The Lute Player, Frans Hals (copy after), c. 1623 - c. 1624 – (Frans Hals) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Frans Hals

Date: 1624

Size: 67 x 60 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

This painting is a copy of Hals’s Lute Player in the Louvre (fig. a). The original has more vibrant colours and a greater sophistication of modelling. It is especially the crude application of white highlights in the figure’s face and left hand that leave no doubt that the Rijksmuseum version is not an autograph replica. A number of small details, such as the figure’s hair and the shadows, differ from the prototype. The buffoon’s right hand has also been placed much closer to the lute’s sound hole than in the original. A pentimento shows that the little finger of the left hand was originally placed in the same position as in the Louvre painting. That little finger was painted out and a new, extended one painted beside it. This minor difference and others indicate that the present painting and not the original served the Leiden artist David Bailly as the model for two drawings he executed in 1624 and 1626 (RP-T-1886-A-562, see fig. b).6 Like the Rijksmuseum painting, too, the buffoon in Bailly’s drawings looks less askance than in the Louvre picture. The figure in the Rijksmuseum painting has more hair on the left side of his face, which was also followed in Bailly’s drawings. While the materials used to create the present painting confirm that it was executed in the 17th century, the fact that Bailly copied it in a 1624 drawing provides a terminus ante quem. A terminus post quem of circa 1623 is indicated by Slive’s convincing dating of the Louvre prototype.7 This replica was executed, therefore, almost immediately after Hals’s prototype in the Louvre was finished. After being initially considered an original by Frans Hals,8 the Rijksmuseum painting was attributed consecutively to Dirck Hals,9 one of Frans Hals’s sons,10 and to Judith Leyster.11 None of these attributions are tenable, however. A slightly larger copy of the present painting on a wooden support was in a German private collection in 1989.12 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. 113.