of station. One need only remember that the Dutch courtier par excellence Constantijn Huygens penned his memoir in Latin and that Van Hoogstraten translated Faret’s French text as examples. See Roodenburg, “On ‘Swelling’ the Hips and Crossing the Legs,” 65-68. Pousão-Smith, “Concepts of Brushwork,” 141. Le Brun, “Recueuil des Essaies des Merveilles de la Peinture.” Ibid., 759. “Comme est il possible que le pinceau ait couché tant de doucers sous ces traitz si rudes, sous des couleurs si rudes, et que parmy tant de nonchalance, on ait couché tant d’attraits.” Le Brun, “Recueuil des Essaies des Merveilles de la Peinture,” 825. Van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, 161. Mariët Westermann, “Fray en Leelijk: Adraien van de Venne’s invention of the ironic grisaille.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999): 232. Westermann related grisailles to esteemed works of art like Jan van Eyck’s shutter wings, Lucas van Leyden’s engravings, and Goltzius’s pen drawings. Ibid, 234-6. Hals’s portraits of Willem van Heythuysen are discussed at length in chapter 4. David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 4-11. For relationships between style and subject, see Mariët Westermann, “Fray en Leelijk” and Karolien de Clippel, “Rough Bacchus, Neat Andromeda: Rubens’s Mythologies and the Meaning of Manner,” in Carl van de Velde, ed., Classical Mythology in the Netherlands in the Age of the Renaissance and Baroque (Leuven, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2009), 95-112. Eddy de Jongh, “Review of Bob Haak’s Hollandse schilders in de gouden eeuw,” Simiolus 15 (1985): 65; and Van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, 161-62. Biesboer, “The Burghers of Haarlem and Their Portrait Painters,” 37.

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De Bray’s earliest dated painting is from 1652. In his account of Hals’s economic downturn, Biesboer dismissed any possible impact by De Bray on Hals or the art market, Ibid., 38-9. Caeser van Everdingen moved to Haarlem in 1648 and joined the Guild of St. Luke there in 1651. Perhaps he, along with De Bray, initiated – or reinvigorated as Albert Blankert has argued – a new strain of classicism in Haarlem at midcentury. Albert Blankert, et. al, Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-Century Painting (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and Frankfurt am Main: Städelesches Kunstinstitut, 1999), 20. “Nu moet ’er het kennelyke van den meester noch in.” Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh, 73. Hals is mentioned as a former student of Van Mander’s in the 1618 edition of Het Schilderboek. Hals must have studied with Van Mander at some point before 1604 when Van Mander relocated to outside Amsterdam. Goltzius toiled in Haarlem from 1577 until his death in 1617. Cornelis van Haarlem returned from Italy in 1580-1 and remained active until he passed away in 1638. As Hals joined the Guild of St. Luke in 1610, there would have been plenty of opportunities for Hals to mingle with these senior painters. In his extensive analysis of inventories, Montias has noted a marked rise in the 1630s and 1640s in the number of paintings that were attributed. From this, he concluded that not only was the name of the artist increasingly important to the consumer, collectors were also becoming more discriminating in terms of style. In other words, from about the third decade of the century forward, style as well as subject matter affected purchasing decisions. John Michael Montias, “Art Dealers in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,” Simiolus 17 (1988): 245. Groen and Hendriks noted this feature from scientific analysis of a broad survey of Hals’s paintings. Groen and Hendriks, “Frans Hals: A Technical Examination,” 121. For a more extended treatment of Hals’s stylistic development, see Seymour Slive, Frans Hals, vol. 1 (London and New York: Phaidon, 1970) and Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: Entwicklung, Werkanalyse, Gesamtkatalog (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1972). The relationships between Hals’s manner of painting and the market, including specific sales outlets, are explored extensively in chapter 3. Tummers has made related arguments for the higher degree of perceptibility of mastery in bold passages, more generally. Tummers, “By His Hand,” 46.

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Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 40-50. See for example John Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Marten Jan Bok, “Vraag en aanbod op de Nederlandse Kunstmarkt, 1580-1700” (Ph.D. diss. University of Utrecht, 1994); Marion Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt: Haarlem 1600-1635” (Ph.D. diss. Universiteit van Leiden, 2001); Michael North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, 1982, trans. Catherine Hill (New Haven: Yale University, 1997); and Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, eds. Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), among others. For Hals’s patrons, see Pieter Biesboer, “The Burghers of Haarlem and Their Portrait Painters,” in Seymour Slive, ed., Frans Hals (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; London: Royal Academy of Arts; and Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum, 1989), 23-44. Hals occasionally received commissions from clients in Amsterdam. He also had sitters who resided in Leiden and Rotterdam, but these were exceptions to the bulk of Hals’s clients who were largely from Haarlem. John Michael Montias, “Cost and Value in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,” Art History 10 (December 1987): 456. Ibid.

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Ibid., 455. Marten Jan Bok, “Pricing the Unpriced: How Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painters Determined the Selling Price of Their Works,” in Michael North, ed. Art Markets in Europe 1400-1800 (London: Ashgate, 1999), 103-11. Filipczak has shown that Frans Floris sped his production for increased profit. Zirka Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Jonathan Israel, “Adjusting to Hard Times: Dutch Art during Its Period of Crisis and Restructuring (c. 1621-c.1645),” Art History 20, no. 3 (September 1997): 449-76. Ibid.; Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy 1500-1815 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 672. Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 46678. Israel, “Adjusting to Hard Times,” 453. De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 627. As De Vries and Van der Woude have shown, the production of beer, one of Holland’s leading exports, suffered a precipitous decline in the 1620s. De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 321. See also Richard Yntema, “The Brewing Industry in Holland, 1300-1800: A Study of Industrial Development” (Ph.D. diss. University of Chicago, 1992). As a major brewing center, Haarlem was particularly hard hit. Simon Episcopius as quoted and translated in Israel, “Adjusting to Hard Times,” 452. Israel, “Adjusting to Hard Times,” 452. Ibid., 455. Ibid., 462-5. Mariët Westermann has argued that non-economic, artistic explanations led Adriaen van de Venne to work in grisaille. See Mariët Westermann, “Fray en Leelijk: Adraien van de Venne’s invention of the ironic grisaille,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999): 220-57. Biesboer, “The Burghers of Haarlem and Their Portrait Painters,” 26. This important early commission may have been what enticed the anonymous biographer of Karel van Mander in 1618 to list Hals as a noteworthy pupil of Van Mander. In a stroke of bad luck, his uncle in-law Gijblant, who had probably aided in securing the 1616 commission, was removed from the city council in 1618 as part of the political upheaval that took place in the wake of the stadhouder’s conflict with Oldenbarnevelt. As a result, Gijblant could no longer aid his niece’s husband in procuring lucrative municipal contracts. Political environment aside, Biesboer suggests that Gijblant’s support may not have been unwavering even if he had been in a position to further Hals’s career. Biesboer, “The Burghers of Haarlem and Their Portrait Painters,” 26. Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 387. Ibid., 386. Marion Boers-Goosens, “Een nieuwe maarkt voor kunst: de expansie van de Haarlemse schilderijenmarkt in de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999): 194-219. Bredius first published the documents relating to the lottery in Abraham Bredius, Künstler-inventare; Urkunden zur Geschichte der Holländischen Kunst des XVIten, XVIIten, und XVIIIten Jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1915-1921), 321-24. For a discussion of the Van Leeuwen lottery, see Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, 198-99. Ibid., 197-99. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, 201; and North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, 89. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, 199; and North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, 89. North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, 89.

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Boers-Goosens, “Een nieuwe markt voor kunst,” 204. The few existing images of lotteries give the impression that lotteries were indeed popular events. Gilles Coignet represented a 1592 Amsterdam lottery at the Dolhuis as a spectacle that attracted a crowd of viewers (fig. 93). The area in front of the podium where the objects are displayed is packed with people. A seemingly endless stream of people is poised at the gate to the amphitheater on the right as they eagerly await the opportunity to join the throng. Even the open second-story window of the building adjacent the stage is filled with young faces straining to catch a glimpse of the excitement transpiring below. Similarly, Willem Buytewech’s (1591/2-1624) drawing of a lottery in The Hague presents an occurrence that garnered considerable interest from the locals. Buytewech presents the viewer with a ground-level vantage point behind the citizens gathered in front of the stage. In fact, so many rows of people stand between the viewer and the stage that one can barely make out what actually transpired at the lottery. While these images should not be considered as journalistic recordings of the events and are probably somewhat biased in their representations, they both present lotteries as being popular events that drew large crowds. Neil de Marchi and Hans van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” Art Bulletin 76 (September 1994): 453. While not used on the art market, the method of descending prices is still used in Dutch flower markets today. Auctions operated in this fashion are still known as “Dutch auctions.” De Marchi and Van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” 453. As Boers-Goosens has explored, Haarlem artists were particularly adept at manipulating these new sales mechanisms to move large quantities of paintings quickly. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt.” De Marchi and Van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” 453. Eric Jan Sluijter, “Jan van Goyen als marktleider, virtuoos en vernieuwer,” in Christiaan Vogelaar, ed., Jan van Goyen (Leiden: Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, 1996): 38-59. Ibid., 43. Van Goyen possessed enough capital to speculate in the Haarlem housing market. Ibid., 40. This ability rebukes twentieth-century scholarship that argued that Van Goyen must have been unsuccessful because his paintings sold for so little. In fact, he must have been extremely successful to have had enough disposable income to be able to participate in any kind of investment venture. Ibid., 40. Hals’s name appears twenty-five times in select Haarlem inventories and another twenty-five times in the Getty Provenance Index. As Boers-Goosens rightly only recorded those entries that identify the artist as Frans Hals and not simply “Hals” to avoid confusion with works by his brother or sons, it is not difficult to imagine that more of the “Hals” paintings refer to pictures by Frans, but we cannot be sure. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 162. Slive concluded that twenty-eight genre paintings have survived that were painted from the 1620s and early 1630s. Slive, Frans Hals, vol. 3 (London and New York: Phadon, 1974), 13-45. For price comparisons of Haarlem artists, including Hals, see Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 296. Boers-Goosens located only sixteen priced paintings by Frans Hals. The pieces by Hals sold at lotteries discussed earlier were valued as follows: vanitas thirty-four gulden, both tronies at sixteen gulden each. The prices of Hals’s paintings sold at auctions were not recorded. Ella Hendriks and Koos Levy-van Halm, “Report Concerning a Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings Exhibited During the Frans Hals Exhibition, Held From May 11 to July 22, 1990 in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, 1991,” (unpublished report), 5-8. Ibid., 9-10. Boers-Goosens has argued, for example, that it is not demonstrable that all of Montias’s trendsetting artists had lower prices than artists of the previous generation. As name and quality became valued traits, a differ-

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ent process seems to have taken place, especially after 1630. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 321. Reindert Falkenburg, “Onweer bij Jan van Goyen: artistieke wedijver en de markt voor het Hollandse landschap in de 17de eeuw,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 48 (1997): 116-161. Gustav Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, vol. 2 (London: J. Murray, 1854), 4. Ella Hendriks and Koos Levy-van Halm, “Report Concerning a Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings,” 42. Other commentary on the relationship between paintings by Hals and those by Rubens can be found in: Norbert Middlekoop, Frans Hals: Leven, Werk, Restauratie (Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum and Amsterdam: Uniepers, 1988), 88. Also see H.P. Baard, Frans Hals, trans. George Steyck (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1981), 31; and Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 323. Hals’s conception of the piece as a whole derives from Rubens, but the arrangement of the figures more closely follows Anthony van Dyck’s Married Couple in Budapest. See I: 114 in Susan Barnes, Nora de Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey, Van Dyck. A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 108. For a discussion of attempts to identify the sitters, see Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3, 12. For a discussion of similarities between the wedding portraits of Hals and Rubens, see Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 163-65; and Slive, Frans Hals (1970), vol. 1, p. 68. Claus Grimm has also recognized the connection to paintings by Rubens. Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, trans. Jürgen Riehle (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 122. Slive dates the pendants to around 1611 while Grimm places them later, to about 1617-18. Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3, 2-3; and Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 136. Slive has argued that Hals painted a merry company earlier, the picture which had been in Berlin but was destroyed in World War II. As this work appears anomalous to everything else in Hals’s career and as scholars have only been able to examine it in photograph, I find no reason to consider it part of Hals’s oeuvre. Although attempts to attribute it to Buytewech and others have also failed, perhaps comparison with early eighteenth-century painters (French?) might yield more satisfactory results. Slive, Frans Hals (1970), vol. 1, 31-34. Walter Liedtke expressed his belief in this relationship in conversation with the author. I thank him for his observations. Liedtke’s perspectives are now more widely available in Frans Hals: Style and Substance (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011). While the young man’s costume, the interior setting, and the romantic engagement of Hals’s picture relates in type to the merry companies painted in Haarlem by artists like Willem Buytewech and Dirck Hals, the conception of the piece stems from the tavern scenes of Jan Sanders van Hemessen (1519-1556). Van Hemessen specialized in secular imagery focused on two or three half-length figures placed in inns or taverns who demonstrate the ills that accompany excessive alcohol consumption. Like Van Hemessen, Hals restricted the number of figures and located his figures in a tavern or some other comparable establishment. Adriaen Brouwer is credited with changing the course of genre painting by moving boorish subjects into the tavern, but Hals’s painting preceded Brouwer’s arrival in Haarlem by at least three years. Interestingly, Malle Babbe resembles the elder maid with the tankard in Hemessen’s painting in Karlsruhe. How exactly Hals came to know Van Hemessen’s work remains unknown. As Hals’s technique in Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart bears little relationship to Van Hemessen’s bright palette and traceless brushwork, one wonders if he knew the Antwerp painter’s pictures through reproduction. Barbara Haeger has explored the ambiguous, moralizing content of the picture though, as she argues, it is not a representation of the Prodigal Son. Barbara Haeger, “Frans Hals’s So-called Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart Reconsidered.” Kunsthistorisk Tidskrift 15, no. 4 (1986): 141-48. Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3, 14. Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989): 224.

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Elizabeth Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). What motivated Hals’s participation in a collaboration with the little known Haarlem still-life specialist Van Heussen remains a mystery. One wonders, though, if it was designed for a patron who, or whose family, had emigrated from Antwerp where such pictures had a greater appeal. This may not be the only example of Hals’s collaboration with another Haarlem painter. Slive believes that Pieter Molijn contributed the landscape setting to Hals’s portrait of Massa in Toronto and the backgrounds to the family groups in the Thyssen-Bornemizsa collection, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, and the National Gallery London. Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 192, 272, and 318, respectively. A 1656 deed lists pendants whose current whereabouts are unknown, where the “portraits were made and painted by Mr. Franchoys Hals the elder and the compaquement by Buytewech, also called Geestige Willem.” Irene van Thiel-Stroman, “The Frans Hals Documents: Written and Printed Sources 1582-1679,” in Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 407, doc. 153. Slive argues that Buytwech’s contribution was probably an elaborate cartouche frame and that the pictures had been painted between 1612 and 1617, the brief time in which Buytewech was in Haarlem. Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 224. Gregory Martin first wondered about the Flemish sources of Hals’s fisher children. Gregory Martin, “The Inventive Genius of Frans Hals,” Apollo 94 (September 1971): 242-43. Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 226. As I discuss in greater detail in the following chapter, not all of the Halsian fisher children are autograph works. Grimm rejected the whole lot, however, attributing them to an unidentified painter he labeled “The Master of the Fisher Children.” I find no reason to doubt the authenticity of some of the most skillfully executed versions such as those in Antwerp and formerly in the Brooklyn Museum, and I concur with Slive that multiple hands are visible in the series, making Grimm’s argument misguided. Claus Grimm, “Frans Hals und seine ‘Schule’,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 22 (1971): 140-78. For Slive’s critique of Grimm’s hypothesis, see Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 226. Schnackenburg has suggested that the early rough manners of Rembrandt and Jan Lievens are also heavily indebted to Flemish head studies. Bernard Schnackenburg, “Young Rembrandt’s ‘Rough Manner’: A Painting Style and Its Sources,” in Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg, eds.The Mystery of the Young Rembrandt (Amsterdam: Museum het Rembrandthuis and Kassel: Staatliche Museen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, 2001), 108-114. The meaning of the word tronie has been the subject of much scholarship. Among the studies, see Lydia de Pauw-de Veen, De Begrippen “Schilder,” “Schilderij,” en “Schilderen” in de zeventiende eeuw (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1969), 190-93; Albert Blankert, Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680): Rembrandt’s Pupil (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1982), 26-28; and 57-59; Christian Tümple, Rembrandt; Mythos und Methode (Königstein im Taunus: Langewiesche, 1986), 57-61; Joshua Bruyn, “Studio Practice and Studio Production,” in A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. 3, ed. Josua Bruyn, Bob Haak, Simon Levie, Pieter J.J. van Thiel, and Ernst van de Wetering (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1989), 22-26; Lyckle de Vries, “Tronies and Other Single Figured Netherlandish Paintings,” Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1989): 185-202; Yoriko KobayshiSato, “The Portrait and the Tronie in the Art of Rembrandt,” in Faces of the Golden Age: Seventeenth Century Dutch Portraits, ed. Eddy de Jongh (Yamaguchi: Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum; Mumamota: Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art; and Tokyo: Tokyo Station Gallery, 1994), 11-17; Jaap van der Veen, “Faces from Life. Tronies and Portraits in Rembrandt’s Painted Oeuvre,” in Rembrandt: A Genius and His Impact, ed. Albert Blankert (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria and Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1997-98), 69-80; Ernst van de Wetering, “The Multiple Functions of Rembrandt’s Self Portraits,” in Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot, eds., Rembrandt by Himself (London: The National Gallery and The Hague: Mauritshuis, 1999): 21-36; Dagmar Hirschfelder, “Portrait or Character Head? The term tronie and its meaning in the seventeenth century,” in Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg, eds., The

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Mystery of the Young Rembrandt (Kassel: Amsterdam: Museum het Rembrandthuis and Kassel: Staatliche Museen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, 2001), 82-91; and Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2008). Hals’s Gypsy Girl in the Louvre and Laughing Boy in the Mauritshuis both focus on a solitary unidentifiable figure’s face, depicting nary a limb or setting. Though his numerous images of young musicians and revelers like those in Braunschweig otherwise include a musical instrument or drinking vessel, they too can be classified as tronies thanks to their restrictive emphasis on the subject’s facial features. Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilderboek (1603-04), vol. 1, ed. Hessel Miedema, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore (Doornspijk: Davacao, 1994-99), 229. Bernhard Schnackenburg, “Young Rembrandt’s Rough Manner, A Painting Style and Its Source,” in Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg, eds., The Mysteries of the Young Rembrandt (Kassel: Staatliche Museen Kassel and Amsterdam: Museum het Rembrandthuis, 2001), 92-121. Ibid., 111. Grimm has noted some relationships between Flemish art and the paintings Hals made between 1617 and 1624. Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: Entwicklung, Werkanalyse, Gesamtkatalog (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1972) 40-50, 138. Schackenburg, 104-12. See, for example, Slive, Frans Hals (1970), vol. 1, 10. Baard has argued that Hals became taken with Rubens much later, after the Flemish master’s visit to Holland in 1627. Baard, Frans Hals, 31. Van Thiel-Stroman, “The Frans Hals Documents,” 378, doc. 22. This painting was commissioned to commemorate the officers who served in the civic guard from 1612 to 1615. From legal records of Hals’s debt to Leenders, the court sent a messenger to the militia hall to take charge of a fee owed by the militia to Hals, presumably for the group portrait. The payment proves that the painting was finished before Hals left for Antwerp. Gerard Davies, Frans Hals (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1902), 15-20. Furthermore, neither Hals’s name nor any variation on it appears in De Liggeren records of the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke, during Hals’s lifetime. P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, 2 vols. (Antwerp: Baggerman, 1864-75). Travel documents and receipts do not exist from the period. As for Hals’s parents, no record of their voyage/s from Antwerp to Haarlem are extant. Therefore, we cannot determine when exactly they immigrated. Even today it remains possible to travel internationally without leaving a paper trail if one were to travel by car and pay by cash. I thank Walter Liedtke for this suggestion. Grimm has suggested that correspondences between Hals and Rubens relate to some sort of shared sociological sensibility. Grimm arrives at this position because Hals’s parents were Flemish and he trained with the transplanted Fleming Van Mander. Grimm, Frans Hals (1972), 186-189. Dominic Baudius, Poematum nova editio, 1616, p. 578. Also see Charles Dempsey, “Euanthes redivivus: Rubens’s Prometheus Bound,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XXX (1967), 420-425. Van Gelder argued that these must have been early paintings by Rubens, probably from 1618 or 1619, before travel between the northern and southern Netherlands became more difficult with the cessation of the Twelve Years’ Truce. J. G. van Gelder, “Rubens in Holland in de zeventiende eeuw,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 3 (1950-1): 104-5. See ibid., 103-50, esp. 118-21; and R. de Smet, “Een nauwkeurige datering van Rubens’ eerste reis naar Holland in 1612,” Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (1977): 199-218. Schama suggested that Rubens most likely would have sought Goltzius, but settled for Goltzius’s pupil and son-in-law Jacob Matham, perhaps on Goltzius’ recommendation. Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 187-88.

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Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3, 2-3; and Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 136. As Julius Held noted, Matham’s print follows the sketch in its few deviations from the ultimate painting – depicting the Philistine wielding the scissors as beardless, placing three soldiers instead of five in the doorway, and arranging the still-life elements beside the door. Furthermore, the inscription below the print mentions that Rubens’s painting resided in Nicolas Rockox’s house in Antwerp. As the panel is rather large and as no documentation survives of Matham ever visiting Antwerp, it seems unlikely that Rockox would have let his prized picture travel to Haarlem. Though Held dates the sketch to 1609 and argues that Rubens used it to present his vision to Rockox before undertaking the project on a large scale, these features do not exclude the possibility that it also functioned later as Matham’s design. Julius Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 430-32. If Rockox owned the sketch, he surely would have favored lending the smaller, more portable modello to Matham. As oil sketches were not widely collected at this time and as Rubens kept his preparatory drawings as reference tools, Rubens may have retained the picture himself, making it possible to send the work northward to Haarlem. Finally, as recent studies have shown, it was common for Dutch printmakers to work from oil sketches in the period. See Ernst van de Wetering, “Remarks on Rembrandt’s Oil-sketches for Etchings,” in Rembrandt the Printmaker, ed. Erik Hinterding, Ger Luijten, and Martin Royalton-Kitsch (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum and London: British Museum, 2000), 50-56; and Ronni Baer, “Rembrandt’s Oil Sketches,” in Rembrandt’s Journey, ed. Cliff Ackley (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts and Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2003), 29-44. Held qualifies his linkage of Matham’s print with the Cincinnati picture by suggesting that a drawing after the sketch could also have conveyed the differences between the modello and the painting to the engraver, but as Rubens seems to have been concerned with finding a printmaker who could convey his painterly effects and bravura handling, Rubens must have supplied Matham with a painted replica to work from. As such, the likelihood that Rubens’s sketch was in Haarlem for Hals to see at a formative stage in his career remains high. Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 141. While it is tempting to consider the painting a sketch for the print due to its small scale and loose application of paint, the use of copper as a support does not encourage this reading. J.J. Temminck, “Sint Bavo en Haarlem.” in Pieter Biesboer, G. Th. Kothof, H. Rau, J.J. Temminck, and J.B. Uittenbout, Vlamingen in Haarlem (Haarlem: De Vriesborsch, 1996), 29-34. Jan Briels, “De zuidnederlandse immigratie in Amsterdam en Haarlem omstreeks 1572-1630,” (Ph.D. diss. Universiteit van Utrecht, 1976). Pieter Biesboer, “De Vlaamse immigranten in Haarlem 1578-1630 en hun nakomelingen.” in Biesboer, G. Th. Kothof, H. Rau, J.J. Temminck, and J.B. Uittenbout, Vlamingen in Haarlem (Haarlem: De Vriesborsch, 1996), 38. Ibid., 35-60. Jan Briels, Zuidnederlandse boekdrukkers en boekverkopers in de Republiek der verenigte Nederlanden omstreeks 1570-1630 (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1974). See for example Jan Briels, Vlaamse schilders in de Noordelijke Nederlanden in het begin van de gouden eeuw, 1585-1630 (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1987). Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 46. Ibid. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 51. See my discussion of Brouwer in chapter four for a review of the Flemish painter’s possible relationship to Hals. Eric Jan Sluijter, “Over Brantse vodden, economische concurrentie, artistieke wedijver en de groei van de markt voor schilderijen in de eerste decennia van de zeventiende eeuw” Nederlandse Kunsthistorische Jaarboek 50 (1999), 113-44.

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De Marchi and Van Miegerot, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” 453-54. GPI N-3807. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, vol. 1, with commentary by F.B. Kaye (Oxford: Oxford University, 1924), 326. For an analysis of Mandeville’s comments on art, see De Marchi and Van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” 454-58. A.H. Kan, De Jeugd van Constantijn Huygens door hemzelf beschreven. Rotterdam and Antwerp: Ad. Donker, 1946, p. 73. GPI N-2213. GPI N-2224 from 1625 and GPI-N3807 (een stuck schilderij met een boer en boerin van Rubbens) from 1650. The latter was owned by the Haarlem brewer and one time Hals sitter, Nicolaes Duyst van Voorhout. GPI N-2244 from 1654. GPI N 2352 from 1645 and GPI N 2265 from 1649, respectively. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 277-321. It is unclear how much Hals knew of developments in Flemish painting after 1620. It is not out of the realm of possibility that the bulk, if not nearly all, of Hals’s experience with the art of Flanders occurred before the Twelve Years’ Truce ended in 1621. Slive, Frans Hals (1970), vol. 1, 17. Meyer Schapiro, “Style,” in Anthropology Today, ed. Sol Tax (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1953) reprinted in Aesthetics Today, ed. Morris Philipson and Paul J. Gudel (New York: New American Library, 1961, revised 1980), 137. Ibid., 93. Richard Wollheim, “Style in Painting,” in The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Caroline van Eck, James McAllister, and Renee van de Vall (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 41-43. As quoted in Richard Spear, “Notes on Renaissance and Baroque Originals and Originality,” in Kathleen Preciado, ed., Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies and Reproductions (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 98. Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Hessel Miedema’s annotation of Van Mander’s usage of manier in Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, vol. 5, 201. Miedema has argued that Van Mander translated maniera as wijse, a term synonymous with manier. Miedema also posited that Van Mander considered handelighe to be one element of manier. Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, vol. 2, 201 and 318. Somewhat alternatively, Samuel van Hoogstraten equated handling with manner. Chapter ten of Van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding, “Van de Handeling of maniere van Schilderen,” gives insight into the meaning of the term. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst (Rotterdam: Fransois van Hoogstraten, 1678; reprinted Doornspijk: Davaco, 1969). Maniere “was until recently understood as a deliberately aimed-at style. I have felt that this view needs some modification: maniere means nothing more than method or manner of working, and the outwardly-visible results of this, which together make up the style, are only one component of this.” Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, vol. 2, 251. Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy, 74-75. “…discerne tr maniera e maniera….” Ibid., 86. Ibid., 87. Ibid. For a discussion of Van Mander’s formulations of distinctive, individual manners, see Anna Tummers, “‘By

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His Hand’: The Paradox of Seventeenth-century Connoisseurship,” in Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008) 46-49. “Hier heb ick / o edel Schilder scholieren / Voor ooghen willen beelden en stellen / Twederly / doch welstandighe manieren / Dy dat ghy met lust u sinnen mocht stieren / Tot het gheen’ uwen gheest meest sal versnellen: / Maer soude doch raden u eerst te quellen/ En u te wennen / met vlijtighe sinnen / Een suyver manier / end’ een net beginnen.” Karel van Mander, Den Grondt der edel vry Schilderconst, vol. 1, trans. Hessel Miedema (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker and Gunbert, 1973), 261 (XII, no. 26). Van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, vol. 3, 207. Ibid., vol. 1, 397-98. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 36. Pliny, Natural History, 35.101, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1952). For a discussion of how this operated as a signature, see Christopher Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (London: Reaktion, 1993), 61. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 120-22. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, 67-80. See Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy, 42. Angel, “Praise of Painting,” trans. Michael Hoyle, Simiolous 24 (1996): 248. Tummers, “By His Hand.” Signing works of art had been relatively common, at least in Renaissance Italy. The appearance of signatures on paintings decreased dramatically after 1500 throughout Italy. Louisa C. Matthew, “The Painter’s Presence: Signatures in Venetian Renaissance Pictures,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 80, no. 4 (December 1998), 616-648. Rudi Ekkart, “Portraiture in Practice,” in Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals, ed. Rudi Ekkart and Quentin Buvelot (The Hague: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis and London: The National Gallery, 2007): 60. Ibid., 61. Michael Jaffé, Rubens: Catalogo Completo, trans. Germano Mulazzani (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989). These calculations are based on the paintings identified as autograph in Susan J. Barnes, Nora de Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). For example, D’Hulst identified signatures on only fifteen of the sixty-five paintings he studied in 1982. Roger Adolf d’ Hulst, Jacob Jordaens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). Ekkart, “Portraiture in Practice,” 59-61. Jeffrey Muller, “Measures of Authenticity: The Detection of Copies in the Early Literature on Connoisseurship,” in Kathleen Preciado, ed., Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 143-44. Tummers has explored how several pre-modern writers expressed the belief that recognition of characteristic manners often relied on boldly executed passages, more generally. Tummers, “By His Hand,” 46. Wood develops his verbal and visual vocabulary from linguistic studies where a deitic utterance is one that calls attention to its own physical production. See Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, 29. Ibid., 31 and 61-63. Ibid., 62. Abraham Bosse, Sentimens sur la distinction des manieres de peinture dessin, et graveure, et des orginaux et coppies (Paris: Chez l’auther, 1649), 67-68, as quoted and translated in Muller, “Measures of Authenticity,” 144.

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Ibid., 67-68. Pliny, Natural History, 35.81-83. Ruth Saunders Magurn, ed., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 61. Ernst van de Wetering and Jaap van der Veen have both interpreted the Rubens-Carleton correspondence as documenting preference for autograph works. Ernst van de Wetering, “The Search for the Master’s Hand: An Anachronism,” in Thomas Gaetgens, ed. Künstlerischer Austauch, Akten des XXVIII Internationalen Kongress für Kunstgeschichte Berlin, 15-20 Juli 1992. (Berlin 1993), 628 and Jaap van Veen, “By His Own Hand, the Valuation of Autograph Paintings in the Seventeenth Century,” in Van de Wetering, ed. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986-2010) volume 4, 7. Tummers has offered an alternative reading, suggesting that Carleton valued Rubens’s direct involvement, whether other artists also laid brush to the same canvas or not. Tummers, “By His Hand,” 43. Elizabeth Honig explored this definition of value in relation to paintings that resulted from the collaboration of two independent masters. See Elizabeth Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 177-96. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, 227. The reason for the percentage of attributed paintings receding in 1670s requires further examination, as no immediate cause is known. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft, 227. Ibid., 259. Ibid. Van der Veen, “By His Own Hand.” Comparably, Tummers has argued for the high degree of concern for the name of artists, but she did not correlate this perspective with monetary value. Tummers, “By His Hand.” “Zoo komt dan deze onze Inleiding ook zeer wel te pas voor alle Liefhebbers van de Schilderkonst, schoon zy in de zelve onervaere zijn, om in’t koopen van Konststukken niet bedrogen te worden, want zy zullen die waerden nae de maete der deugden, die in de zelve zijn waergenomen, en geen naemkoopers blijven, gelijk’er tans veel zijn, die van d’een of d’anderen snoeshaen verleyt, kaele vodden in grooten waerden houden, om dat hun is wijs gemaekt, datze van d’een of d’ander groot Meester geschildert zijn. Zeker een belachlijke liefhebbery, als men iets voor konstich en hoog acht, daer men niet konstigs noch hoogs in zien kan. Niet dat ik zeggen wil, dat deeze mijne Inleiding allen Liefhebbers de oogen zoo al openen, dat zy zelfs strax van de kunst zullen kunnen oordeelen: dat zy verre; maer zy zullen uit ons werk gemakkelijk kunnen begrijpen, waer van dat men oordelen moet, en dan zullen zy, met behulp van een ervaren Schilder, de deugden en feilen, die in eenig werk zijn, klaer en onderscheidelijk kunnen naespeuren.” Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, 3-4. Pousão-Smith rightly sees Van Hoogstraten’s concerns as somewhat divorced from issues of attribution and connoisseurship as practiced in the market. In other words, Van Hoogstraten consciously distanced himself and his writing from market concerns and motivations. Maria Isabel Pousão-Smith, “Concepts of Brushwork in the Northern and Southern Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century,” (Ph.D. diss. Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1998), 141. Mandeville, The Fable of Bees, vol. 1, 326. Also see De Marchi and Van Miegerot, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” 454. Logically, De Marchi and Van Miegerot equated the import of attribution and the reputation of the artist. De Marchi and Van Miegerot, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” 456. “Sijnde ’t voorsz. Schilderije waerdich driehondert gulden, maer ten respecte van de meester sijn naem en reputatie hebben ’t selve op vierhondert gulden getaxeert en niet meer.” Bredius, Künstler-inventare, vol. VII, 301. As translated in Van der Veen, “By His Own Hand,” 5. Eric Jan Sluijter has noted that Van der Helst had

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attempted to price the picture in question at 1,000 guilders. Thus, while Bleecker and Coolen increased the value based on the artist’s fame, Van der Helst had overestimated his own reputation. Eric Jan Sluijter, “Determining Value on the Art Market in the Golden Age: An Introduction,” in Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 12-13. See Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 250-55; and De Marchi and Van Miegerot, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Seventeenth Century,” 454-55. “Zyn Konst openbaer te maeken” in Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, 195. Van Hoogstraten also advised circulating painted copies of one’s works. I consider this passage in relation to Hals’s workshop production in chapter four. Samuel Ampzing, Beschryvinge ende lof der stadt Haerlem in Holland (Haarlem: Adriaen Rooman, 1628), 371; and Theodorus Schrevelius, Harlemias ofte, om beter te segggen, de eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem (Haarlem: Thomas Fonteyn, 1648), 383. “Il y a [in Haarlem] une maison nommé le Doul…, et il y a force grands portraits de ces Messieurs [officers] assemblez, et un entre autres d’Als, qui est avec raison admiré des plus grands peintres.” Van Thiel-Stroman “The Frans Hals Documents,” 411, doc. 173. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 156. The life of Van Mander did not appear in Het Schilderboek when it was first published in 1604. An anonymous author added the text to the second edition of the book in 1618. Ampzing, Beschryvinge ende lof der stadt Haerlem in Holland; and Schrevelius, Harlemias ofte, om beter te segggen, de eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem. For example, Houbraken excluded Molenaer, Leyster, and Bollinger from his text. Boers-Goosens has suggested that these omissions might be the result of a pro-Amsterdam bias by Houbraken. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 155. Cornelis de Bie, Het Gulden Cabinet van de Edel vry Schilderconst (Antwerp: Juliaen van Montfort, 1662), 281-82. Sluijter has suggested that Rembrandt attempted to set prices for his work based solely on his high reputation. Following Richard Spear’s analyses of Guido Reni’s practices, Sluitjer makes his case by identifying the shift from valore di fatica (value defined by labor expended) to valore di stima (value defined by quality and reputation). Sluijter, “Determing Value on the Art Market in the Golden Age,” 9-16. These paintings are now in the Rijksmuseum and Kenwood House respectively. Ernst van de Wetering, “The Multiple Functions of Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits,” in Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot, eds., Rembrandt By Himself (London: The National Gallery and The Hague: Mauritshuis, 1999), 27-36. Van de Wetering believes that Rembrandt was an art celebrity so that his fame spurred the artist to market his image and his style. Ibid., 36.

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Mau van Dantzig, Frans Hals: Echt of Onecht (Amsterdam and Paris: H.J. Paris, 1937). As with Rembrandt, it was thought, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, that those Halsian paintings rejected from the master’s oeuvre were fakes or forgeries made after the master’s death. To be sure, due to the popularity of Hals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, numerous fakes like those produced by Han van Meegeren, as well as numerous copies designed for study rather than malicious purposes, date from this time. For an introduction to Van Meegeren’s Hals forgeries, see Seymour Slive, Frans

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Hals, vol. 3 (London and New York: Phaidon, 1974), 46. For a broader discussion of Van Meegeren, see John Raymond Godley Kilbracker, Van Meegeren, Master Forger (New York: Scribner, 1968) and Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: The Unvarnishing of Master Forger Han van Meegeren (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). Arthur Wheelock’s examination of Rembrandt’s workshop are particularly relevant. Arthur Wheelock, Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 205-210. Though it has been known widely that Hals trained pupils, scholars have paid scant attention to his workshop. In his 1871 study, Wilhelm von Bode placed Hals within the context of artists operating in Haarlem, but the members of the Hals “school” that Von Bode discussed were more contemporaries than artists who received their formal training from Hals. Wilhem von Bode, “Frans Hals und seine Schule,” Jahrbüch für Kunstwissenschaft 4 (1871): 1-66. Of considerably greater use is the series of documents published by Abraham Bredius in the first two decades of the twentieth century. These texts shed light on several artists associated directly with Hals, particularly the painter’s sons. Abraham Bredius, “Het Schildersregister van Jan Symus,” Oud Holland 8 (1890): 12; Bredius, “Harmen Hals te Vianen,” Oud Holland 27 (1909): 196; Bredius, “Archiefsprokkels betreffende Herman Hals,” Oud Holland 41 (1923-24): 62, 249; Bredius, “De Schilder Francois Ryckhals,” Oud Holland 35 (1917), 1-3; Bredius, “Eenige gegevens over Frans Hals den jonge,” Oud Holland 41 (1923-24): 215; Bredius, “Een schilderij van Jan Hals [Homer] door Vondel bezongen,” Oud Holland 6 (1888): 304; Bredius, “Oorkonden over Jan Hals,” Oud Holland 41 (1923-24): 263-65; Bredius, “Oorkonden over Reynier Hals,” Oud Holland 41 (1923-24): 258-59; Bredius, “Claes Hals: I,” Burlington Magazine 38 (March 1921): 138-43. Both Seymour Slive and Claus Grimm have supplemented Bredius’s findings with explorations of the artistic careers of Hals’s progeny. Seymour Slive, “Frans Hals Studies, III: Jan Franszoon Hals,” Oud Holland, lxxvi, 1961, 176f. Claus Grimm, “Frans Hals und seine ‘Schule’,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst Xxii (1971), 147-178. Similarly, as part of her study of the art market of Haarlem in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, Marion Boers-Goosens has contributed to the understanding of Hals’s workshop in the earliest stages of the artist’s career, but the parameters of her study precluded a consideration of developments after 1635. Marion Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt, Haarlem 1605-1635,” (Ph.D. diss. Universiteit van Leiden, 2001). Recently, significant monographic studies such as Frima Fox Hofrichter’s work on Judith Leyster, Konrad Renger’s study of Adriaen Brouwer, and Dennis Weller’s examination of Jan Miense Molenaer contribute to our knowledge of those who were not blood relations but who may have worked with Hals at some point in their careers. Frima Fox Hofrichter, Judith Leyster: A Woman Painter in Holland’s Golden Age (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1989); James Welu and Pieter Biesboer, eds., Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World (Worcester: Worcester Art Museum and Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum 1993); Konrad Renger, Adriaen Brouwer und das niederlädishce Bauerngenre 1600-1660 (Munich: Hirmer, 1986); Dennis Weller, ed., Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Manchester, NH: Currier Museum of Art, 2002); and Dennis Weller, “Jan Miense Molenaer: the Life and Art of a Seventeenth-century Dutch Painter,” (Ph.D. diss. University of Maryland, 1992). However, these efforts do not alter Slive’s brief lament in his 1970 catalogue raisonné that “a full-dress study of the artist’s relation to his pupils and followers has not been published.” Slive, Frans Hals (1970), vol. 1, 223. The first scholar to pursue seriously this paradox, as she did in relation to Rembrandt’s work, was Svetlana Alpers. Alpers’s emphasis on Rembrandt’s individualism and his desire for freedom, especially from patrons, diverges, however, from the interests of the current study. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and The Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Houbraken cites Cornelis de Bie’s Het Gulden Cabinet as the source of his information on Van Delen. Arnold Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, volume 3, ed. Petrus

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Theodorus Arnoldus Swillens (1718-21; repr. Maastricht: Leiter-Nypels, 1943), 246. De Bie’s discussion of Van Delen can be found in Cornelis de Bie, Het Gulden Cabinet van de Edel Vry Schilderkonst (Antwerp: Juliaen van Montfort, 1661), 281. This document in the Haarlem archives is quoted in Bert Sliggers, Dagelijckse aenteninge van Vincent Laurensz. van der Vinne: een reisjournal van een Haarlems schilder 1652-55 (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1979), 15. C.A. Hees, “Archivalia betreffende Frans Hals en de zijnen,” Oud Holland 74 (1959): 36-42; and Van ThielStroman, “The Frans Hals Documents,” 403, doc. 136. Not only did Leyster’s name not appear in De Bie or Houbraken, but in 1628 Samuel Ampzing mentioned her as a student of Frans Pietersz. de Grebber. Samuel Ampzing, Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem (Haarlem: Adriaen Rooman 1628), 370. Ampzing’s note does not negate the possibility that she also studied with Hals, as many painters trained with more than one master. Rembrandt is the most famous example of this practice. Jan Orlers recorded Rembrandt’s early training, both with Van Swanenburg and with Lastman. Jan Orlers, Beschrijvinghe der Stadt Leyden (Leiden: Abraham Commelijn, 1641), 375. Pieter Biesboer has suggested that Dirck had as much influence on Leyster as Hals did. Pieter Biesboer, “Judith Leyster: Painter of ‘Modern Figures,’” in Welu and Biesboer, eds., Judith Leyster, 80-82. Technical examinations of Leyster’s work undertaken for the Worcester exhibition demonstrate that she did not work from preconceived designs. It should also be noted that no drawings by Leyster are known to exist. Ella Hendriks and Karin Groen, “Judith Leyster: A Technical Examination of Her Work,” in Welu and Biesboer, Judith Leyster, 93-114. Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 10-11. Van Thiel-Stroman, “The Frans Hals Documents,” 388, doc. 70 and 71. Ronald de Jager has found that periods of tutelage varied greatly but that three to five years was the most common period of instruction with a single master. Ronald de Jager, “Meester, leerjongen, leertijd: een analyse van de zeventiende-eeuwse Noord-Nederlandse leerlingcontracten van kunstschilders, goud- en zilversmeden” Oud Holland 104 (1990): 70-71. Since the sixteenth century it was common in northern Europe for a painter to have a limited number of assistants. In Antwerp between 1500 and 1579 approximately eighty percent of the workshops had a maximum of three apprentices. Only seven studios employed more than five assistants. Citing Maximiliaan Martens and Natasja Peeters’s paper, “Artists by Numbers: Quantifying Artists’ Trades in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp,” presented at the Historians of Netherlandish Art Quadrennial Conference in Antwerp, March 14-16, 2002, Filip Vermeylen notes that this number may be deceptive, as journeymen did not have to register with the guild. Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market: Commercialization of Art in Antwerp’s Golden Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 124. A similar practice seems to have been in place in the northern Netherlands where it was common for a workshop to have approximately four painters. See J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer, Molly Faries, and Jan Piet Filedt Kok, “Painting technique and workshop practice in Northern Netherlandish Art of the sixteenth century,” in Wouter Kloek, W. Halsema-Kubes, and Reiner Baarsen, eds. Kunst voor de beeldenstorm: Noordnederlandse Kunst 1525-80, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1986), 106-16. This painting is the merry company now in the Szépmvészeti Múzeum in Budapest. Evidence of this might be found in Dirck’s repetition of the figural group from Shrovetide Revelers of around 1615 within one of his own compositions (figs. 9 and 101). Dirck shrank the scale of the group and altered the context, but his motif is certainly derived from Hals’s painting. This seems to be the only extant example of Dirck’s repetition of motifs from one of his brother’s paintings, so it is not enough upon which to build any sustainable conclusions. Eduard Plietzsch, “Randbemerkungen zur Holländischen Interieurmalerei am Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 18 (1956): 193.

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Trent Blade, “The Paintings of Dirck van Delen,” (Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1976), 127. The dull, brownish tints of some of Van Delen’s independent work from the late 1620s also may derive from the tonal methods of Haarlem painters like Hals. Though Konrad Renger has argued to the contrary, few have found reason to doubt that Brouwer and Hals worked closely together. Renger, Adriaen Brouwer und das niederlädishce Bauerngenre 1600-1660, 13-18. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 78-79. Ernst van de Wetering has suggested that upon moving to Amsterdam from Leiden Rembrandt may have been a vrije gast of the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh in order to bypass guild residency restrictions. Ernst van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration,” in A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. 2, ed. Josua Bruyn, Bob Haak, Simon Levie, Pieter J.J. van Thiel, and Ernst van de Wetering, (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 45-90. As Houbraken often embellished anecdotes to form artistic criticisms conflating art and life, Houbraken may have invented this tale to show the dual influence of Hals and Brouwer on Van Ostade’s paintings. Brouwer’s influence on Van Ostade has led Franits to express doubt about Hals’s impact on his young counterpart in Haarlem. For example, Franits notes that the “tighter” brushwork of Van Ostade makes him one step further removed from Hals than from Brouwer. Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting, 42. Bernhard Schnakenburg, “Adriaen van Ostade,” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, May 5, 2005, http:www.groveart.com. Hessel Miedema, De archiefsbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem: 1497-1798, vol. 2 (Alphen van Rijn: Canaletto, 1980), 933. Weller, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, 10-11. Ibid., 71-3. Molenaer’s other paintings that predate the artist’s entry into the Haarlem guild in 1634 also suggest the influence of Hals’s brother Dirck. As Weller noted, the smaller-scale figures rendered in full length and set in a well-defined interior space such as in The Musicians in London from around 1630 have much in common with Dirck’s merry company scenes. Biesboer has even suggested that Dirck’s influence was stronger and longer lasting than that of Hals’s, concluding that Molenaer is more likely to have studied with Dirck. Biesboer, “Judith Leyster: Painter of ‘Modern Figures,’” 82. According to Weller’s chronology, however, Molenaer drew inspiration concurrently from both brothers during the late 1620s. Due to the close working relationship and possible shared studio between the siblings, it remains possible that Molenaer could have gained familiarity with Dirck’s pictures through Hals, or vice versa. In any event, the indebtedness of Molenaer’s early artistic vision to Hals clearly indicates a close familiarity with his paintings. Frits Duparc, “Philips Wouwerman, 1619-1668,” Oud Holland, 3 (1993): 257-287. Gregory Martin, “The Inventive Genius of Frans Hals,” Apollo 94 (September 1971): 243. GPI N2205 from 1647 lists a tronijten and a trony by Wouwerman. GPI N2036 (1669), GPI N1511 (1698), and GPI N419 (1706), respectively. Two children from Hals’s first marriage whose names were not recorded were buried in 1613 and 1616. An unnamed child from Hals’s second marriage was buried in 1620. Hals also had four daughters who lived to majority, none of whom are known to have become painters: Sara, Adriaentje, Maria, and Susanna. Jacobus (b. 1624) may have died in 1648 at the age of twenty-four, but nothing is known about what career path he had chosen. Irene van Thiel-Stroman has suggested that Jacobus may have been the “child of Frans Hals” buried in 1648. It seems more likely that this was a child of Frans II, rather than the 24 year-old Jacobus being referred to as kindt and not by name. Irene van Thiel-Stroman, “The Frans Hals Documents: Written and Printed Sources, 1582-1679,” in Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989), 403, doc. 128. Pieter (d. 1667) was mentally disabled and sent to live at a municipal workhouse outside the city from 1637 onward. Ibid., 392, doc. 81. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 94-95.

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Our limited understanding of Jan’s oeuvre is indebted to Slive’s discovery of the artist’s monogram on a number of Halsian portraits from the 1640s and 1650s. Slive, “Frans Hals Studies III: Jan Franszoon Hals,” Oud Holland 76 (1961), 173-200. Building upon Slive’s finds, Grimm has suggested that Jan was active from 1640-1666 and Frans II was active between 1643 and 1658. Grimm, “Frans Hals und seine ‘Schule’,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 22 (1971), 147-78. As there are no signed works by Frans II, Grimm’s attempts to define the oeuvre of the younger brother is tenuous. In the last thirty-five years, Rembrandt’s pupils and studio production has received considerable scholarly attention. For example, see Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, “Rembrandt as a Teacher,” in HaverkampBegemann, ed., Rembrandt after Three Hundred Years (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1969), 21-30; Van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration.”; Albert Blankert, et al., The Impact of Genius: Rembrandt, His Pupils and Followers in the Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam: Waterman Gallery, 1983); Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, 6 vols. (Landau-Pfalz: Edition PVA, 1983-1995); Joshua Bruyn, “Studio Practice and Studio Collaboration,” in Joshua Bruyn, Bob Haak, Simon Levie, Pieter J.J. van Thiel, and Ernst van de Wetering, eds., A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. 3 (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 12-50; Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch, and Pieter van Thiel, Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop-Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991); Albert Blankert, Rembrandt: A Genius and His Impact (Zwolle: Waanders, 1997); and Walter Liedtke, “Rembrandt’s ‘Workshop’ Revisited,” Oud Holland 117 (2004), 48-73. J.W. von Moltke, Arent de Gelder, Dordrecht 1645-1727 (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994). The exceptional case of De Gelder may be explained by the fact that most of De Gelder’s works postdate Rembrandt’s death, so that they would not have been competing with those by his teacher. Boers-Goosens, “Schilders en de Markt,” 78-79, 97. For example, Frans Pieterz. de Grebber registered sixteen students and two journeyman with the guild in Haarlem between 1640 and 1642. Apprenticeship contracts varied in length from one to seven years. De Jager found that the longer contracts were generally for those beginning their training. The shorter contracts were most often for students who had already begun to study painting with another master. De Jager, “Meester, leerjongen, leertijd,” 70-71. Rogier de Piles, Cours de Peinture par Princepes, 1708, 291-93 as translated in Olivar Millar, “Van Dyck in England,” in Susan Barnes, Nora de Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 427. See Ella Hendriks and Koos Levy-van Halm, “Report Concerning a Preliminary Technical Investigation of Paintings Exhibited During the Frans Hals Exhibition, Held From May 11 to July 22, 1990 in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, 1991,” (unpublished report) 49-53. This does not include of course the so-called Meagre Company (fig. 32) that Pieter Codde completed when Hals deserted the project or Hals’s collaboration with the still-life painter Nicolaes van Heussen in the Fruit and Vegetable Seller (fig. 84). As both Codde and Van Heussen were registered masters, neither is an instance of a master and an assistant or pupil contributing to the same picture. Slive made this observation in conversation with the author in 2003. There is a large and growing bibliography on workshop production in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in northern centers. Important general studies include: Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); Lynn F. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380-1550: Medieval Tastes and Mass Marketing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Jean C. Wilson, Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998). Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 1380-1550. Wilson, Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages. Arianne Faber Kolb, “Varieties of Repetition: ‘Trend’ versus ‘Brand’ in Landscape Paintings by Joachim Patinir and His Workshop” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (Winter 1998): 167-200.

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Elmer Kolfin, The Young Gentry as Play: Northern Netherlandish Scenes of Merry Companies, 1610-1645 (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2005), 145-170. Micha Leeflang has argued similarly in relation to the work of Joos van Cleve (?-ca. 1540/1). As she wrote, there was always individualization and uniqueness of Joos’s variants as elements were re-used, but always in different combinations. Micha Leeflang, “Serial Production in Joos van Cleve’s Workshop.” paper presented at the Historians of Netherlandish Art Quadrennial Conference, Antwerp, March 14-16, 2002. Van Thiel-Stroman, “The Frans Hals Documents,” 385-86, doc. 58. Another reference to copies after Hals may be found in the 1649 inventory of Cornelis van der Tin which lists a copy by “Hals.” GPI N-5215. As this citation does not give a first name, it is not certain that this refers to a copy after a picture by Frans Hals. “1 stuck van Frans Hals troonge, noch een peekelharing van Frans Hals, 2 ronden van Frans Hals, verscheijde copijen naer Frans Hals.” Van Thiel-Stroman, “The Frans Hals Documents,” 385, doc. 58. Hofrichter attributed the picture to Leyster. Hofrichter, Judith Leyster, 39. Welu and Biesboer categorized it as “Circle of Frans Hals.” Welu and Biesboer, eds., Judith Leyster, 350-55. For the portrait of Johannes Hoornbeek in the Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België and the copy after it, see Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol 3, cat. no. 165. Recently, Walter Liedtke stopped short of assigning the picture to Hals’s workshop, but acknowledged the possibility. Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), vol. 1, 299-302. It is possible that the version in Lille depicts Malle Babbe at yet another moment. I have not had the opportunity to examine this picture firsthand, so I cannot comment on its precise relationship to the Berlin and New York pictures. Slive first made the attribution to Leyster. Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3, cat. no. L 3-3. See, for example, the painting in Wilton House. Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3, cat. no. L 3-2. Trivas offered no discussion of the fisher children whatsoever. For Grimm’s opinion, see Grimm, “Frans Hals und seine ‘Schule’,” 175-77. Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3, 132. Slive considered the fisher girls in Cincinnati and Cologne to be by the same hand. Moreover, Slive suggested that this artist also may have painted the Malle Babbe in New York. Ibid., 140. From examinations of photographs, the fisher boy in Westphalia, which Slive considers to be by Hals, may also be by the same hand. Slive has questioned the authenticity of the signature. Ibid., 141. Molenaer also painted multiple Halsian fisher children set in a landscape setting in A Beach Scene with Fishermen (sold at auction: Sotheby’s, October 24, 1973). As many others have noted, in non-autograph Halsian works the individual strokes lack the spontaneity, fluidity, and confidence of those executed by Hals himself. Van Dantzig, Frans Hals: Echt of Onecht, 13-18; Slive, “Frans Hals Studies III”; Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3, 128-58; and Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, trans. Jürgen Riehle (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 233-65. There is considerable debate on the extent of collaboration in Rembrandt’s workshop. Van de Wetering interestingly notes that authentic “A” paintings are solely by Rembrandt but that non-autograph “B” and “C” paintings often display the work of multiple hands in the same painting. Van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration,” 75. Walter Liedtke has recently argued against the RRP’s position, suggesting that it seems likely that Rembrandt collaborated to some degree with his pupils. Liedtke, “Rembrandt’s ‘Workshop’ Revisited.” Liedke’s arguments follow those first made by Wheelock and Claus Grimm: Wheelock, Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: 205-210 and Claus Grimm, “Die Frage nachder Eigenhändigkeit und die Praxis der Zuschreibung,” in Thomas Gaeghtens, ed., Künstler Austauch/ Artistic Exchange: Akten des XXVIII Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin 15-20 July 1992, vol. 2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlad), 631-645.

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This argument was made in relation to Portrait of a Man now in The Hermitage, St.Petersburg. See Josua Bruyn, Bob Haak, Simon Levie, Pieter J.J. van Thiel, and Ernst van de Wetering, eds., A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, vol. 2 (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), C-78, 805-9. Van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration,” 50-51. Van de Wetering cites Samuel Muller, Schildersvereenigingen te Utrecht, bescheiden uit het Gemeetearchief (Utrecht: J.L. Beijers 1880), 76, n. 111. For related discussions, see also Bruce Cole, The Renaissance Artist at Work: From Pisano to Titian (London: John Murray, 1983), 31-32 and Ludwig Richter, Lebenserinnerungen eines deutsches Maler (London: John Murray, undated), 1-2. “…die gene, die als gepermitteerde Meesters schilderen, net zullen vermogen eenige vreemde, of ook inwoonende personen, op tytels als discipulen, ofte voor haar schilderende, en echter van haar handelinge niet zynde, ende haar eygen naam tekende, aan te houden, ofte in het werk te stellen.” Muller, Schildersvereenigingen te Utrecht bescheiden uit het Gemeetearchief, 76, n. 111 as quoted and translated in Van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration,” 57. Van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration,” 50. Michelle O’Malley, “Late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century painting contracts and the stipulated use of the painter’s hand,” in Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright, eds., With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage 1434-1530 (London: Ashgate, 1998), 155-177. This theory was first advanced in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Liesbeth Helmus, “Schilderen in opdracht. Noord-Nederlandse contracten voor altaarstukken 1450-1570,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam, 2010). “…well ende curieuslijck ten deele zelffs te schilderen ende ten deele door andere, sooals het bequamst door hem Jordanes goet gevonden sal worden. Ende ’t gene door andere geschildert sal wesen blijft hij gehouden zoo over te overschilderen, dat het voor zijn signors Jordaens eygen wreck gehouden sal worden ende oversulckx zijnen naem ende teechininge daer onder stellen.” Antwerp City Archives, NA 2299, 21 April 1648. For analysis of this document, see Jaap van Veen, “By His Own Hand, the Valuation of Autograph Paintings in the Seventeenth Century,” in Van de Wetering, ed., A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings (The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 19862010) volume 4, 13-14 and Anna Tummers, “‘By His Hand’: The Paradox of Seventeenth-century Connoisseurship,” in Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 40. Anabel Thomas, The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 213-15. The March 29, 1620 contract for the now lost decorations for the ceiling of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp reads: “That the aforementioned Sr. Rubens shall be obliged to make with his own hand the design of all the aforesaid thirty-nine paintings in small size, and to have them executed in large size by Van Dyck.” John Rupert Martin, The Ceiling Paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp (London: Phaidon, 1968), 217. Several sources that postdate the project, such as Bellori, also state that Van Dyck worked from Rubens’s designs for the 1618 Decius Mus tapestries. See Erik Larsen, The Paintings of Anthony van Dyck, vol. 1 (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1988), 180-81. Natasja Peeters, “Marked for the Market? Continuity, Collaboration, and the Mechanics of Artistic Production in the Francken Workshops in Counter Reformation Antwerp,” Nederlands Kunsthistorich Jaarboek 50 (2000): 59-79. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 119-22. Ibid., 102. Ann Jensen Adams, “Rembrandt f[ecit]. The Italic Signature and the Commodification of Artistic Iden-

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tity,” in Thomas Gaeghtens, ed., Künstler Austauch/Artistic Exchange: Akten des XXVIII Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin 15-20 July 1992 vol. 2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlad), 581-93. Ibid., 584. More briefly, Judson and Ekkart made related arguments for the appearance of paintings created by members of Honthorst’s workshop that bear the master’s signature. Van Thiel described these signatures as “the workshop’s hallmark.” J.Richard Judson and Rudolf E.O. Ekkart, Gerrit van Honthorst, 1592-1656, (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1999), 41. Koenraad Jonckheere has posited that Thomas Key used his signature as a “brand name” to signal a distinctive style and quality. Koenraad Jonckheere, “Supply and Demand: Some Notes on the Economy of Seventeenth-century Connoisseurship.” In Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 72. Tummers has suggested that signatures could operate as “trademarks.” Tummers, “By His Hand,” 38. Tummers has suggested that the absolute dearth of documents identifying a painting as by the pupil or assistant of a specific master indicates that all studio production exited the workshop as the master’s products. Tummers, “By His Hand,” 41. Eddy de Jongh has also suggested that seventeenth-century viewers would have recognized a difference in value between paintings by Hals and copies after him. Eddy de Jongh, “De dike en de dunne Hals,” Kunstschrift 34, 2 (1990): 2-3. More generally, Ed Romein has argued that quality and the assessment of quality played significant roles in the Leiden art market. Ed Romein, “Knollen en citronen op de Leidse kunstmarkt: over de rol van kwaliteit in de opkomst van de Leidse fijnschilderstijl.” De Zeventiende Eeuw 17 (2001): 75-94. “Plagten de meeste kracht hearer Konst-kennisse daer in voornamelijck de bewijsen, dates d’originelen staendsvoets van de copijen weten t’onderscheyden. D’Oorspronckelicke wecken die de treffelicke Meesters nae ‘t leven selver ghemaeckt hebben, worden alhier door den name van originele stucken te verstaen ghegeven.” Franciscus Junius, De schilder-konst der oude. (Middleburgh: Z. Roman, 1641), 344 as discussed and translated in Van der Veen, “By His Own Hand,” 4. Jeffrey Muller, “Measures of Authenticity: The Detection of Copies in the Early Literature on Connoisseurship,” in Kathleen Preciado, ed., Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 141-9. Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, 1638 as quoted in Jeffrey Muller, “Measures of Authenticity: The Detection of Copies in the Early Literature on Connoisseurship,” in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions ed. Kathleen Preciado (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 143. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (Rotterdam: Fransois van Hoogstraten, 1678; reprinted Doornspijk: Davaco, 1969), 197. See my earlier discussion of Van Mander’s characterization of rouw painting as being more difficult in chapter two. Also, see Karel van Mander, Den Grondt der edel vry Schilderconst, vol. 1, trans. Hessel Miedema (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker and Gunbert, 1973), 261. Tummers and Eric Jan Sluijter have suggested that connoisseurs would have distinguished pictures by masters from those of pupils based on quality. Tummers, “By His Hand,” 41. Eric Jan Sluijter, “Determining Value on the Art Market in the Golden Age: An Introduction,” in Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 18-20. Neil De Marchi and Hans van Miegroet, “Pricing Invention: ‘Originals,’ ‘Copies,’ and Their Relative Value in Seventeenth-Century Art Markets,” in Victor Ginsburgh and P.M. Mengers, eds. Economics of the Arts: Selected Essays. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1996), 27-70. Johannes Gerard Van Dillen, Bronnen tot de geschiednis van het bedrifsleven en het gildewezen van Amsterdam,

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vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1933), 664, as cited in Van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration,” 60. The earliest evidence of monetary value for copies after Hals dates from 1669. See GPI N-2309 which lists “een copie: signier, van Frans Hals” for 4 guilders and GPI N-4784 that records “een vaendeldrager naer Frans Hals” for 2.10 guilders. Ruth Saunders Magurn, ed., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 61. Tummers has noted that the differentiation in prices Rubens offered between single authorship and collaborative production was not substantial. Tummers concludes that a painting did not have to be solely by Rubens, but did need to have been done partly by him to be found worthy of a high valuation. Tummers, “By His Hand,” 43. Sluijter has considered how factors other than authorship, including size, also may have impacted Rubens’s pricing. Sluijter, “Determining Value on the Art Market in the Golden Age,” 16-18. Jolanda de Bruijn, “Honthorst fecit (?): een onderzoek naar de atelierpraktijk van Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656).” (M.A. thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2001), 63-111. Tummers has suggested that Honhorst may not have been the only painter to do this. Tummers, “By His Hand,” 44-46. Liedtke has made similar comments, writing that despite Rembrandt’s signature on workshop pieces there is no evidence that Rembrandt sold them as his own. Liedtke, “Rembrandt’s ‘Workshop’ Revisited,” 48-73. For Van de Wetering’s interpretation, see Van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration,” 54. For example, a 1644 document records a disagreement between Sybert Dogger and the painter Adam Pick over the authorship of a painting that bore Willem van Aelst’s signature. While Dogger claimed that the signature signaled that Van Aelst painted the picture, Pick, who had once studied with Van Aelst, said he could demonstrate that another painter had executed it. Apparently, the owner of the picture had faith in the signature as register of singular authorship when the signature may have signaled corporate authorship instead. Van der Veen, “By His Own Hand,” doc. 15. In a related sense, Romein has posited that quality assessment was problematic in the Leiden art market before 1642 due to discrepancies in information and evaluative criteria between artists and consumers. Romein, “Knollen en citronen op de Leidse kunstmarkt.” Westermann has suggested that Adriaen van de Venne (1589-1662) may have practiced product variation. Mariët Westermann, “Fray en Leelijk: Adraien van de Venne’s invention of the ironic grisaille,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50 (1999): 249-52. Tummers has postulated that Rubens and Rembrandt, by retouching pupils’ work, could produce cheaper pictures that could supplement the sale of their own pictures. Tummers, “By His Hand,” 41. “Zyn Konst openbaer te maeken.” Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding, 195-99. “Dewijl ik in’t voorige Hooftdeel aengeweezen hebbe, dat het den leergierige geesten nut en profijtelijk is, somtijts de werken van andere beroemde baezen nae te volgen, zoo past’er dit ook voor de liefhebbers by, dat de konstige stukken der groote meesters door’t nakopieeren van goede gezellen ruchtbaer worden. Want dewijl dezelve gemeenlijk in konstkamere opgeslooten zijn, en de Kopyën in alle Rijken worden omgezonden, zoo krijgenze daer door allerweegen zoodanich een luister, dat de Konstminnaers zich niet en ontzien veel dachreyzen af te doen, om de prinsipaelen eens te beschouwen.” Ibid., 197. Kolb has argued that Patinir used reproductions of his paintings to increase his market visibility. Kolb, “Varieties of Repetition,” 193. The painting was sold on July 2, 2008 at Sotheby’s in London, lot 26. Slive rejected the picture in 1989. Slive, Frans Hals, 1989, 276. Norbert Middlekoop and Anne van Grevenstein, however, had already suggested that the Brussels painting was a ca. 1655 copy of the Rothschild portrait which they dated to the late 1630s. Norbert Middlekopp and Anne van Grevenstein, Frans Hals, leven, werk, restauratie, (Amsterdam: Uniepers, 1988), 96-7.

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The Brussels picture measures 46.9 x 37.5cm while the Rothschild portrait measures 47 x 36.7cm. Pieter Biesboer, “Willem van Heythuysen en zijn twee portretten”, in H. Brokken, ed., Hart voor Haarlem: Liber Amicorum voor Jaap Temminck (Haarlem: Schuyt, 1995), 122. In large part due to the hand, as well as general dullness of touch then visible on the surface of the painting, Slive categorized the painting as a “variant by another artist’s hand after Hals’s original.” Slive, Frans Hals, 1970-4, vol. 3, 69. Pieter Biesboer, “Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan: A Portrait and a Burgomaster Revealed,” in Pieter Biesboer and Martin Bijl, eds., A Portrait of Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan: Frans Hals Re-discovered (Zurich: David Koetser Gallery, 2006), 7-16. Martin Bijl, “The Technical Study in Revealing the Original Painting by Frans Hals,” in Pieter Biesboer and Martin Bijl, eds., A Portrait of Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan: Frans Hals Re-discovered (Zurich: David Koetser Gallery, 2006), 17-25. Hals’s portrait of René Descartes and his self-portrait are the only other works that seem to have been copied or reproduced directly from a Hals prototype. The number, if any, of these that were produced in the studio cannot be determined at this time. Slive also identified two portraits of the same man, possibly Theodorus Schrevelius, that are both dated 1628. Curiously, one inscription lists the sitter’s age as fifty-six years old while the other lists it as sixty-six. I have not had the opportunity to examine the works in person and thus cannot comment on Slive’s attribution of both paintings to Hals. Nonetheless, from photographs, it is clear that the two pictures have different compositions: circular as opposed to oval format, frontal orientation versus profile shoulders and turned head, etc. Therefore, even if one accepts Slive’s attributions, one cannot identify either painting as a direct copy or reproduction of the other. Slive, Frans Hals, 1970-74, vol. 3, 31-32. Biesboer, “Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan.” 2006. In the Aachen painting, Bor holds a book that does not appear in the print. Thomas Fusenig, SuermondtLudwig-Museum Aachen: Bestandkatalog der Gemäldegalerie Niederlande von 1550 bis 1800 ( Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2006), 136. These features, especially the construction of the eyes, relate to the work of Adraien van Ostade. Van Ostade is not known to have been an active portraitist, but Bor looks similar to many of the figures that appear in Van Ostade’s genre pictures. Slive, Frans Hals, 1970-74, vol. 3, 120-121. The picture was painted on copper, a rarity in Hals’s oeuvre. Hals only employed copper as a support three times over the course of his career, each time for a small portrait made between 1617 and 1632/3. The last of these, a portrait of Samuel van Ampzing (fig. 62), was also a design for print. Judson and Ekkart reached the same conclusion about the numerous portrait copies and variants that bear Gerrit van Honthorst’s signature. Judson and Ekkart, Gerrit van Honthorst, 41. Also see, De Bruijn, “Honthorst fecit (?).” Slive notes the signature but does not discredit it as inauthentic. Slive, Frans Hals (1974) vol. 3, 146. Portraits by Hals’s hand inconsistently bear the master’s monogram or signature. Slive catalogued the following pictures as having such elements: 57, 83, 100-1, 103, 115, 123, 126, 131, 134, 138, 143-45, 148-49, 150-151, 155, 161-62, 164, 179, 190, 198, 200, 202, 204-5, 208-9, 213-15, 217-18, and 220. Slive, Frans Hals (1974), vol. 3. The only possible exceptions are his images of celebrities like Rene Descartes and the small-scale portrayals of clergy, the latter of which may have been designed as sketches for prints. Van Dyck’s methods were described through an intermediary to Rogier de Piles, who wrote that after Van Dyck executed a sketch from life: “Then he would give the drawing to the skilful people he had in his studio, that they might paint it accordingly after the actual garments which the sitters had sent at Van Dyck’s request. His disciples having done what they could with the draperies from nature, he would go over them

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lightly and, thanks to his intelligence, impart to them in no time at all the art and the truth to nature which we admire.” ( Il donnoit ensuite ce dessein à d’habiles gens qu’il avoit chez lui, pour le pindre d’après les habits memes que les personnes avoient envoyés exprès à la prière de Vandeik. Ses Eleves ayant fait d’après nature ce qu’ils pouvoient aux draperies, il repassoit legerement dessus, & y mettoit en très-peu de tems, par son intelligence, l’art & la verité que nous y admirons.) Rogier de Piles, Cours de Peinture par Princepes, 1708, 291-3 as translated in Olivar Millar, “Van Dyck in England,” 427. I thank Mariët Westermann for this suggestion. Walter L. Strauss and Marjon van der Meulen, The Rembrandt Documents (New York: Abaris, 1979), 87, doc. 1632/2. For other documents on Rembrandt’s stay with Uylenburgh, see also 107, doc. 1634/2 and 116, 1635/1. For a discussion of the duration of Rembrandt’s stay with Uylenburgh, see Sebastian Dudok van Heel, “Rembrandt van Rijn: A Changing Portrait of the Artist,” in Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch, and Pieter van Thiel, Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop-Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 54 and Friso Lammertse and Jaap van der Veen, eds. Uylenburgh and Son: Art and Commerce from Rembrant to De Lairesse 1625-1675 (Zwolle: Waanders, 2006). On the Rembrandt and Rembrandtesque portraits issued from Uylenburgh’s studio, see Van de Wetering, “Problems of Apprenticeship and Studio Collaboration,” 56-60 and Lammertse and Van der Veen, Uylenburgh and Son. Houbraken wrote, “Gy zult my licht tegenwerpen, Lezer, dat ‘er diergelyke stukken ook van Frans Hals zyn: en die woord nochtans voor een goed Schilder gehouden. Ik antwoorde; dat de handeling van Frans Hals met die van Diepraam geeberhande gelykheit heeft. Want de eerste heeft daar door zyn verstant, de laatste zyn verval doen zien. D’Eerste heeft voordagtelyk zoo gedaan, en om te toonendat hy ’t penceel meester was, de laatste om dat hy ’t niet ander konde doen, uit oorzaak dat hem de handen door het te veel Brandewyndrinken beefden.” Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh, vol. 2, 193. The only available source on Van Diepraam is Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines lexikon der bildenden künstler von der antike bis zur gegenwart, vol. 9, (Leipzig: Verlag Von E. A. Seemann, 1913), 246.

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Anonymous, “Le Modernisme de Frans Hals,” L’Art Moderne 111 (September 23, 1883), 301-3. Frances Suzman Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” in Seymour Slive, ed., Frans Hals (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; London: Royal Academy of Arts; and Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum, 1989), 61-86. Without invoking discourses on modernity, Christiane Stuckenbruk has explored eighteenth- and nineteenth-century responses to Hals’s motifs of children and musicians. Christiane Stukenbrock, Frans Hals – Fröhliche Kinder, Musikanten und Zecher (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993), 173-232. Briony Fer, Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 8. This formulation contrasts with the idea that posthumous reception affects and has affected how we approach and understand some artists. For thoughts on the latter process, see Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For additional discussions of Houbraken’s life of Hals as art criticism, see chapter two. Many of the ideas of the Querelle can be found in Charles Perrault, Parallèles des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (Paris: Chez Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1688). For a more recent discussion of the debate, see H. Baron, “The Querelle of the Ancients and Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 1 (1959), 3-22. For an early example of the dispute in the Dutch Republic, see Constantijn Huygens’s memoir wherein he

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weighs the merits of the ancient and the modern. Because of scientific advancements such as the eyeglasses he needed for reading, Huygens generally favored the modern. Constantijn Huygens, Mijn jeugd, ed. C.L. Heesakkers (Amsterdam: Querido Uitgeverij, 1987), 107. In the French Academy the question of the superiority of the ancients and moderns was argued by the Poussinistes and the Rubenistes respectively. Those on the side of the ancients upheld the work of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) as the ideal. Meanwhile, those who supported contemporary achievement advanced the manner of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) as the epitome of art and style. For the various discourses and theoretical underpinnings, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993). This construction relates to Hals, as the Dutch painter’s manner was very much influenced by Rubens. See chapter three, 130-33. Hals’s name was never invoked in the French academic dispute. Junius published De pictura veterum in 1637 with his own English translation, On the Painting of the Ancients, appearing in 1638 and one in Dutch, De Schilder-konst der Oude begrepen in drie boecken, in 1641. Thijs Weststeijn, The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 101-108. “In’t voorhuys: een moderne schilderij van Dirck Hals” and “een ovael met moderne beelden van D. Hals.” Pieter Biesboer, “Judith Leyster: Painter of ‘Modern Figures,’” in James Welu and Pieter Biesboer, eds., Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World, (Worcester: Worcester Art Museum and Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum 1993), 88, n. 1. The latter document was first published in Hessel Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem: 1497-1798, vol. 1 (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 1980), 158. “En als ghij shilderen wilt: dan schildeert ock wat ordonantsij van modern bij u rommerlerij ten eersten op gelick ghij wel koent: want dat spoet bessten blift oock schoonst en vloeijent int besterven…” Reprinted and translated from the original letter in the Collection Frits Lugt, Instituut Néerlandais, Paris in Arthur Wheelock, ed., Gerard ter Borch (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art and Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2004), 188-89. Alison McNeil Kettering, “Gerard ter Borch and the Modern Manner,” in Wheelock, ed., Gerard Ter Borch, 20. Arie Wallert, “The Miracle of Gerard ter Borch’s Satin,” in Wheelock, ed., Gerard ter Borch, 38-40. Ibid., 38. Mariët Westermann has recently argued that a restricted palette is one of several modernities of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Westermann has not, however, addressed whether these modernities were recognized as such in the seventeenth century. Westermann, “Response to the Proceedings,” The Legacies of Dutch Art in the Age of Rembrandt:A Symposium in Conjunction with “The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, New York, 2 November 2007. Lisa Vergara, “Antiek and Modern in Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid,” Vermeer Studies. Studies in the History of Art 55 (1998): 235-53. For example, see Perrault, Parallèls des anciens et des modernes. “Ik kan, myn’s oordeels, het groot verschil tusschen ‘t antiek en ‘t modern niet beter aanwyzen, of te verstaan geeven, dan met een windbal en een ey, welke ik Aldus aanmerk. De Bal, dor het heen en weer kaatsen eindelyk genorsten vertoont het tydelike, geevende niet dan wind. Het ey, bebroeid en geopend, levert in tegendeel een leevendig schepsel uit; brengende dit niet allen wat, maar ook iets goedts voort, en ‘t ander niets; of zo ‘t noch iets zou mogen genaamt worden, is het slechts ydelheyd, dierhalven eer kwad als goed.” Gerard de Lairesse, Het Groot Schilderboek, vol. 1 (Haarlem: Johannes Marshoorn, 1707; repr. Doornspijk: Davaco 1969), 173, as translated in Arno Dolders, “Some Remarks on De Lairesse’s Groot Schilderboek.” Simiolus 15 (1985): 215.

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Claus Kemmer and Lisa Vergara have both explored how De Lairesse perceived connections between history painting and genre painting based on a shared narrativity. Claus Kemmer, “In search of classical form: Gerard de Lairesse’s Groot Schilderboek and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting.” Simiolus 26 (1998): 87-115; and Vergara, “Antiek and Modern in Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid.” Kemmer also noted how De Lairesse’s theories on the hierarchies of genre largely follow André Félibien. Félibien, Conférences de l’Académe royale de peinture et de sculpture. (Paris: Chez Frederic Leonard, 1668), unpaginated. It should be noted that discussions of handling do not appear in De Lairesse’s discussions of the antique and modern manners. The genera dicendi derived from classical rhetoric. See Dolders “Some Remarks on De Lairesse’s Groot Schilderboek,” 217. De Lairesse compares navigating between these poles to finding one’s way between Scylla and Charybis. De Lairesse, Het Groot Schilderboek, vol. 2, 10. For an analysis of this passage, see Kemmers, “In search of classical form,” 109. “Die men verbergen of verschikken kan, ja geheel nalaaten, onder deze tel ik, een blind oog, een stek, sneede, wen, maal, pokputten, puistachtigheid, enz. Een rode, blauwe, of ruige vlek hier of daar in de tronie, ook dezulke die door aanwenning gekommen zyn, als hangende lippen, of zekere nypingem en trekkingen van mond en oogen.” De Lairesse, Het Groot Schilderboek, vol. 2, 10. Ibid., vol. 2, 12. “…niet zonder moeite en ongenoegen dit gebrek in de Spiegel.” De Lairesse, Het Groot Schilderboek, vol. 2, 13. “…the fashion with what is painter-like […] and which is called the painter-like or antique manner, but by the ignorant commonality, the Roman manner,’ in other words a dress ‘somewhat favoring of the modern but in no wise agreeing with the Roman habit.” De Lairesse, Het Groot Schilderboek, vol. 2, 6, as translated in Kemmers, “In search of classical form,” 109. The perception of timelessness in Van Dyck’s portraits was discussed frequently in the eighteenth century. See Emily Gordenker, Anthony van Dyck and the Representation of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Portraiture (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 22-25. Arnold Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlandtsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, 1718, vol. 1, 90-95, as translated by Michael Hoyle in Slive, ed., Frans Hals (1989-90), 17. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 17. Bart Cornelis, “Arnold Houbraken’s Groote Schouburgh and the Canon of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting.” Simiolus 26, no. 3 (1998): 144-61. Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 61-64. Jacob Campo Weyerman, De levens-beschryvingen der Nederlansche konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen: met een uytbreyding over de schilder-konst der ouden, vol. 1 (’s Gravenhage: E. Boucquet, 1729-69), 352-57. Cornelis, “Arnold Houbraken’s Groote Schouburgh,” 153. “…als een Gaskon verspilt om zijn onbetaalde snuyfoos te openen.” Weyerman, De levens-beschryvingen, 353. Alternatively, in eighteenth-century aesthetics, sketchiness also could have signaled a mind furiously at work. Mary Sheriff Jones has demonstrated how eighteenth-century French critics considered a messy or muddled palette to be indicative of a lively genius that could be grasped best through sketchy works. Mary Sheriff Jones, “The Portraits de Fantasie of J.-H. Fragonard: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Art and Theory,” (Ph.D. diss. University of Delaware, 1981).

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Cornelis, “Arnold Houbraken’s Groote Schouburgh,” 154. Though Descamps was an artist, academician, and dealer in Old Master paintings, especially by Dutch and Flemish artists, he relied heavily in his writing on Houbraken and Weryerman. In his life of Hals, Descamps turned to Weyerman, as the French author focused exclusively on the encounter with Van Dyck and employed almost exactly the same terminology. Descamps thus emphasized the naturalism and sketchiness of the Haarlem painter’s works, “Hals peignot le portrait d’une grande resemblance, & d’une belle manière, pleine d’art. Il ébauchoit ses portraits avec precision, ses couleurs étoient mêlées tendrement: mais avec un pinceau hardi il favoit leut donner de la force.” Like Weyerman, Descamps lamented the lack of a more tender blending of colors, but references such as this and the description of the haphazard arrangement of his palette linked Hals’s paintings to contemporary conceptions of the unfinished. Though Descamps presented no new information on Hals, the inclusion of Hals in La vie signals that the Dutch artist had acquired an international reputation by the mid-1700s despite never having worked for a foreign patron. Jean-Baptiste Descamps, La vie des peintres des peintres flamands, allemands et hollandaise), vol. 1 (Paris: C. A. Jombert, 1753-64), 360-62. As the title indicates, Burgess sought to update De Piles, but his choice of language also demonstrates that the author intended to inform an English-speaking audience about the painters De Piles failed to address. Burgess acknowledged his use of Descamps as a source in his preface before copying and translating the French writer’s account of Hals nearly verbatim. Therefore, the image of the artist found in Burgess’s text corresponds to that of Houbraken and Weyerman, as well as Descamps. In this way, eighteenth-century readers encountered the same descriptions and anecdotes in three languages, codifying the portrayal of Hals as a painter who possessed masterful brushwork, produced naturalistic portraits in an unfinished or sketchy manner, and consciously opted to congregate with the lower classes rather than pursue aristocratic commissions. Thus, while the title of Burgess’s book uses the word modern chronologically, the author also presented Hals in stylistic terms as a modern as did the writers he followed. James Burgess, The Lives of the most eminent modern painters: who have lived since, or who were omitted by Mons. De Piles (London: Thomas Payne, 1754), 66-68. Known examples of paintings by Hals residing outside the Dutch Republic at this time include: Portrait of a Man (Slive 134) now in the Hermitage which was probably in England by 1670, the Portrait of a Man (Slive 133) now in Vienna which was in the collection of Charles VI at the Stallburg between 1720-28, the self portrait that was in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden in 1722 (Slive L15.2), and the Rommel Pot Player (Slive L 3.2) that was at Wilton House by 1730. An unknown painting of a man attributed to Hals was also sold at Chartres in London on March 12, 1713, number 11. The examination of Hostede de Groot’s fiches on sales records and a survey of sales catalogues now in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague reveals that paintings by Hals appeared for sale at least sixty times in France and at least one hundred thirty times in Britain. Schaub, London (Langford), 26-28 April, 1758, lot 34 and Account of the pictures purchased by the Empress of Russia (valuation made by Mr. West and Cypriani, 26 December 1798). Unpublished manuscript. Morel, Paris (Lebrun), 19 April 1786; M. le Chevalier Lambert et M. Du Porail, Paris (Le Brun), 27 Mar 1787, nr 57; and Vassal de St. Hubert, Paris (Remy), 17/21 January 1774. Christie’s, London, 17 February 1792, nr 17. “Et sur a porte d’entrée du Cabinet sont trios tetes, l’une, celle du milieau, de Frans Hals, Peintre d’une grande reputation, & qui n’a ete surpasse pour le Portrait que par Vandick.” Comte de vVence, Paris, 1759 and “22 Deux Tableaux faisant pendans: l’un represente une jeune femme vue a mi-corps, la tete Presque de face, coeffee en cheveux, ajustee d’une coeffe de dentelle decoupee elle a le cou & les epaules couverts d’un fichu en forme de rabat borde d’une dentelle du meme genre que la coiffure & les manchettes: elle est vetue d’une robe noire, ayant les mains croisees l’une sur l’autre. Le pendant offer un home aussi vu a mi-corps; la tete de trios quarts, couverte d’un grand chapeau

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noir, ayant au co une fraise blance & habille de noir avec tailladees, le bras drouth appuye & la main pendants, la main gauche fermee & elevee sur la poitrine. Ces deux Tableaux, d’un faire large & vigoureaux, sont de l’effet & de la couleur la plus piquante, & peuvent aller de pair avec les tableaux de Rembrandt & de Vandick.” Morel, Paris (Lebrun), 19 April 1786. George Scharf, A Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures at Knowsley Hall (London: Bradbury, Agnew, and Company, 1875), 164. De Vigny & Lebrun e.a. Paris (Remy), 1 April 1773. A portrait sold in London in 1780 similarly was deemed as having been “painted with freedom and great spirit.” Verhulst and John Bertels, London (Clayton and Parys), 26-27 April 1780. Likewise, a 1778 Parisian catalogue proclaimed a portrait “peint librement & avec facilité.” J.B.P Lebrun, Paris. (Lebrun, Florentin), 10 December 1778. See Seymour Slive, Frans Hals. Volume 3. (London and New York: Phaidon, 1970-74), 116-117; Horst Gerson, Ausbretung und Nachwirkung der Holländischn Malerei des 17. jahrhunderts. De expansie der 17-eeuwshe Hollandsche Schilderkunst, (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn, 1942), 99; and Stuckenbruk, Frans Hals, 191. Grimou’s painting most closely follows Judith Leyster’s Jolly Toper now in the Frans Hals Museum. One should remember, though, that many of Leyster’s paintings were attributed to Hals, as her identity was largely unknown until her critical resuscitation in late twentieth century. See Frima Fox Hofrichter, “The Eclipse of a Leading Star,” in James A. Welu and Pieter Biesboer, eds., Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and Her World (Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum and Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 1993), 115-122. Ernst Wilhelm Moes first connected Fragonard’s drawing to Hals’s portrait. E.W. Moes, Frans Hals, sa vie et son oeuvre, J. de Bosschere, trans., (Brussels: Avn Oest et cie, 1909), 61. A wider view of Fragonard’s Dutch and Flemish sources can be found in L. Réau, “Les influences flamandes et hollandais dans l’oeuvre de Fragonard,” Revue Belge d’Architecture et d’Histoire d’Art, II (1932), 16f. Simone Alaida da Zurowski briefly noted the formal relations between Fragonard’s fantasy portraits, especially those of men, and paintings by Hals. More specifically, she identified Hals’s brushwork as Fragonard’s inspiration. Simone Alaida da Zurowski, “Fragonard” In Rubenism: An Exhibition by the Department of Art, Brown University and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1975), 155. Based on numerous drawings after Dutch paintings and their impact on his art, scholars agree that Fragonard must have traveled to Holland. The timing of the trip is, however, unknown. Pierre Rosenberg has suggested that it occurred in 1762-3. Rosenberg, Fragonard (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1987), 178-180. This relation has long been recognized. See, for example, Gerson, Ausbretung und Nachwirkung, 443 and Frederick Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 117. Gerson posited that Hogarth’s travel companion to the Netherlands, Thomas Hudson, also may have drawn some inspiration from Hals. Some of Hudson’s portrait compositions do relate to those of Hals in Cologne (Slive 137 and 138) and Edinburgh (Slive 156 and 157), but they also relate to those of Van Dyck’s early English portraits. In terms of style and aesthetic, Hudson seems to have favored Rembrandt’s example. Gerson, Ausbretung und Nachwirkung, 447. As quoted in Michael Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 140. Rica Jones, “Gainsborough’s materials and methods,” Art History, 146, 426 (August 1997): 12-16. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty with the Rejected Passages from the Manuscript Drafts and Autobiographical Notes, Joseph Burke, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Ibid., 16-17 Ibid., xii.

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Northcote also says that a Hals painting “which Titian could not have surpassed” hung in Reynolds’s study. Ernest Fletcher, Conversations of James Northcote, R.A. with James Ward on Art and Artists (London: Methuen and Company, 1901), 52-53. On the attempts to identify this painting, see Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 80, n. 28. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 1797, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 109. Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 28. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 253-54. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 260. Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London: Phaidon, 1971), 166-81. Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) and Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) are the other prominent omissions from Smith’s text. John Smith, Catalogue raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish and French painters (London: Smith and Son, 1829-42). Hals’s paintings continued to appear with some frequency at sales in the early nineteenth century, but prices fell considerably. While paintings by Hals reached highs of forty-three and forty pounds in Britain in the previous century, only a couple of paintings reached thirty pounds between 1800 and 1850. More frequently, sales records indicate prices around ten pounds with a low of under a single pound. In France, instances of Hals’s paintings appearing in sales dried up considerably. Among these, only eight sales prices are available. The high was four hundred eighty francs in 1811 – Paris: Salle du Mont de Piete, 9-11 December 1811, number 58 – which ranks among the highs achieved in the eighteenth century. This figure appears to be an aberration, though, as the other prices are sixty (1802), thirty (1806), sixty (1811), nineteen (1814), one hundred and eight (1815), thirty-seven (1816), and fifty-one (1820). While the records are incomplete and therefore price analysis cannot be comprehensive, the data suggests a sharp decline. Commentary on the low prices commanded by pictures by Hals can be found in Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, Galeries des Peintres Flamands, Hollandais et Allemands, vol.1 (Paris: L’Auteur, 1792-96), 71; and C.J. Nieuwenhuys, A Review of the Lives and Works of Some of the Most Eminent Painters (London: Henry Hooper, 1834), 131. Eugéne Fromentin, The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland, 1876, trans. M. Robbins (New York: Schocken, 1963), 225. Frances Suzman Jowell, “Thoré-Bürger and the Revival of Frans Hals,” Art Bulletin. 56 (March 1974): 10117; and Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals.” In 1849 Thoré-Bürger was condemned to exile for his political activities and open dissatisfaction with the direction of the revolution. For a more complete study, see Frances Suzman Jowell, “Thoré-Bürger and the Art of the Past,” (Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 1971). Frances Suzman Jowell, “Thoré-Bürger – a critical rôle in the art market,” The Burlington Magazine 138 (February 1996): 115-29. Thoré-Bürger’s reviews were republished as William Bürger, Trésors d’art en angleterre (Paris: J. Renouard, 1857). Jowell overlooks the importance of Hals’s inclusion in the Manchester exhibition. Her francocentric perspective also fails to account for the role of German scholarship in the staging of the show. The exhibition was based on Gustav Waagen’s Treasures of Art in Great Britain and the director of the Berlin museums advised the organizers extensively on the object list and the display. Thus, the inclusion of two works by Hals may be seen as a result of both British and German interest in the artist prior to Thoré-Bürger’s writings. For a study of the Manchester exhibition and the influence of German scholarship on its development, see Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum. Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 82-89.

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William Bürger, Musées de la Hollande, Amsterdam et La Haye (Paris: J. Renouard and Brussels: F. Claassen, 1858). For a discussion of Musées de la Hollande, see Frances Suzman Jowell, “From Thoré to Bürger: the image of Dutch art before and after the Musées de la Hollande,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 49, no. 1 (2001): 44-60. Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 65. Ibid., 81, n. 48. William Bürger, Salons de Bürger, 1861 à 1868 (Paris: Renouard, 1870), 414, as translated in Jowell “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 81, n. 48. Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 69. Ibid., 64 and 82, n. 63. Fromentin’s travelogue of Dutch and Belgian museums of 1875 also follows the format of the Musées des Hollandes and the extended treatment of Hals, even if the author did not hold him in the same high regard that Thoré-Bürger did. For how this may have inspired Courbet, see Jowell, “From Thoré to Bürger,” 55. Courbet visited the Netherlands in 1846. He displayed an affinity for seventeenth-century Dutch art early in his career, though he rarely made direct reference to particular models. See Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, French Realism and the Dutch Masters: The Influence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting on the Development of French Painting between 1830 and 1870 (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker and Gumbert, 1974), 49-55; and Linda Nochlin, “Development and Nature of Realism in the Work of Gustave Courbet: A Study of the Style and its Social and Artistic Background” (Ph.D. diss. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1963). Ten-Doesschate Chu identified Fantin-Latour as one of the two French artists (along with Manet) most directly indebted to Hals. This seems to be a bit of an overstatement, though, as Fantin-Latour’s direct appropriation of Hals seems to be rather limited. Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, “Nineteenth-Century Visitors to the Frans Hals Museum,” in The Documented Image: Visions in Art, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 118. For a more comprehensive discussion of this painting, see Douglas Druick and Michel Hoog, eds., FantinLatour (Paris: Grand Palais; Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada; and San Francisco: California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1983), 171-78. Ibid., 174. Fantin-Latour saw the original when he visited the museum in Haarlem eleven years later in 1875. Between 1828 and 1862, Hals’s group portraits hung in the Haarlem town hall. During this time individuals could see the paintings only when granted special permission from the city. Ten-Doesschate Chu, “Nineteenth-Century Visitors to the Frans Hals Museum,” 123-27. Later, many of these painters also advised their students to travel to Haarlem while others even organized study trips to see the single largest collection of Hals’s works. For example, when Chase returned to New York in 1878 to teach at The Art Students League, he introduced Hals to his students. In 1903, Chase organized a study trip for his students to Haarlem. Likewise, in 1905, the realist American Ashcan School painter Robert Henri crossed the Atlantic with a group of his students with the explicit purpose of studying Hals’s paintings in Haarlem. For more on this trip and Henri’s engagement with Hals and Dutch art, see Christopher Atkins, “Robert Henri’s Descendental Experience” (M.A. Thesis, Rutgers University, 1999). Many of the artists who visited the museum are known to have made copies as Courbet had. Among them are Busch, Liebermann, Sargent, and Chase. These works were most likely used as study pieces and reference tools when they returned to their native countries. As recorded in Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Whistler the Friend (London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1930), 117. The Evangelists now in Odessa and Los Angeles and possibly the representations of Peeckelharing in out-ofdate troubadour costumes in Leipzig and Kassel are the only known examples of Hals taking subjects from outside his contemporary milieu.

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Gustave Courbet, “Statement on Realism,” 1855, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1815-1900 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 372. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, “The Ideology of the Licked Surface: Official Art,” in Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism. The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art. (New York: Viking Press, 1984), 224. Anne Wagner has suggested that Courbet’s materiality catered to, rather than shocked, contemporary bourgeois taste. Anne Wagner, “Courbet’s Landscapes and their Market,” Art History 4, no. 4 (1981): 426-47. Rosen and Zerner, “The Ideology of the Licked Surface,” 229. Michael Fried discounts any influence of Hals’s work, instead finding Manet’s inspiration in the history of French painting. See Michael Fried, “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865,” Artforum 7 (March 1969): 28-82; and Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 136-85. Manet traveled to the Netherlands in 1856, 1863, 1865, and 1872. The 1865 trip also included time in Italy and Spain and was the same one that sparked Manet’s interest in Velázquez, as has attracted considerable recent attention. See Geneviève Lacambre and Gary Tinterow, eds., Manet/Velázquez. The French Taste for Spanish Painting (Paris: Musée d’Orsay and New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002). One should note, however, that neither the exhibition nor the catalogue addresses Manet’s interest in Dutch art or Hals. Antonin Proust’s monographic article appeared in Le Studio 21 ( January 15, 1901), 71-77, as translated by Bridget McDonald in Fried, Manet’s Modernism: 429. “The Portrait of the Artist’s Parents (fig. 145), exhibited in the same Salon of 1861, completely baffles these same critics. If they were able to perform, appropros the Guitarrero, variations on Velazquez and Goya, they are mute before the Portrait of the Artist’s Parents, in which the influence of Frans Hals appears, whom they don’t know yet. Frans Hals will not, in fact, be recognized until later, the day after the Pourtalès sale.” Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 430. Even those who attended the Salon who were familiar with Hals’s work may have missed the reference. George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954), 166-67. Charles Moffett, Edouard Manet, 1832-1883 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 1983), 405-7. Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 65. Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 67. Richard Brettell, “Painting as Performance: Spontaneity and its Appearance in Painting, and the Intellectual Origins of the Impression,” in Brettell, Impression. Painting Quickly in France 1860-1890 (London: The National Gallery; Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; and Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2000), 28-67. Brettell, “Edouard Manet and Perfomative Painting,” in Brettell, Impression. Painting Quickly in France, 68-103. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 58 and 72. Ibid., 79-80. Manet also developed his manner from Rubens, Velázquez, and Fragonard. Ibid., 80. In the case of Hals, Manet learned “to compose form from separate painted lines” through the Dutch painter’s “representations of constructed gestures.” Ibid., 82. Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, Revue des deux mondes ( June 1, 1873), as quoted and translated in Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, 165. Albert Bertall, L’Artiste (May 1, 1880), as quoted and translated in Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, 229. Boime, The Academy and French Painting, 149-66.

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Rosen and Zerner, “The Ideology of the Licked Surface,” 229. Theodore de Banville, National (May 15, 1873), as quoted and translated in Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, 37. De Banville was discussing Manet’s Berthe Morisot Reclining in the 1873 Salon when he made this comment. Ibid., 37. For example, Armand Silvestre wrote in La Vie moderne (May 22, 1880) on Manet’s Portrait of Proust in the Salon: “What spirited modernity in the countenance and in the costume! What brilliant execution in a bright and appropriate color scheme! I have never understood the public’s hesitations in front of a painting, the first effect of which is to caress the eye with the freshness of color.” As quoted and translated in Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, 231. Ibid., 226. For example Ernst Duvergier wrote in 1873, “Are we reduced to asking Manet for the secret of great art?... It’s always said that Manet is a master, a reformer, and that he should only be spoken of with respect… For this painter, misunderstood by the public and disdaining all the little artistic skills, the banner of realism is only a mask which hides a system of aesthetics of his own. Has reality ever resembled these soft, shapeless mannekins, pallid, purplish, or black, crudely portrayed by means of sloppy and vague planes without harmony or unity, which he tries to offer us as the last word in modern art?” Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, Revue des deux mondes ( June 1, 1873), as quoted and translated in Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, 165. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: De Capo, 1986), 13. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 17. Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 71, n.112. Zacharie Astruc, “Trésors d’art de Paris: Exposition Rétrospective , Portraits.” L’Etendard ( July 23, 1866) as quoted in Sharon Flescher, Zacharie Astruc: Critic, Artist, and Japoniste (New York and London: Garland, 1973), 299. Fromentin, The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland; and Eugéne Véron, L’Esthétique (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1878). Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” 74. Anonymous, “Le Modernisme de Frans Hals,” 301-3. Anonymous, “Le Modernisme de Frans Hals,” 305. Griselda Pollock, “Vincent van Gogh and Dutch Art. A Study of the development of Van Gogh’s notion of modern art with special reference to the critical and artistic revival of seventeenth-century Dutch Art in Holland and France in the nineteenth century” (Ph.D. diss. Courtauld Institute of Art, 1980). Ronald de Leeuw, ed., The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, trans. A. Pomerans (London: Penguin Press, 1996), letter 428. Georges S. Keyes, “The Dutch Roots of Vincent van Gogh,” in R. Dorn, ed., Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts; Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; and Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art) 249, n. 43. Leeuw, ed., The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, letter 427. Keyes, “The Dutch Roots of Vincent van Gogh,” 40. Pollock, “Vincent van Gogh and Dutch Art,” 436-76. This was an extremely productive period for Van Gogh. He painted around one hundred seventy paintings during this time. Pollock, “Vincent van Gogh and Dutch Art,” 497. See George T.M. Shackleford, “Van Gogh in Paris: Between the Past and the Future,” in Dorn, ed., Van Gogh Face to Face, 145-48.

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Leeuw, ed., The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, letter 489. “However, do not be mistaken, Vincent van Gogh is by no means untrue to his race. He has submitted to the ineluctable law of heredity. He is truly and completely Dutch, of the sublime line of Frans Hals. And above all, like his illustrious compatriots, he is a realist, a realist in all the force of that word.” Albert Aurier, “Un Isolé: Vincent van Gogh,” Mercure de France ( January 1890) as translated in Pollock, “Vincent van Gogh and Dutch Art,” 614-21. Pollock, “Vincent van Gogh and Dutch Art,” 432-34. Paul Mantz, “The Works of Manet,” 1884, in Pierre Courthion and Pierre Cailler, eds. Portrait of Manet by Himself and his Contemporaries, trans. M. Ross (London: Roy, 1960), 167-76. Louis de Fourcard, Gaulois (May 4, 1882) as quoted and translated in Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, 251. Kenyon Cox, Old Masters and New. Essays in Art Criticism (New York: Fox, Dunfield, and Company, 1905), 265. Henrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: the problem of the development of style in later art, trans. D. Hottinger (New York: Henry Holt, 1932). Daniel Adler, “Painterly Politics: Wölfflin, Formalism, and German Academic Culture, 1885-1915,” Art History 27 ( June 2004): 431-56. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 18-72. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19-20. Ibid., 22. Adler, “Painterly Politics.” Ibid. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 43-44. Wilhelm Valentiner, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Catalogue of an exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1909), xiv-xv. Charles Caffin, The Story of Dutch Art (New York: The Century Company, 1909), 59. Wilhelm Valentiner, Frans Hals, 2nd ed. (1921; repr., Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1923). “Getragen von der grissen Begeisterung fuer den Kuenstler, die der Periode des Impressionismus wie kaum einer anderen zu eigen war, verstehen sie die Liebe zu ihm zu wecken und denm der sie schon besitzt, manningfaltig zu belehren. “Da jede ueberragende Personenlichkeit der Vergangenheit einer neuen Zeit neue Seiten ihres Wesens darbeiter, sind undserer Zeit allerdings vielleicht andere Eigenschaften des Kuenstlers als di von den Impressionisten gepriesenen bedeutungsvoller. Den Kuenstlern aller Zeiten wird die ausgesprochenen Freude des Haarlemer Meisters am Handwerklichen, sein unablaessiges Streben nach einer seinem Wesen vollkomen angemessen Technik vorbildlich sein.” Ibid., xi. Claus Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 86. Ibid., 86 and 101. Ibid., 101. Exhibitions devoted to Hals’s paintings occurred at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1935; the Municipal Museum of Haarlem in 1937; the Schaeffer Gallery in New York in 1937; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1947; the Frans Hals Museum in 1962; and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Royal Academy in London, and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem in 1989-90. Wilhelm Valentiner, Frans Hals (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1935), unpaginated. H. P. Baard, “Introduction,” in H.P. Baard and Seymour Slive, Frans Hals (Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum, 1962), 19.

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Ibid., 19-20. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Art and Literature no. 4 (Spring 1965), 193-201, reprinted in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, ed. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 6. On the modernity of the sketch aesthetic, see Ronni Baer, “Rembrandt’s Oil Sketches,” in Cliff Ackley, ed., Rembrandt’s Journey (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts and Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2003), 39-41. Richard Wollheim, “The Work of Art as Object,” 1970, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 787. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 6. See for example Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, Modern Art. Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, 3rd ed. (New York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, 1992). Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 6. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 5-10. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, Dec 1952. reprinted: Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 76. Jonathan Hay, Shitao: Painting and Modernity in Early Qing China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Andrew Bowie, “Confessions of a ‘New Aesthete’: A Response to the ‘New Philistines,’” New Left Review 225 (September-October 1997): 105-26. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. See also, Scott Lash, “Reflexive Modernization: the Aesthetic Dimension,” in Modernity: Critical Concepts, vol. 4, ed. Malcolm Waters (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 40-59. Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity, 32. “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life…” Rosenberg, 78. Theodorus Schrevelius, Harlemias ofte, om beter te seggen, de eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem (Haarlem: Thomas Fonteyn, 1648), 383. Houbraken, De Groote Schouburgh, 73. Hay, Shitao, 2-25. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Many of their positions can be traced back to Max Weber’s famous attempt to locate the roots of modern economic systems to early Protestant societies. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 2002). Paul Wood, “Commodity,” in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 270-71. The longstanding perception is that modernity and industrialization, which itself is an outgrowth of capitalization, are one and the same. See for example, Krishan Kumar, “Modernization and Industrialization,” in Modernity: Critical Concepts, vol. 1, ed. Malcolm Waters (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 72104. This position has, however, begun to be questioned. See, for example, De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Acknowledgement of this condition can be found at least as early as 1936 in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-1990 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 512-520. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Wood, “Commodity.”

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Wood’s definition develops from Karl Marx’s discussion of commodities and the distinction between “use value” and “exchange value.” Wood, “Commodity,” 258. De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 711-22. Waters defined his conditions for modernity as: industrial production systems; increasing proportion of self-interested, rational, and calculating interpersonal practices; definition of physical and social objects as commodities to be exchanged in markets; control of the state specified by social role rather than personal characteristics; individual citizenship rights that can be claimed against the state; value spheres of culture that are autonomized relative to each other; and social units (families, schools, governments, firms, churches, organizations) that are separated and distinguished from one another. Malcolm Waters, “General Commentary: The Meaning of Modernity,” in Modernity: Critical Concepts, vol. 1, ed. Malcolm Waters (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), xii-xiii. For a discussion of the political, economic, and social situation in the Dutch Republic, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 14771806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Though Hals was considered a blockbuster draw, 196,865 people saw the show compared to 327,551 who attended the Vermeer exhibition. Michael Kernan, The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994). The lack of popularity in the last decades of the twentieth century and earlier contrasts with an earlier period of regard that led to such oddities as an American horticulturalist naming his hybrid flower the Frans Hals Daylily in 1954. (I thank Ken Cobb, Archivist for the American Horticultural Society, for information about the naming of this flower.) Among the rare more recent popular invocations are the 1986 single “Frans Hals” by the British indie band McCarthy and Marijke Kots’s 1988 Musikal Frans Hals. As the latter example was performed only in Haarlem, the production seems to have been more of an exercise in civic pride rather than a demonstration of popular appeal. See Arthur K. Wheelock and Marguerite Glass, “The Appreciation of Vermeer in Twentieth-Century America,” in Wayne Franits, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 161-82. I thank Perry Chapman for sharing this characterization of Vermeer and its relation to early twenty-first century psychologies. This formulation also has much in common with Westermann’s arguments for the quiet, self-consciously introspective nature of many Dutch paintings like those of Vermeer. Westermann, however, understands this introspection, an internally oriented aesthetic, as a topology of modernity because it demands active participation on the part of the viewer. If so, it is at least a different manifestation of modernity than that found in Hals’s work and is perhaps one that better relates to formulations in postmodernity. Westermann, “Repsonse to the Proceedings.” Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (1981), reprinted in Modernity: Critical Concepts, vol. 4, ed. Malcolm Waters (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 7. Ibid., 5. “[Freud’s] portraits record his fascination with Frans Hals, an artist [according to Freud] ‘fated always to look modern, to the point of coarseness – when people are shocked by Hals, I think they have a real sensibility.’ Thinking about Hals attuned Freud’s tonic sense of protuberance and flattening, the elastic vigor of form, and what it could gain from direct strokes with stiff bristles.” Robert Hughes, Lucian Freud: Paintings (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 18.

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Frans Hals, Stephanus Geraerdts, c. 1650-1652. Oil on canvas, 115 x 87 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Frans Hals, Isabella Coijmans, c. 1650-1652. Oil on canvas, 116 x 86 cm. Private Collection. Anthony van Dyck, Peeter Stevens, dated 1627. Oil on canvas, 112.5 x 99.4 cm. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. Anthony van Dyck, Anna Wake, dated 1628. Oil on canvas, 112.5 x 99.3 cm. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull, c. 1611-1612. Oil on panel, 94 x 72.5 cm. © The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham / The Bridgeman Art Library. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman, c. 1611-1612. Oil on panel, 94.2 x 71.1 cm. The Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth House Trust. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1614-1615. Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 55.2 cm. The Brooklyn Museum, New York. Gift of the executers of the estate of Colonel Michael Friedsam, 32.821. Frans Hals, Pieter van den Morsch, 1616. Oil on panel transferred to canvas, 88.1 x 69.5 cm. The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. With support of Mrs. Alan M. Scaife, 1961. Frans Hals, Catherina Hooft and Her Nurse, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, 86 x 65 cm. bpk, Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders. Frans Hals, Shrovetide Revelers, c. 1615-1616. Oil on canvas, 131.5 x 99.6 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. David Vinckboons, Banquet with Dancers, c. 1614. Oil on panel, 28.5 x 44 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Willem Buytewech, Merry Company, c. 1616-1617. Oil on canvas, 49.3 x 68 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Gerrit van Honthorst, Merry Fiddler, 1623. Oil on canvas, 108 x 89 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Frans Hals, Singing Girl, c. 1625-1630. Oil on panel, 18.2 x 18.4 cm. The Ivor Collection. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Saunders III.

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Fig. 26 Fig. 27 Fig. 28 Fig. 29 Fig. 30 Fig. 31 Fig. 32 Fig. 33 Fig. 34 Fig. 35

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Frans Hals, Boy with a Violin, c. 1625-1630. Oil on panel, 18.4 x 18.8 cm. The Ivor Collection. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas A. Saunders III. Frans Hals, Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard, 1616. Oil on canvas, 175 x 324 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson. Cornelis van Haarlem, Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard, 1583. Oil on panel, 135 x 233 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Frans Hals, Isaac Massa, 1626. Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 65 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Legacy of Frank P. Wood, 1955. Frans Hals, Merry Lute Player, c. 1625. Oil on panel, 90 x 75 cm. Harold Samuel Collection, Mansion House. Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Portrait of Cardinal Borghese. The Morgan Library & Museum. Ottavio Leoni, Tommaso Salini. Chalk on paper. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Firenze. Simon Vouet, Self-Portrait, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, 64 x 48 cm. Musée Réattu, Arles. Frans Hals, Paulus van Beresteyn, 162[0]. Oil on canvas, 137.1 x 104 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, 1630. Oil on canvas, 115 x 89.5 cm. Private Collection, Mullen, Boston. Frans Hals, Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan, c. 1639. Oil on canvas, 111.1 x 86.3 cm. Bequest of John Ringling, 1936. Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida. Frans Hals, Malle Babbe, c. 1630-33. Oil on canvas, 75 x 64 cm. bpk Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders. Frans Hals, Malle Babbe (detail), c. 1635. Oil on canvas, 75 x 64 cm. bpk Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders. Frans Hals, cross-section Claes Duyst van Voorhout, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, 80.7 x 66 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Frans Hals, Jolly Toper (detail), c. 1628-1630. Oil on canvas, 81 x 66.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Frans Hals, cross-section Man in a Slouch Hat, c. 1660-6. Oil on canvas, 7.5 x 66.5 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel. Frans Hals, Family Portrait, c. 1635. Oil on canvas, 113 x 93.4 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum. Frans Hals and Pieter Codde, The Meagre Company, 1633. Oil on canvas, 209 x 429 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1645. Oil on canvas, 115 x 86.1 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman, c. 1645. Oil on canvas, 115 x 85.8 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Illustration of Abstracted Motion from Sarah Friedman and Marguerite Stevenson, “Perception of Movement in Pictures”. In The Perception of Pictures, ed. Mary Hagen (New York and London: Academic Press, 1980) 243.

the signature style of frans hals Fig. 36 Fig. 37 Fig. 38 Fig. 39

Fig. 40 Fig. 41 Fig. 42 Fig. 43 Fig. 44 Fig. 45 Fig. 46 Fig. 47 Fig. 48 Fig. 49 Fig. 50 Fig. 51 Fig. 52 Fig. 53 Fig. 54

list of illustrations

Frans Hals, Jolly Toper, c. 1628-1630. Oil on canvas, 81 x 66.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Frans Hals, Paulus Verschuur, 1643. Oil on canvas, 118.7 x 94.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rembrandt van Rijn, Nicolaes Ruts, 1631. Oil on panel, 116 x 87 cm. The Frick Collection, New York. Rembrandt van Rijn, Cornelis Claesz Anslo and Aeltje Gerritsdr. Schouten, 1641. Oil on canvas, 173.7 x 207.6 cm. bpk, Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders. Rembrandt van Rijn, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 1653. Oil on canvas, 143.5 x 136.5 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hendrick Ter Brugghen, Singing Boy, 1627. Oil on canvas, 85.2 x 73.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund. Cornelis van Haarlem, Andries Pietersz. van Souwen, 1624. Oil on panel, 107 x 79 cm. Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht. Frans Pietersz. de Grebber, Job Claesz Gijblant, 1611. Oil on panel, 127 x 99 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Pieter Fransz. de Grebber, Philippus Rovenius, 1631. Oil on canvas, 105.5 x 93 cm. Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht. Pieter Fransz. de Grebber, Maerten Jorisz. van Velden, 1638. Oil on panel, 90 x 80 cm. Archive photo; on loan until 1951 at Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden. Salomon de Bray, Nun, 1622. Oil on canvas, 48.4 x 40.1 cm. bpk Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Gustav Schwarz. Frans Hals and Salomon De Bray, Family Portrait in a Landscape, c. 1620-1628. Oil on canvas, 151 x 163.6 cm. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo. Frans Hals, Family in a Landscape, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, 152 x 107.5 cm. Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels. Johannes Verspronck, Young Girl in Blue, 1641. Oil on canvas, 82 x 66.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Johannes Verspronck, Maria van Strijp, c. 1652. Oil on panel, 97 x 75 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Pieter Claesz. Soutman, Portrait of a Woman, 1625-1630. Oil on canvas, 118 x 91.4 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Edward Mallinckrodt. Object number: 139:1922. Jan de Bray, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, 1658. Oil on panel, 67.9 x 56 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles H. Beyley Picture and Painting Fund and other funds. Jan de Bray, Boy, 1654. Oil on panel, 59.5 x 47 cm. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. Jan van Goyen, Dune Landscape with Figures, 1632. Oil on panel, 33 x 54 cm. Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden – long term loan by the Cultural Heritage Agency (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed).

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Pieter Claesz., Still Life With a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Oil on panel, 24.1 x 36.9 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Adriaen Brouwer, Tavern Scene, c. 1630-1635. Oil on panel, 35.5 x 27.2 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek München. Adriaen van Ostade, Carousing Peasants in an Interior, c. 1638. Oil on panel, 28.8 x 36.3 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London. Adriaen van Ostade, Peasant Family in an Interior, 1661. Oil on panel, 34.1 x 39.7 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London. Frans Hals, Regents of the Old Men’s Almhouse, 1664. Oil on canvas, 172.5 x 256 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson. Frans Hals, Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almhouse, 1664. Oil on canvas, 172.5 x 256 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1660-1666. Oil on canvas, 69 x 60.5 cm. Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. Frans Hals, Samuel Ampzing, c. 1630. Oil on copper, 16.2 x 12.3 cm. Private Collection, New York. Frans Hals, Vincent Laurensz. van der Vinne, c. 1655-60. Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 48.9 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Legacy of Frank B. Wood, 1955. Hendrik Goltzius, Gillis van Breen, c. 1600. Pen in brown ink, 223 x 178 cm. Rijksprentenkabinet / Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Anthony van Dyck, Head, c. 1616. Oil on paper laid on canvas, 57 x 41.4 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen. Frans Hals, Laughing Boy, c. 1620-25. Oil on panel, 29.5 cm diameter. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Seated Man Holding a Branch, c. 1645. Oil on panel, 42.4 x 33 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Hendrick Goltzius, Mercury, 1611. Oil on canvas, 214 x 120 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem – long term loan by the Cultural Heritage Agency (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed). Hendrik Goltzius, Minerva, 1611. Oil on canvas, 214 x 120 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem – long term loan by the Cultural Heritage Agency (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed). Hendrik Goltzius, Hercules, 1613. Oil on canvas, 207 x 142.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem – long term loan by Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. Frans Hals, Willem Coijmans, 1645. Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 63.5 cm. Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Adriaen van de Venne, Friedrich v and Elizabeth Stuart Returning from the Hunt, 1628. Oil on panel, 154.5 x 191 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Adriaen van de Venne, Man Sitting at a Table, 1631. Oil on panel, 40 x 33 cm. Peabody Essex Museum, Private Collection.

the signature style of frans hals Fig. 74

Fig. 75 Fig. 76 Fig. 77 Fig. 78 Fig. 79 Fig. 80 Fig. 81 Fig. 82 Fig. 83 Fig. 84 Fig. 85 Fig. 86 Fig. 87

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list of illustrations

Frans Hals, Portrait of Willem van Heythuysen, Seated on a Chair and Holding a Hunting Crop, mid 1630s. Oil on panel, 47 x 36.7 cm. Private Collection, courtesy Richard Nagy Ltd., London. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1660-1666. Oil on canvas, 85.8 x 66.9 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Frans Hals, Lute Player, c. 1625. Oil on canvas, 70 x 62 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Frans Hals, Jacob Pietersz. Olycan, 1625. Oil on canvas, 124.6 x 97.3 cm. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. Frans Hals, Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen, c. 1622. Oil on canvas, 140 x 166.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Peter Paul Rubens, The Honeysuckle Bower, 1609. Oil on canvas, 178 x 136.5 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek München. Frans Hals, Jacobus Zaffius, 1611. Oil on panel, 54.5 x 41.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Jacob Jordaens, Family Portrait, c. 1615. Oil on canvas, 175.2 x 137.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Frans Hals, Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, 1623. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 105.4 x 79.2 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Detail of Frans Hals, Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart, 1623. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 105.4 x 79.2 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Frans Hals and Claes van Heussen, Fruit and Vegetable Seller, 1630. Oil on canvas, 157 x 200 cm. Private Collection. Frans Snyders and Cornelis de Vos, Produce Stall, mid 1620s. Oil on canvas, 201 x 333 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek München. Frans Hals, Fisher Boy, c. 1630. Oil on canvas, 74 x 61 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Frans Snyders and Cornelis De Vos, Fish Stall, c. 1616-1620. Oil on canvas, 209 x 343 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum / photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets. Frans Hals, Youth with a Flute, c. 1626-1628. Oil on panel, 37.5 cm. diameter. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. Frans Hals, Youth with a Roemer, c. 1626-1628. Oil on panel, 38 cm. diameter. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. Jacob Jordaens, Study of Abraham Graphaeus, c. 1620. Oil on wood, 41 x 29 cm. Collection Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai, inv: 198. Photo: Hugo Martens. Peter Paul Rubens, Samson and Delilah, c. 1609. Oil on panel. Cincinnati Art Museum, Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Leyman Endowment / The Bridgeman Art Library. Frans Hals, Claes Duyst van Voorhout, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, 80.7 x 66 cm. bpk, Berlin / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gilles Coignet, The Lottery of 1592, c. 1595. Oil on canvas, 113 x 203.5 cm. Amsterdam Museum.

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list of illustrations Fig. 94 Fig. 95 Fig. 96 Fig. 97 Fig. 98 Fig. 99

Fig. 100 Fig. 101 Fig. 102 Fig. 103 Fig. 104 Fig. 105

Fig. 106

Fig. 107 Fig. 108 Fig. 109 Fig. 110 Fig. 111 Fig. 112

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Frans Hals, Pieter van den Broecke, c. 1633. Oil on canvas, 71.2 x 61 cm. The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (English Heritage), London. Philips Wouwerman, The Horse Fair, c. 1665. Oil on panel, 66 x 88.9 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London. Workshop of Frans Hals, Lute Player, c. 1625?. Oil on canvas, 67.9 x 58.1 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Frans Hals, Peeckelhaering, c. 1628-1630. Oil on canvas, 75 x 61.5 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel. Frans Hals, So-called Mulatto, c. 1628-1630. Oil on canvas, 72 x 57.5 cm. Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig. Workshop of Frans Hals, Malle Babbe. Oil on canvas, 74.9 x 61 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, 1871. Acc.n.: 71.76 © 2011. The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence. (Workshop of?) Frans Hals, The Rommel Pot Player, c. 1622-1625. Oil on canvas, 106 x 80.3 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. Workshop of Frans Hals, The Rommel-Pot Player, 1625?. Oil on panel, 39.1 x 30.5 cm. Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester Collection, 1974.78, The Art Institute of Chicago. Frans Hals, Fisher Boy, c. 1630-1632. Oil on canvas, 72 x 58 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Frans Hals, Fisher Girl, c. 1630-1632. Oil on canvas, 80.6 x 66.7 cm. Private Collection, New York. Workshop of Frans Hals, Fisher Girl, c. 1630-1632?. Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 63 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum, Gift of Mary Hanna. Workshop of Frans Hals, Fisher Girl, c. 1630-1632?. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 56 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Fondation Corboud. Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c011279. Workshop of Frans Hals, Fisher Girl, c. 1630-1632?. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 56 cm. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Fondation Corboud. Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c011279. Workshop of Frans Hals, Fisher Boy, c. 1630-1632?. Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 56.5 cm. Allentown Art Museum, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961 (1961.36 kg). Jan Miense Molenaer, Beach Scene with Fisher Folk, c. 1630-1632?. Private Collection. Frans Hals, Willem van Heythuysen, 1625. Oil on canvas, 204.5 x 134.5 cm. bpk, Berlin / Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, München. Frans Hals, Willem van Heythuysen, after 1650. Oil on panel, 46.9 x 37.5. Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels. Frans Hals, Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan, 1629-1630. Oil on panel, 68 x 56.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem Haarlem – long term loan from a private collection. Workshop of Frans Hals, Paulus Bor, 1633. Oil on copper, 29 x 24 cm. SuermondtLudwig-Museum Aachen. Photo: Anne Gold, Aachen.

the signature style of frans hals Fig. 113 Fig. 114 Fig. 115 Fig. 116 Fig. 117 Fig. 118 Fig. 119 Fig. 120 Fig. 121 Fig. 122

Fig. 123 Fig. 124

Fig. 125 Fig. 126 Fig. 127

Fig. 128 Fig. 129 Fig. 130

list of illustrations

Abraham Diepraam, Peasants Drinking and Smoking at a Barrel, signed and dated 1648. Oil on panel, 30.9 x 26.2 cm. Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of Abbey Saint-Non, 1769. Oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © rmn / Daniel Arnaudet. William Hogarth, Shrimp Girl, c. 1740. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 52.5 cm. The National Gallery, London. Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of the Artist with Wife and Daughter Outside, c. 1748. Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 70.5 cm. The National Gallery, London. Thomas Gainsborough, The Linley Sisters, 1772. Oil on canvas, 200.4 x 153 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Thomas Gainsborough, Self-Portrait, 1787. Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 58.5 cm. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited. William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745. Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm. © Tate, London 2011. Frans Hals, Boy with a Flute, c. 1625. Oil on canvas, 62 x 54.5 cm. bpk, Berlin / Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders. Gustave Courbet, Copy of Malle Babbe, 1869. Oil on canvas, 86.3 x 71 cm. bpk, Berlin / Hamburger Kunsthalle / Elke Walford. Henri Fantin-Latour, Homage to Delacroix, 1864. Oil on canvas, 160 x 250 cm. rf 1664, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, donation Etienne Moreau-Nélaton, 1906 © rmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowsky. Frans Hals, Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard, 1627. Oil on canvas, 183 x 266.5 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson. Edouard Manet, Artist’s Parents, 1860. Oil on canvas, 110 x 90 cm. rf 1977-12, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, acquis grâce à la générosité de la famille Rouart-Manet, de Mme Jeannette Veil-Picard et d’un donateur étranger, 1977 © rmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowsky. Edouard Manet, Le Bon Bock, 1873. Oil on canvas, 94.6 x 83.2 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mr. & Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson Collection. Edouard Manet, Self-Portrait, 1879. Oil on canvas, 85.4 x 71 cm. Steven A. Cohen, Greenwich, Connecticut. Edouard Manet, Peonies, 1864. Oil on canvas, 56.8 x 46.2 cm. rf 1996, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, legs du comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911 © rmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowsky. Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Woman, 1885. Oil on canvas, 42.5 x 29.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin, 1888. Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 65.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Robert Treate Paine II. Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle, c. 18881889. Oil on canvas, 92.4 x 73.5 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of L.

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Italicized page numbers refer to images. Abt, Hendrick Wilemsz. Den 122, 170 Aelst, Willem van 143, 274n91 Alberti, Leon Battista 47, 49, 244n34 alla prima 52 Allegri, Alessandro 149 Altdorfer, Albrecht 149, 150 Ampzing, Samuel 89, 90, 153, 154, 234, 245n44, 268n8, 275n108 Amsterdam 18, 29, 50, 56, 57, 66, 77, 103, 123, 142, 143, 146, 153, 154, 166, 182, 188, 218, 244n29, 247n85, 256n113, 256n3, 258n31, 266n164, 269n19 Angel, Philips 60, 92, 149 Anglo-Dutch Wars 111 Antidotus 92, 95 Antwerp 26, 43, 74, 103, 123, 130, 133, 134, 136, 14043, 146, 165, 175, 179, 181, 233, 249n112, 259n54, 260n58, 260n61, 261n72, 261n73, 261n74, 262n81, 268n12, 272n70 Apelles 96, 97, 101, 102, 146, 151, 181, 200, 207, 252n43 Aristotelian rhetoric 47 Astruc, Zacharie 221, 223 auctions 17, 123-26, 153, 258n33, 258n42 Aurier, Albert 228 Baburen, Dirck van 33, 41, 43, 67, 130, 244n26 Banville, Theodore de 222, 284n117 Barendsz, Dirck 91 Bassano, Jacopo 95 Baudelaire, Charles 214, 222, 223 Benson, Ambrosius 168 Berck, Dorothea 105, 254n85 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 41-43, 49, 57, 80, 243n20, 243n21, 244n22

Portrait of Cardinal Borghese 41 Bertall, Albert 221 Bie, Cornelis de 91, 96, 99, 102, 112, 154, 165, 268n8 Bleecker, Dirck 153, 266n156 Bloemaert, Abraham 123, 153 Bode, Wilhelm von 92, 214, 267n3 Bonnat, Léon 214 Bonvin, Francois 214 Borch, Gerard ter 197 Bosse, Abraham 150, 151 Bray, Jan de 15, 17, 68, 75, 76, 77, 78, 108, 109, 111, 147, 248n98, 249n108, 249n110, 256n111 Boy 76, 77 Boy with a Basket of Fruit 75 Bray, Salomon de 17, 71, 72, 75, 77, 143 Nun 71 Brouwer, Adriaen 79, 80, 105, 143, 162-64, 166, 189, 198, 200, 249n112, 259n54, 267n3, 269n17, 269n20 Tavern Scene 79 Brugghen, Hendrik 33, 41, 43, 67, 130, 244n26 Singing Boy 67 Brun, Pierre le 99, 107 Brune, Johan de 47 Burgess, James 200, 201, 206, 209, 279n42 Burgkmair, Hans 149 Busch, Wilhelm 214, 282n92 Buytewech, Willem 29, 32, 258n31, 259n52, 259n54, 260n58 Merry Company 29, 32 Caffin, Charles 230, 231 Carleton, Sir Dudley 141, 151, 152, 182, 265n144 Cassat, Mary 216 Castiglione, Baldassare 15, 105-7, 255n95 Chase, William Merrit 216, 282n91, 282n92

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index Claesz., Pieter 78, 79, 133 Cleve, Joos van 271n45 Codde, Pieter 50, 56, 242n8, 270n38 Coignet, Gilles 153, 154, 258n31 The Lottery of 1592 154 Coolen, Jacob 153, 266n156 copies after paintings by Frans Hals, including copy-variants 164, 167-71 177, 178, 180, 182, 184, 187, 201, 206, 207, 213, 214, 214, 266n2, 271n46, 271n49, 271n58, 273n77, 274n86, 274n97, 275n103, 282n92 Cornelis van Haarlem 17, 36, 37, 67, 68, 112, 119, 256n113 Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard 36, 37 Andries Pietersz. Van Souwen 68 Corot, Camille 213 Courbet, Gustave 213, 214, 216, 217, 220, 231, 282n85, 282n86, 282n92, 283n96 Copy of Malle Babbe 213, 214 Cox, Kenyon 228, 229 Dantzig, Mau van 60, 161, 252n48 David, Gerard 168 Degas, Edgar 223 Delacroix, Eugène 213, 214, 215 Delen, Dirck van 162, 163, 166, 198, 200, 268n5, 269n16 Descamps, Jean-Baptiste 200, 201, 279n41, 279n42 Descartes, Rene 15, 18, 38, 240n18, 275n103, 275n112 Diaz, Narcisse 213 Diepraam, Abraham 189, 190 Peasants Drinking and Smoking at a Barrel 190 Dijck, Floris van 105 Doelen, Haarlem 153, 155 Dou, Gerrit 66, 125 Dubois, Louis 214 Dürer, Albrecht 106, 149, 230 Duvergier de Hauranne, ernest 221, 223, 284n120 Dyck, Anthony van 17, 26, 27, 94-97, 101, 109, 111, 136, 138-40, 144, 146, 147, 150, 153, 156, 167, 168, 179, 187, 198-201, 209, 243n18, 252n39, 259n49, 272n70, 275n113, 279n41, 280n58 Head 94, 95, 138 Peeter Stevens 26, 27

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the signature style of frans hals Everdingen, Cesar van 247n87, 256n111 exhibitions of paintings by Frans Hals 50, 97, 211, 214, 231, 232, 236, 237, 239n12, 245n42, 251n28, 252n45, 258n43, 270n38, 281n78, 285n162 Fantin-Latour, Henri 214, 215, 216, 282n87, 282n89 Homage to Delacroix 214, 215 Flemish immigrants in Haarlem 142-44, 147 Floris, Frans 136, 257n8 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 201, 203, 204, 207, 280n54, 280n55, 280n56, 283n111 Portrait of Abbey Saint-Non 202, 203 Freud, Lucian 20, 237, 241n45, 287n195 Fromentin, Eugène 211, 223, 226, 282n84 Fourcard, Louis de 228 Gainsborough, Thomas 61, 204-07, 209, 210 The Linley Sisters 204, 205 Portrait of the Artist with Wife and Daughter Outside 204 Self-Portrait 205, 206 Gelder, Arent de 167, 270n34 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 214 Gheyn, Jacques de II 242n5 Goeree, Willem 92 Gogh, Vincent van 19, 20, 53, 113, 224-29, 231, 284n136, 285n140 Head of a Woman 225 Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin and Baby Marcelle 226, 228 Postman Joseph Roulin 226, 227 Goltzius, Hendrick 12, 72, 92, 102, 103, 105, 112, 131, 141, 149, 248n98, 255n105, 256n113, 261n79 Gillis van Breen 92, 94 Hercules 102, 103 Mercury 102, 103 Minerva 102, 103 Goyen, Jan van 14, 77, 78, 105, 118, 119, 125, 126, 249n111, 258n38, 281n71 Dune Landscape with Figures 77, 78 Grebber, Frans Pietersz. de 17, 67, 69, 72, 75, 76, 124, 242n11, 248n91, 268n8, 270n35 Job Claesz. Gijblant 69, 122 Grebber, Pieter Fransz. de 17, 68, 70, 72, 75, 76, 248n92, 248n93, 248n94

the signature style of frans hals Philippus Rovenius 69, 70 Maerten Jorisz. van Velden 70, 71 Greenberg, Clement 12, 19, 232, 233, 234 Grimou, Alexis 201, 280n53 grisaille 107, 108, 257n18 Guild of St. Luke, Haarlem 71, 74, 125, 141, 143, 162, 163, 164, 248n95, 256n111, 256n113 Hals, Claes 162 Hals, Dirck 11, 25, 89, 124, 163, 169, 197, 250n6, 259n54, 277n10 Hals, Frans Samuel Ampzing 89, 90, 153, 245n44, 275n108 Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guard 153, 214, 215, 216 Banquet of the St. George Civic Guard 36, 39, 122, 129, 141, 153 Dorothea Berck 105, 254n85 Paulus van Beresteyn 44 Boy with a Flute 211, 212 Boy With a Violin 35 Pieter van den Broecke 155, 156, 205 Jean de la Chambre 247n85 Isabella Coijmans 26, 27 Josephus Coijmans 105 Willem Coijmans 105, 106 Willem Croes 201 Claes Duyst van Voorhout 11, 51, 53, 144, 145 Catherina Hooft and Her Nurse 27, 30, 226 Johannes Hoornbeek 171, 271n49 Family in a Landscape (Brussels) 71, 72 Family Portrait (Cincinnati) 54, 55 Family Portrait in a Landscape (Toledo) 71, 72 Fisher Boy (Antwerp) 134, 135, 165, 175, 178, 181, 182, 204, 233, 260n61, 271n54 Fisher Boy (Dublin) 175, 178, 182, 204, 207, 260n61, 271n54 Fisher Girl (New York) 134, 175, 178, 182, 204, 207, 260n61, 271n54 Fruit and Vegetable Seller 132, 133, 134, 242n5, 270n38 Stephanus Geraerdts 26, 27 Gypsy Girl 261n64 Willem van Heythuysen (Munich) 183, 184 Willem van Heythuysen (Brussels) 171, 184, 185, 187

index Willem van Heythuysen Seated on a Chair Holding a Hunting Crop (Private collection) 108, 109, 184, 187, 171 Jolly Toper 13, 33, 52, 53, 60, 62, 140, 189, 201, 211, 218, 226, 227 Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart 131, 132, 201, 242n5, 259n54 Herman Langelius 91, 250n10 Laughing Boy 97, 98, 171, 245n43, 261n64 Laughing Cavalier 47, 68 Lute Player 120, 121, 170 Malle Babbe 48, 49, 52, 140, 172, 214, 216, 259n54 Man in a Slouch Hat 53 Isaac Massa (Toronto) 39, 40, 41, 243n18, 260n58 Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen 127, 128, 204, 211, 218 Meagre Company 50, 56, 270n38 Merry Lute Player 40, 41 Pieter van den Morsch 27, 30, 120 Jacob Pietersz. Olycan (the Hague) 39, 61, 63, 121 Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan (Haarlem) 184, 186 Pieter Jacobsz. Olycan (Sarasota) 46, 47 Peeckelhaering 122, 170, 171, 172 Portrait of a Man (Berlin) 245n44 Portrait of a Man (Boston) 109, 110, 233 Portrait of a Man (Edinburgh) 58 Portrait of a Man (New York) 27, 29 Portrait of a Man (Paris) 87, 88 Portrait of a Man (Private collection) 44, 45, 211 Portrait of a Man (St. Petersburg) 279n43 Portrait of a Man (Vienna) 279n43 Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull (Birmingham) 27, 28, 128 Portrait of a Seated Man Holding a Branch 99, 100 Portrait of a Woman (Chatsworth) 27, 28, 128, 129 Portrait of a Woman (Edinburgh) 59 Portrait of a Woman (Washington) 226 Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse 11, 82, 83 Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse 11, 82, 83

321

index Rommel Pot Player 173, 174 Tieleman Roosterman 105 Theodorus Schrevelius 141 Shrovetide Revelers 28, 31, 130-32 Singing Girl 34 So-called Mulatto 171, 172, 242n5 Paulus Verschuur 63, 64 Vincent Laurensz. van der Vinne 63, 64, 92, 93, 94 Youth with a Flute 43, 54, 137, 138, 139, 140, 164, 205 Youth with a Roemer 138, 140, 164 Jacobus Zaffius 128, 129, 130 Hals, Frans, workshop of 169, 172, 173, 174, 176, 188 Hals, Frans II 162, 165, 166, 269n30, 270n31 Hals, Harmen 164 Hals, Jan 267n3 Hals, Reynier 267n3 Hanneman, Adriaen 147 Helst, Bartholomeus van der 153, 244n27, 265n156 Hemessen, Jan Sanders van 259n54 Henri, Robert 282n91 Heussen, Claes van 132, 133, 134, 242n5, 260n58, 270n38 Fruit and Vegetable Seller 132, 133, 134, 242n5, 270n38 Heythuysen, Willem van 108, 109, 171, 183, 184, 185, 187 Hogarth, William 203, 204, 207, 280n58 The Painter and his Pug 208 Shrimp Girl 203, 204 Honthorst, Gerrit van 33, 41, 43, 67, 130, 182, 244n26, 273n75, 275n109 Merry Fiddler 33 Hoogstraten, Samuel van 16, 49, 50, 92, 95, 104, 106, 107, 152, 153, 155, 181, 183, 196, 254n80, 255n98, 265n153 Horace 148 Houbraken, Arnold 11-13, 89, 96-99, 101, 111-13, 151, 154, 162, 164, 165, 189, 196, 198, 199, 200, 207, 210, 234, 235, 247n82, 253n53, 266n164, 268n8, 269n20, 279n41, 279n42 Huygens, Christiaan 38 Huygens, Constantijn 18, 57, 96, 107, 146, 243n18, 252n39, 255n98

322

the signature style of frans hals Isenbrant, Adriaen 168 Jongkind, Johan Barthold 213 Jordaens, Jacob 130, 131, 132, 136-40, 144, 146, 147, 150, 179, 272n68 Family Portrait 130, 131 Study of Abraham Graphaeus 137, 138, 139, 140 Junius, Franciscus 49, 50, 104, 106, 181, 196, 254n78, 277n8 Ketel, Cornelis 101 Kilianus, Cornelis 103, 254n74 Kooning, Willem de 234 Lairesse, Gerard 197-99, 278n19, 278n21 Leeuwen, Claes Claesz. van 123, 124, 153, 257n25 Lely, Peter 248n91 Lenbach, Franz von 216, 229 Leoni, Ottavio 41-44 Tommaso Salini 42 Leyden, Lucas van 149, 255n105 Leyster, Judith 162-64, 166, 174, 266n164, 267n3, 268n8, 268n9, 271n48, 271n52, 280n53 Liebermann, Max 216, 229, 282n92 liefhebber 89, 101, 103-5, 111, 152, 184, 254n74, 265n152, 274n94 Lievens, Jan 57, 92, 140, 147, 260n62 Locke, John 16-18 Lotteries 17, 122-26, 153, 197, 257n25, 258n31, 258n42 Mander, Karel van 14, 47, 49, 68, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 106, 112, 136, 141, 143, 148, 149, 151, 154, 181, 243n18, 248n92, 248n98, 250n18, 252n35, 252n43, 256n113, 257n20, 261n75, 266n162 Mandeville, Bernard 144, 152 Manet, Edouard 19, 20, 113, 214, 217, 218-24, 22629, 231, 233, 282n87, 283n98, 283n99, 283n111, 284n118, 284n120 Artist’s Parents 217, 218 Le Bon Bock 218, 219, 227 Peonies 221, 222 Self-Portrait 220 Mantz, Paul 228, 229 Matham, Adriaen 187 Matham, Jacob 141, 261n79, 262n81

the signature style of frans hals metaphors of movement 18, 36, 47, 49, 50, 60, 64, 79, 83, 140, 212, 230, 246n74 Metsys, Quentin 242n6 Minerva 102, 103 Molenaer, Jan Miense 125, 162-64, 166, 177, 242n8, 266n164, 267n3, 269n25, 271n58 Beach Scene with Fisher Folk 177 Molijn, Pieter de 143, 197, 260n58 Monconys, Baltasar de 153 Monet, Claude 19, 214 Montaigne 15, 18, 47 Montias, John Michael 17, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 152, 258n45 Moroni, Giovanni Battista 64, 243n18 net 91, 92, 148, 250n13, 250n19, 264n118 Norgate, Edward 57, 104 Northcote, James 208-10 Olycan, Pieter Jacobsz. 184, 186, 187 open painting technique 54, 76, 78, 79, 155, 189 Ostade, Adriaen van 80, 81, 162, 164, 166, 269n20, 275n106 Carousing Peasants in an Interior 80, 81 Peasant Family in an interior 80, 81 painterly 14, 15, 60, 77, 87, 88, 107, 113, 117-19, 122, 125, 127, 130, 134, 136, 144, 150, 204, 207, 211, 213, 217, 224, 229, 230, 233, 247n84, 262n81 Pantoja de la Cruz, Juan 80 Patinir, Joachim 168, 274n95 Peacham, Henry 104, 105, 255n95 pentimenti 58, 94 Petrarch 148 Picasso 19 Pliny the Elder 50, 97, 149, 151 Pollack, Jackson 234 Porcellis, Jan 143 prices for paintings by Frans Hals 125, 126, 155, 182, 184, 188, 201, 210, 258n42, 281n72 prices for paintings by other artists 119, 124, 125, 146, 147, 153, 182, 258n45, 266n166, 274n88 Protogenes 92, 96, 97, 101, 149, 151, 152, 200, 207, 252n43 Proust, Antonin 218, 283n100, 284n118

index Rembrandt 12, 14-16, 18, 38, 43, 64, 65, 66, 80, 96, 111, 140, 154, 155, 161, 167, 178-80, 182, 188, 189, 225, 226, 242n12, 243n18, 244n27, 244n32, 247n84, 248n94, 251n33, 266n166, 266n2, 267n4, 268n8, 271n60, 274n90, 280n58 Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer 66 Cornelis Claesz Anslo and Aeltje Gerritsdr. Schouten 64, 65 Nicolaes Ruts 64, 65, 243n18 Rembrandt Research Project 161, 178, 271n60 Renialme, Johannes 146 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 61, 63, 208-10, 281n64 Riegl, Alois 36, 37 Ripa, Cesare 102, 253n64 Roestraten, Pieter van 162, 163, 166 Roosterman, Tieleman 105, 254n84 Ronsards, Pierre de 101 Rosenberg, Harold 19, 234, 235 rouw 91, 92, 95, 96, 111, 112, 148, 250n11, 250n14, 250n19, 273n82 Rubens, Peter Paul 17, 74, 75, 77, 105, 128, 130, 136, 138, 140-42, 144, 146, 147, 150-53, 156, 167, 179, 182, 203, 251n33, 254n82, 259n48, 259n49, 261n70, 261n75, 261n79, 262n81, 272n70, 274n88, 277n7, 283n111 The Honeysuckle Bower 128, 130 Samson and Delilah 141, 142 Ruisdael, Jacob van 105, 226 Saenredam, Jan 131 Sargent, John Singer 228, 229, 282n92 Schapiro, Meyer 13, 147, 148 Schrevelius, Theodorus 11, 12, 13, 15, 25, 46, 50, 83, 89, 141, 153, 154, 234, 235, 242n2, 245n44, 275n103 Scriverius, Petrus 141 Seghers, Hercules 143 self fashioning 15, 16, 240n22 Shitao 235 signatures 149, 150, 175, 180, 264n128, 264n133, 273n75 Six, Jan 111 sketches (including modelli) 14, 41, 54, 56, 57, 77, 92, 94, 95, 128, 136, 138, 141, 142, 199, 203, 205, 218, 221, 243n18, 246n57, 251n24-26, 262n81, 275n112, 275n113

323

index Smith, John 210, 281n71 Snyders, Frans 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 146 Fish Stall 134, 136 Produce Stall 133, 134 Soems, Jan 91 Soutman, Pieter Claes 17, 68, 74, 75, 77 Portrait of a Woman 74 Spinoza, Baruch 38 sprezzatura 107, 111 St. George Civic Guard of Haarlem 36, 37, 122, 129, 141, 153 St. Hadrian Civic Guard of Haarlem 214, 215, 216 Steen, Jan 16, 47, 189, 240n22 Stevens, Alfred 218 style 12-21, 60, 66, 83, 89, 92, 107, 109, 111, 112, 118, 121, 122, 127, 147-50, 153-57, 161, 166, 167, 178-82, 184, 187, 189, 190, 195, 196, 198, 209, 210, 212-14, 217, 220, 221, 223, 224, 229, 230, 232, 236, 237, 255n108, 256n114, 263n112, 266n169, 273n75, 277n7, 280n58 subjectivity 12, 14-20, 231, 235-37, 240n30 supports for paintings 51, 52, 126, 167, 245n47 Swanenburg, Willem van 141, 268n8 technical examinations of paintings 14, 50, 52, 57, 58, 92, 99, 168, 184, 252n45, 268n9 Thoré-Bürger (Theophile Thoré writing under the pseudonym William Bürger) 20, 195, 196, 21114, 217, 220, 221, 224, 226, 234, 235, 236, 281n78, 282n84 time, definitions of 38, 44, 47 Tintoretto 92, 95 Titian 17, 91, 95, 96, 98, 99, 112, 181, 209, 245n47, 247n85, 252n35 transitory moment 26, 28, 29, 36-39, 50 tronie 122, 134, 136, 140, 144, 146, 165, 203, 258n42, 260n63 Twelve Years Truce 119, 122, 261n77, 263n104 Uylenburgh, Hendrik 188, 189, 269n19, 276n115 Valckert, Werner van den 253n68 Valentiner, Wilhelm 230-32, 236 Vasari 14, 95, 96, 148, 151, 252n35 Velázquez, Diego 187, 218, 220, 231, 283n99, 283n101, 283n111

324

the signature style of frans hals Velde, Esaias van de 143 Venne, Adriaen van de 107, 108, 109, 242n8, 257n18, 274n92 Friedrich V and Elizabeth Stuart Returning from the Hunt 107, 108 Man Sitting at a Table 109 Vermeer, Johannes 15, 197, 211, 236, 237, 281n71, 287n189 Véron, Eugéne 223 Verspronck, Johannes 14, 15, 17, 66, 68, 72-77, 108, 109, 249n108, 251n30 Maria van Strijp 73, 74, 77 Young Girl in Blue 72, 73 viewing pictures from a distance 83, 91, 96, 111, 122, 206, 226, 233 Vinckboons, David 29, 32 Banquet with Dancers 29, 32 Vinne, Vincent Laurensz. 63, 64, 92, 93, 94, 162, 166 virtuoso 18, 88, 89, 96, 101, 103-5, 111-13, 117, 140, 144, 149, 150, 155, 178, 181, 184, 207 Vlerick, Pieter 148 Voorhout, Claes Duyst van 11, 51, 53, 105, 144, 145, 147 Vos, Cornelis de 133, 134, 136 Fish Stall 134, 136 Vouet, Simon 42, 43, 44, 244n25 Self-Portrait 42, 43 Vroom, Cornelius 105, 153 Waagen, Gustav 127, 214 Waterloos, Frederick 91 Weir, J. Alden 216 wet-in-wet 14, 52, 140 Weyerman, Jacob Campo 200, 208, 279n41, 279n42 Whistler, James McNeill 214, 216 Wolff, Albert 218 Wölfflin, Heinrich 60, 229, 230, 232, 233, 246n77 Wollheim, Richard 15, 147, 148, 149, 233 Woutersz., Willem 163 Wouwerman, Philips 91, 105, 162, 164, 165, 166, 250n8 The Horse Fair 165