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Jacob Jordaens
Selbstportrat und Portrat der Familie seines Schwiegervaters
ca.1616
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see collection:
Jacob Jordaens
Frans Hals
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Jacob Jordaens
The Artist and his Family
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Jacob Jordaens
The Family of the Artist
1621
Oil on canvas, 181 x 187 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
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In this almost quadratic picture, which entered the Prado from
the collection of Philip IV in 1829, the Flemish painter Jacob
Jordaens proudly presents himself and his family. The view from
below -eye level is practically ground level - lends the subject
dignity. The use of this optical device allows Jordaens to portray
himself in an almost aristocratic light. In 1621 he was made Dean of
the Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp and later carried out a large
number of royal commissions, both independently and under Rubens's
guidance.
The composition defines family gender roles. Jordaens himself stands
on the right, one foot casually supported on the crossbar of a
raised chair. His right hand leans on the chair's backrest, while
his left holds the neck of a lute. His wife, wearing elegant clothes
and a large ruff, sits on the left on a lower chair, her arms
casually holding her little girl. In her hands, the girl has a
basket of flowers and an apple. In the middle ground, between
husband and wife, is another girl, who, although also shown
frontally, is the only figure not to gaze directly at the spectator.
The older girl is generally held to be a servant. However, she is
shown here holding a basket of grapes. This role is usually ascribed
to children m seventeenth-century Netherlandish family portraits.
The grape-motif is a symbol for the strength of familiy ties, based
on the old meaning of the Eucharist. The girl is probably between
thirteen and fifteen years old. If she were really the daughter of
the artist, who married the daughter of his teacher Adam van Noort
in 1616, then the portrait could not have been painted in 1620/22,
as is generally supposed, but must have been executed eight to ten
years later.
Jordaens, like Rubens, saw himself as a scholar. Indeed,
notwithstanding his membership in what amounted to a guild for
craftsmen, he saw himself as a highly sophisticated court painter.
This portrait, for example, is full of hidden allusions to his
status and to his - albeit hardly unconventional at the time - ideas
on marriage and the family. A putto at the top left of the painting
suggests marriage is a union based on love, not merely on property.
The putto is riding a dolphin, which, since early Christian times,
had been viewed as an archetypical symbol - often in relation to the
story of Jonas - for Christ's death and resurrection. Marriage is
thus portrayed as a union founded on faith. The parrot in the top
left, a Marian attribute, is, by allusion to the purity of the
Virgin, a cipher for the chastity expected of married women. The dog
behind the artist is a symbol of devotion (compare van Eyck's
Arnolfini portrait,) implying - as a kind of "quid pro quo" for
his wife's promise of chastity - the conjugal fidelity sworn bv the
husband.
As in Frans Floris's family portrait (1561; Lier), the musical
instrument stands for "concordia", family harmony. At the same time,
in recalling Leonardo's description of an elegantly dressed painter
listening to music and standing at his easel, it points to the
artist's privileged status in society. In this sense, it is
interesting that Jordaens has chosen to portray himself in the
privacy of his family, rather than in a professional setting.
Norbert Schneider
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Jacob Jordaens
The Artist and his Family (detail)
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Jacob Jordaens
The Artist and his Family (detail)
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see collection:
Jacob Jordaens
Frans Hals
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Frans Hals
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born 1581/85, Antwerp, Spanish Netherlands [now in Belgium]
died September 1, 1666, Haarlem, Neth.
great 17th-century portraitist of the Dutch bourgeoisie of Haarlem, where he
spent practically all his life. Hals evolved a technique that was close to
impressionism in its looseness, and he painted with increasing freedom as he grew
older. The jovial spirit of his early work is typified by “The Merry Company”
(c. 1616–17; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). In middle age his
portraits grew increasingly sad, revealing sometimes a sense of foreboding
(e.g., “Nicolaes Hasselaer,” c. 1630–33; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). The paintings
of his old age show best his genius for portraying character (e.g., “Man in a
Slouch Hat,” c. 1660–66; State Art Collection, Kassel, Ger.).
Early life and works
Frans Hals left no written evidence about his life or his works, and
only a brief outline of his biography is known. He was the son of a
cloth worker from Malines (Mechelen) and of a local girl, and the
family moved from Spanish-held Flanders to Haarlem in the free
Netherlands by 1591 at the latest; the local town hall records give
this date for the christening of Frans's younger brother Dirck, who
also became a painter. Except for a brief visit to Antwerp in 1616,
Hals lived all his life in Haarlem.
What he did for the first 25 or 30 years of his life is not known.
The earliest indication of his activity as an artist was that about
1610 he joined the Guild of St. Luke of Haarlem, a body empowered to
register artists as masters. Shortly afterward he married his first
wife, Annetje Harmensdochter Abeel. She bore him two children before
her death in 1615. Two years later, Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers,
who was to survive her husband by some nine years. In all, Hals had
10 children, and 5 of his 8 sons became painters. None, however, was
of note.
Tradition has it that Frans Hals was the pupil of Carel van Mander,
a minor painter and poet who helped found a successful painting
academy at Haarlem. There is no evidence either to support this
claim or to refute it. From the beginning, however, Hals's work
conflicted with the typical mannerisms of his presumed master. His
early work is actually closer in spirit to that of Jacob Jordaens,
who was an outstanding Baroque painter from Antwerp and a pupil of
Peter Paul Rubens. The good humour of Hals's popular scenes recalls
the joyous gatherings painted by the contemporary Dutch followers of
the earthy, sensuous Italian painter Caravaggio.
Frans Hals seems, from the evidence of extant works, to have begun
his career with sober portraits and with group portraits of members
of the local guilds and military societies. The best of these early
works—which already shows complete competence in portraiture—is a
monumental painting entitled “Banquet of Officers of the Civic Guard
of St. George at Haarlem” (1616; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Neth.),
painted with a loose brushstroke technique that is unlike anything
else in Dutch art of the time. It already has a sense of life and of
relationship between the figures that was then unknown in this type
of subject matter. By about 1620, however, Hals had begun to
introduce into his paintings the jovial spirit that characterized
his early works and that portrays with accuracy and enthusiasm one
important aspect traditionally ascribed to Dutch character. Many of
his portraits are simply pictures of merrymakers. The portrait of
Hans Wurst in “The Merry Company” shows the sitter in a tall,
wide-brimmed hat, wearing a necklace made of pig's feet, herrings,
and eggs. The portrait of Mr. Verdonck (c. 1627) shows the subject
joyfully brandishing the jawbone of a horse. Similar in spirit are
the portrait of Peeckelhaering (c. 1628–30) clenching his beer mug,
“The Merry Toper” (see photograph), and two later portraits, a
picture entitled “Malle Babbe” (c. 1630–33; State Museum of Berlin),
which portrays an old madwoman laughing, with an owl perched on her
shoulder, and a joyful picture in the Louvre Museum of a laughing,
carelessly dressed Gypsy girl (1628–30). In Hals's group portraits,
too, the spontaneous joie de vivre that is evident in the individual
portraits is felt to a degree that revolutionizes the hitherto
austere genre. One such painting is his second “Banquet of Officers
of the Civic Guard of St. George at Haarlem” (1627; Frans Hals
Museum), in which the figures take up postures normally employed for
the expression of mystical religious rapture to celebrate their
well-nourished contentment. In this painting, Hals displays his
unmistakablegenius for mise-en-scène; the dramatic effects he
achieves here set him apart from most other painters. His militiamen
are linked in a harmonious composition that makes the viewer aware
of the cohesion of their group as a whole. Each conducts a dialogue
with his neighbour, and here and there one figure is made purposely
to disrupt the scheme with a gesture or a glance in the viewer's
direction. Nothing is happening except a meal shared by typical
members of the Dutch middle class and their conversations. Yet there
is a majesty to this scene that is equal to any depiction of an
incident from the life of a king. This painting also hints at the
sense of mysterious spirituality, which, fostered by the artist's
intimate knowledge of his subjects, came with his maturity to thread
its way into his absolute realism.
By the 1620s Hals had definitively evolved a technique that was
close to impressionism in its looseness. Like the contemporary
Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, he used colour to structure forms;
and this use of colour is what sets the two artists apart from their
contemporaries. Unique to Hals, however, is his use of quick, loose
strokes of bright colour that suggest rather than enclose form and
are highly expressive of movement and of the subjects' vitality.
Most painters of the 17th century approached their paintings slowly,
with preparatory drawings, a certain amount of under painting, and
an elaborate finish. Although there is no certain evidence of his
method, Hals seems to have started directly on the canvas and
painted quickly, leaving his first spontaneous expression, which is
almost an oil sketch, as the finished work. Hals continued to use
this technique, which gave a striking immediacy to his perceptive
portrayals of character, all his life, painting with increasing
freedom as he grew older.
It has often been suggested that Frans Hals's life resembled the
lives of the bon vivants he portrayed at the beginning of his
career. It is true that from 1616 he began to incur claims from
creditors, and he was in financial difficulties most of his life. He
belonged, however, to the Haarlem St. George militia company and was
a member of the Haarlem De Wijngaertranken (“Society of
Rhetoricians”) in 1618–19; both of these facts are quite
inconsistent with the romantic picture of dissipation that
traditionally has been associated with the painter. Moreover, the
stern preachers and theologians, the high-ranking officials, the
surgeons, the admirals, the writers, and the respectable shopkeepers
whose portraits Hals painted in great numbers were not likely to
have posed for a dissolute person.
Later life and works
At any rate, the joviality began to disappear from the paintings of
Hals's middle age. In the portraits painted after he reached the age
of 40, the subjects seem to eye the world knowingly, with a shade of
sadness in their faces. The earliest portrait that strongly shows
this quality is “Man with Arms Crossed” (1622). Others follow that
contain the same theme: “The Laughing Cavalier” (1624; Wallace
Collection, London), “Portrait of Isaac Abrahamszoon Massa” (1626;
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), “Pieter van den Broecke” (1633),
“Nicolaes Hasselaer,” “Willem van Heythuyzen” (c. 1637–39; Royal
Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels), and “Daniel van Aken Playing the
Violin” (c. 1640; National Museum, Stockholm). These portraits seem
to reveal a sense of foreboding; still, their mood ranges somewhere
above the midpoint in the “human comedy.” The period from 1630 to
1650 was Hals's most productive. He was very popular among the staid
citizens of Haarlem's middle class, and during this time he painted
more than 100 single portraits and 6 group and family portraits.
Frans Hals lived to be very old, and it is in the paintings of
hisold age that his genius for portraying human character is fully
revealed. The last years of his life were difficult materially, and
he was harassed by discouraging family problems. Although he
continued to work steadily, he received markedly fewer commissions
after 1650. He had, during his long career, achieved an impressive
reputation; he had been honoured by many important commissions, had
become in 1644 an officer of the Guild of St. Luke, and in 1649 had
painted the philosopher René Descartes. Still, although some
continued to value his subtle perceptions, the public had generally
begun to favour a more elegant style made popular by the portrait
painter Anthony Van Dyckin England. What commissions he did receive
were not enough to support him, and, like his two great compatriots
Rembrandt and Vermeer, he saw his possessions sold at auction for
debt (1654). It was not until 1662 that his right to public
assistance was recognized, and he was accorded a yearly pension by
the city. In spite of this adversity the portraits of Hals's last 16
years are his masterpieces. At this point, a view of the world is
revealed in his painting in which the human comedy takes a tragic
turn, and something breaksin the order that had kept the reasonable
man and the madman separated. His portraits, no longer tempered by
laughter, seem to express a realization that simply being is enough,
after a certain age, for life to impress its tragic seal.
Henceforth, Hals drew gradually closer to traditional subjects and
stored away his drinking glasses and his tableware. At the same time
he diminished the intensity, the vividness of his themes, a greater
simplicity appeared in his compositions, and he took more and more
liberty with his painting. His palette lost a good deal of its
lustre. But through decades of work he had evolved a remarkably
broad range of blacks and whites to choose from, and these
colourswere sufficient for what he wanted to show.
From 1650 on, his subjects begin almost to look awestruck, and Hals
ceases to bind his compositions into powerfully articulated human
masses. Instead, he strings the solitude of each figure together on
a flimsy thread, with the pattern broken only here and there by some
ultimate spark of vitality. The light seems to act as a nervous
system in his subjects that whips their drowsy flesh back to life,
and the magic of the brushwork seems to startle their faces out of a
swoonlike slumber. In the two celebrated portraits of the “Governors
of the Old Men's Home at Haarlem” (both 1664; Frans Hals Museum),
one a group of old men and the other of old women, his men seem
overcome with drunkenness and his women entranced by the obsession
of death. Here he presents us with the most extraordinary reunion of
senile decay ever assembled in the history of the pictorial arts; he
shows us the quavering flame of dying life. It is not known whether
these portraits were comprehensible to his models. Apparently, none
of the regents of the home objected to the paintings hanging in
their Hall of Honour. Perhaps his subjects shared the old painter's
humility in the face of destiny. Thus, the harmony in the colourful
blare of the early works came to be succeeded by an art that seemed
to give form to elusive nervous twitches, sudden motions, and to
heartbeats accelerating, only to falter and start again. All his
life Frans Hals had acted as a lucid observer of Haarlem. He painted
it in the loud mirth of youth, and, reflecting in the image that he
made of it his own life and declining health, here main ed its
faithful companion until his death.
Old age fostered self-denial and a strict discipline in Hals, along
with a new freedom in his painting. It most certainly was a painful
time for the great painter. But the years had also sharpened his
vision. There is no sign of religion in the evolution of his art;
and it may be assumed that to Frans Hals, painting was a secular
concern. Nevertheless, the loving compassion that permeated his art
becomes, in his last years, something spiritual.
Like many artists whose style is unique in their own time, he left
few direct followers; the closest was Adriaen Brouwer, who used
Hals's techniques well to portray tavern scenes and similar
subjects. Hals was for a long time regarded as a competent but
limited painter whose consistent neglect of any subjects other than
portraits gave him no place in the history of significant art. It
was not until the 19th century that interest in his work was
revived. He influenced Édouard Manet with his free style and Vincent
van Gogh with his subtle range of colours. In modern times he has
been appreciated for the serious and excellent realist painter that
he was.
Pierre Descargues
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see collection:
Jacob Jordaens
Frans Hals
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Frans Hals
The Governors of the Old
Men's
Almshouse at Haarlem
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Frans Hals
The Lady-Governors of the Old Men's Almshouse at Haarlem
1664
Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem
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The governors of hospitals and almshouses were among
the most important patrons of the Netherlandish group portrait.
Unlike the sitters for paintings of militia companies or archers'
guilds, however, these regents and regentesses, as they were called,
were not members of traditional professional associations, but the
honorary governing bodies of charitable institutions; men and women,
usually of aristocratic background, who were appointed by the citv's
ruling elite.
Since the late Middle Ages, the care of the aged in towns had become
a matter of public concern. The growth in commodity relations and
the partly violent expropriation of peasant farmers had led to the
lat-ters' rum and consequent migration to towns, where they were
exposed to a ruthless system of capitalist exploitation and
extortion. Poverty and begging now increased to such an extent that
traditional forms of charity, which had existed since the Middle
Aees, such as those based on the ideas of Francis of Assisi or
Elizabeth of Marburg, no longer sufficed. Following Luther's
example, reformers began to put pressure on municipal councils to
seek a long-term solution to the problem by setting aside
appropriate funds to cover the cost of looking after old people.
Wittenberg itself, with its edict of 1521 proclaiming the founding
of a "common purse", was exemplary in this respect, and Nuremberg,
with its "Rules for the Dispensation of Alms", perhaps even more so.
Nuremberg even appointed public servants to care for the needy. In
the Netherlands, the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives demanded the
endowment of charitable institutions in his book "De subventione
pauperum" (On Supporting the Poor).
The mass phenomenon of begging was a source of constant irritation
to the burghers and ruling strata of the towns, who found beggars
difficult to distinguish from the "traditional" poor. This presented
a moral dilemma, since the poor had never been held responsible for
their plight. In the Middle Ages, after all, poverty had been
accepted as God's will. Soon, however, the ruling strata began to
view persons who were suffering hardship, or who were socially
marginalised, as lazy or unwilling to work. The upper classes, whose
economic interests, based on the principle of wealth accumulation,
had led to the widening of the gulf between rich and poor in the
first place, thus tended to see the resultant misery as deriving
from a congenital ignobility of character in members of the lower
classes.
While early sixteenth-century charitable practice had adhered to
Martin Luther's dictum "Love serves without regard to reward",
increasing penetration of every sphere of human life by the
capitalist principles of wages and profit soon undermined ideals of
chanty and encouraged demands for the poor to be detained in
institutions which would serve their correction. The poorhouses were
little more than prisons - sometimes even called so - and were
organised according to the principle of centralised manufacture.
Their inmates were forced into gruellingly hard labour in return for
a mere pittance. Some of the worst working conditions were found in
the rasp-houses, where dyeing powder was extracted by rasping
logwood. The exploitation of this cheap labour force led to grand
profits. Orphanages, or foundling hospitals, and sometimes mental
asylums, each with their own regents, or governing bodies, were
often found attached to the workhouses. However, there were also
charitable institutions offering asylum to those who had fallen on
hard times. These included homes of refuge for the ill and aged.
In the sixteenth century, it had been customary for works of art to
show the poor in the company of their benefactors - in The Seven
Works of Charity, for example, or in the scenes accompanying
The Last Judgement. In seventeenth-century Netherlandish
portraits of the governors of charitable institutions, however,
human misery itself, with few exceptions, was evidently subject to
taboo, or at least was banished from sight; an invisible barrier
thus existed between "selflessly" or "generously" acting dignitaries
on the one hand, and the inmates of institutions on the other. The
governors remained aloof, avoiding prejudice to their social status
which might derive from being seen in company with those whom the
age had already branded as virtually criminal: the company, in other
words, of persons entrusted into their care. The most they could
bear was the presence of a servant, or a wardress; and even then,
the servant's lower status was clearly indicated by their being
shown bareheaded. The governors would usually sit for their
portraits at one of their regular meetings, and they would have
themselves shown keeping the minutes, or counting money.
Frans Hals's pair of large-format group portraits of The
Governors and Lady-Governors of the Old Men's Almshouse at Haarlem,
painted in 1664, were among the last works commissioned from him.
Indeed, he had now become a pensioner himself, receiving, during the
last four years of his life, an annual stipend of 200 guilders,
awarded by the municipal authorities. Hals executed the portraits in
the manner outlined above, at the same time modifying the dominant
portrait type: the "regents and regentesses" were no longer placed
in a narrative context, depicted carrying out certain typical forms
of activity. This had been a compositional achievement of the first
half of the century, to whose attainment Hals himself had greatly
contributed. Here, however, he showed the sitters in full-face view:
plain, rather formal figures, without the faintest hint of swagger.
In deference to the sitters' wishes, each of whom paid the artist
individually, Hals retained the principle of showing their faces
separately. On the other hand, a new quality now entered his work
via an unconventional, pre-Impressionist mode of painting: the
direct, spontaneous application of paint to the ground ("alia
prima"), with its tendency to favour more open forms.
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Frans Hals
The Lady-Governors of the Old Men's
Almshouse at Haarlem
(detail)
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Frans Hals
The Lady-Governors of the Old Men's
Almshouse at Haarlem
(detail)
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Scholars have frequently suggested that these structural innovations
- appearing as they do to anticipate the (aesthetic) rebelliousness
of a later avant-garde — must be seen in conjunction with Hals's
allegedly critical attitude towards the governors and lady-governors
of the almshouse. It has been said, for example, that the governor
whose hat sits askew was given to drunkenness, or to the abuse of
drugs, and that Hals wanted to poke fun at him. However, it is
demonstrable that the man was actually suffering from facial palsy.
It is therefore misleading to indulge this late nineteenth-century
cliche by attributing to Hals the motive of revenge for
ill-treatment he is reputed to have endured at the hands of his
patrons.
As usual in genre portraits of "regents and regentesses", the
figures in both paintings are shown against a dark background. On
the wall behind the lady-governors is a landscape painting. This
probably represents a "paysage moralise", a morally significant
landscape, whose purpose is to provide a "clavis interpretandi", a
key to understanding the work: the narrow path winding upwards into
the mountains may be an allusion to the "path of virtue", a symbol
often encountered in Renaissance art and "emblem books". If so, it
may indicate what kind of behaviour was expected of the inmates by
the lady-governors.
Norbert Schneider
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Frans Hals
The Governors of the Old Men's Almshouse at Haarlem
1664
Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem
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see collection:
Jacob Jordaens
Frans Hals
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