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 H...