Frans Hals Study Morning

Wonderful online study morning from the Wallace Collection to mark the end of their exhibition of Male portraits by Frans Hals.

I loved this exhibition, went twice and had already done three talks from the gallery on the show, but I still found more to learn in this study morning. We started by looking at some of the female pendant portraits of the men in the show. They hadn’t been included as the plan was to use the Laughing Cavalier and his friends to explore masculinity.

A talk on a new identification of a picture by Pieter Biesboer was fascinating but I must admit I got a bit lost in a family tree of Dutch names. An amazing piece of research though.

The last talk of the day looked at whether the purchase of the Laughing Cavalier led to the rediscovery of Hals but argued that this had already started with the publication of various books in the proceeding few years which in fact boosted the bidding war.

Oddly two independent talks linked. One looked at the Mennonites that Hals painted remaking that he seemed to stop painting them by the mid-1640s and another at how he started painting pictures of younger painters at about the same time. In the questions this was paired reports of Hals drunkenness and debt at this time plus the fact he seemed to paint less women led to the idea that, as some of his commissions waned, his fellow painters stepped in to support him and to have a picture of themselves by this great older artist. I thought this was such a touching idea and the main thing I will take away from the morning.

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