User:Frans Fowler/sandbox
Girl Singing (Hals)[edit]
| Girl Singing | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Frans Hals |
| Year | About 1628 |
| Catalogue | Hofstede de Groot, Catalogue Raisonné 1910: No. 118 |
| Medium | Oil on panel |
| Movement | Dutch Golden Age |
| Dimensions | Lozenge with sides of about 18 cm × 19 cm (7.3 in × 7.5 in) |
| Location | Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia (on loan) |
| Accession | L2020.6.14 |
Girl Singing is a figurative painting in oils on a wooden panel by the Dutch Golden-Age artist Frans Hals. The subject is an expressive face, a kind of picture that was popular in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Girl Singing is one of a pair Hals painted at Haarlem in about 1628; its pendant is the Boy Playing a Violin. Both paintings have a musical theme. Both show casually dressed young people at home. They are the same quite small size and both are in regular lozenge format. Possibly the models were two of Hals's own children. The Girl Singing and the Boy Playing a Violin currently (2024) hang together, on loan, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the United States.
Description[edit]
Seymour Slive remarked that Girl Singing and Boy Playing a Violin, which are Hals's smallest known genre pictures, exhibit the sparkling technique and blond tonality seen in his commissioned portraits on the same scale that are datable to the second half of the 1620s.[1]
Girl Singing depicts the head, part of the upper body, and hands of a young woman singing from a book of music. The light shines down from her right (our left). Towards the right in the otherwise quite plain background there is a patch of shade (her shadow) in which Hals has put his usual FH monogram signature.
The young woman's face is cheerful, gently animated, and open. She is absorbed in her singing. Her lips part as she sings. She turns her face a little to her left. Her face is inclined downwards towards her music, which she holds in her left hand at the lower right-hand edge of the picture—but because the artist looks up from a position slightly lower than her face, we can see her eyes. She has her hair tied back loosely, with strands spilling out in almost every direction. The uppermost page of the song book flitters above the others, refusing to lie flat. She appears to be keeping rhythm using her right hand (at the bottom left of the painting). Over all, Hals's picture convincingly captures a young woman's energy and joy at a fleeting moment.[2]
Girl Singing is (unusually for Hals) square (about 7½ x 7½ inches) and (also unusually for Hals) in lozenge format.[3] Boy Playing a Violin is the same size and shape.
Clothes and hair[edit]
The young woman is dressed casually in a green bodice over a white chemise, reminiscent of Hals's similarly attired and similarly posed lusty Bohémienne ("The Gypsy Girl"), which is from the same time. (For these reasons, the Girl Singing and La Bohémienne have adjacent entries in Cornelis Hofstede de Groot's Catalogue Raisonné.[3])
The conventions, including artistic conventions, applying to girls' and women's clothes, hairstyles, and headwear were stern in the Dutch Republic at Hals's time—and particularly so in Haarlem, where Mennonite influence was strong. Bared bosom, unbound hair, or even too skimpy headwear could attract outrage. In such a context, Isabella Coymans' marriage portrait was unusual and risqué.[4]
The tronie market (see the "Titles" and models section, below) also expected tight propriety. For example, Hals's Smiling Fishergirl wears a chemise closed right up to the throat and a big black bonnet that conceals nearly all of her hair. Contrast her with the Girl Singing: this model is bare-headed, her hair is gathered in a loose bun which seems on the point of coming undone, and her chemise gapes perilously. These are not wiles to attract attention—she is busy singing. But it suggests an enthusiastic singer in action, and it suggests a domestic, rather than a public, setting. No respectable woman, however young, would have wished to be seen out in that state.
Technique and painting style[edit]
"Titles" and models[edit]
Hofstede de Groot's Catalogue Raisonné lists Girl Singing as "A Girl Singing from a Book".[3] The painting is also known as "Singing Girl".
It may be a "tronie", a Dutch term for an expressive, interesting, or funny generic face intended to be offered on the market (as distinct from a portrait of a specific individual made to order for a paying client).[5] Typically, we cannot tell who the individuals were who modelled for tronies and, as far as we know, Hals did not usually give his paintings titles. The titles by which we now know the works of Hals have often been ascribed by their later owners or by auctioneers, curators, and art historians—not necessarily for the purpose of identifying the work in question unambiguously.
We can put names to some of the relatively wealthy merchant-class people who sat, and paid, for portraits by Hals, for instance the Portrait of Isabella Coymans, but not others, such as the person who sat for the Portrait of a Woman at the Ferens Art Gallery. Conversely, the tronie face is a type rather than an individual. If anyone was paid, it was an unidentifiable model, although one Hals picture conventionally categorised as a tronie, namely La Bohémienne, may actually be an instance of commercial art commissioned to advertise sexual services. And in at least one case we can identify the the model for a painting sometimes considered to be a tronie: "Malle Babbe" was Barbara Claes; she lived in the same institution as one of Hals's grown-up children and died in 1663.
There is a likelihood that the models for Girl Singing and Boy Playing a Violin were two of Frans Hals's own children. A Haarlem resident who claimed to have known most of Hals's children told Arnold Houbraken they were keen musicians.
Location and owners[edit]
Girl Singing and Boy Playing a Violin are in the Saunders Collection. They are now (2024, since 2022) on long-term loan to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts at Richmond in the United States.[6]
At the time Hofstede de Groot's 1910 Catalogue Raisonné was written, Girl Singing was owned by American railway financier Charles T. Yerkes,[3] who developed the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines of the London Underground.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Slive, Seymour (1989). "Catalogue". In Slive, Seymour (ed.). Frans Hals. Royal Academy of Arts, London. pp. 130–369. The catalogue for a London exhibition that also travelled to Washington DC and Haarlem. pp. 202, 203.
- ^ Atkins, Christopher D.M. (2012). The Signature Style of Frans Hals. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 9789089643353. See the chapter titled A Liveliness Uniquely His.
- ^ a b c d A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century based on the work of John Smith, Volume III; C. Hofstede de Groot (with the assistance of Kurt Freise and Dr Kurt Erasmus); translated from the German and edited by Edward G. Hawke; Macmillan & Co., London; 1910; pp. 32, 33. (On line at archive.org, retrieved 23 June 2024: https://archive.org/details/catalogueraisonn03hofsuoft/page/32/mode/2up?view=theater)
- ^ Du Mortier, Bianca M. (1989). "Costume in Frans Hals". In Slive, Seymour (ed.). Frans Hals. Royal Academy of Arts, London. pp. 45–60. The catalogue for a London exhibition that also travelled to Washington DC and Haarlem. p. 52.
- ^ Atkins, Christopher D.M. (2012). The Signature Style of Frans Hals. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 9789089643353. See the chapter titled Painting for the Market.
- ^ "VMFA Welcomes Elegance and Wonder: Masterpieces of European Art from the Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III Collection". VMFA. 6 May 2022. Retrieved 22 June 2024.