Portrait of a Man, possibly a Clergyman, Frans Hals, c. 1657 - c. 1660 – (Frans Hals) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Frans Hals

Date: 1660

Size: 37 x 30 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

While the majority of Hals’s supports are canvas, about a quarter of his output was executed on panel. A number of those works are small-scale portrait sketches designed as models for engravings, such as the very fine Portrait of Jean de la Chambre in the National Gallery, London, which measures approximately 20 by 17 centimetres.6 Another group of portraits painted on panels more or less twice the size as those that served as models for engravings are independent works. The present portrait belongs to this latter group. When the painting was ‘rediscovered’ in 1916 under a perpetual calendar while in the collection of J.B. Luyckx it was published by a number of scholars as a work dating around 1645.7 Slive rightly pushed this dating up to the second half of the 1650s; the painting has the predominantly sober palette and free brushwork of Hals’s late life-size works on canvas, but then in miniature.8 Slive’s dating is supported by the dendrochronology, which indicates the painting was probably executed in or after 1657. There are two stylistically related portraits, also of unidentified sitters, on panels of similar dimensions in the Mauritshuis and a private collection.9 In the Rijksmuseum painting and the Portrait of a Man in the private collection, bright red and yellow accents in the faces enliven the otherwise monochrome rendering of clothing and backgrounds. Although scholars and magistrates also wore them, the anonymous sitter’s skullcap in the Rijksmuseum portrait might indicate that he was a cleric. There are a number of identified preachers in Hals’s oeuvre, all of whom wear skullcaps, but only one secular sitter has one, the Haarlem burgomaster and brewer Cornelis Guldewagen.10 Hofstede de Groot pointed out that the sitter in the present portrait might have been the Haarlem preacher Jan Ruyll (Johannes Rulaeus, 1609-76), whose portrait by Hals was celebrated in a 1680 poem by Arnold Moonen.11 This poem, however, does not offer any specific information on the painting that could lead to a conclusive identification. Other portraits by Hals of men wearing skullcaps could equally be the one showing Jan Ruyll. Indeed, Hofstede de Groot had earlier suggested the man with a skullcap in a private collection is Ruyll, and Moes identified him as the man in the Mauritshuis picture.12 There is a good chance that the Rijksmuseum portrait can be identified with one auctioned in Amsterdam in 1776 as a bust-length showing a preacher with two hands visible.13 Like that painting, the Rijksmuseum one has a wooden support and the dimensions given in the catalogue (approximately 37 x 31 cm) are quite comparable. The paintings in the Mauritshuis and a private collection are of a similar size, but their sitters are shown without hands or with only one hand. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 111.