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Lot Essay
This large and ambitiously conceived merry company is one of the greatest successes of the artistic partnership between Dirck Hals and Dirck van Delen. Combining the innovative wit of Hals’ crowded figure groups and van Delen’s splendid imaginary interiors, it embodies the most highly regarded traits of the genre that emerged in the Dutch Republic in the second decade of the seventeenth century.
On long-term loan at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem since 1948, it is here offered for sale for the first time in eighty years, further to its restitution in 2019 to the heirs of its last rightful owner - Jacob Lierens. A Jewish businessman and art collector in Amsterdam, Lierens sold the picture at auction in 1941 before his company was ‘Aryanised’ by the Nazis and he and his wife were interned at Westerbork. The picture was acquired at the sale by Hans Posse for the projected ‘Führermuseum’ at Linz before being returned to the Netherlands after the war.
In a palatial Renaissance-style interior, young gentry are at play. Across Hals’ entanglement of figures, elegant society feast, converse, play tric-trac and court to the accompaniment of music, while children and dogs play nearby. Although only here signed by Dirck van Delen, who painted the setting, this picture is the largest of three similar large-scale panel paintings on which Hals and van Delen collaborated in 1628. The second, sold at Christie’s, New York, 29 January 1998, lot 17 ($1,047,500) (fig. 1) includes different architecture by van Delen and is of slightly smaller dimensions (77 x 135.5 cm.), yet repeats virtually to a man the present figure group by Hals, who alone signed and dated the work ‘DHALS / AN / 1628’. The serving boy departing through the doorway in the present work is also replaced with a seated couple, seen through a vaulted colonnade on an open portico added on the right (see P.C. Sutton, op. cit., p. 205). A third collaboration from this year, of the same dimensions as the painting sold at Christie’s New York in 1998, is in the Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna (inv. no. 684), also signed and dated ‘DHals AN 1628’. Further examples of their collaborations exist, such as two paintings dated 1629, one in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin – which includes variations of the figure of the woman standing in the doorway and the seated violin player in this picture – and a work formerly in the collection of Sir Cecil Newman, Burloes Hall, Royston. None, however, are painted on as grand a scale as the present painting.
The working methods of Hals and van Delen’s collaborations was explored by Renate Trnek (op. cit., pp. 169-70) through a close examination of infrared reflectograms of the present picture and that in Vienna. Starting with the architecture, van Delen first drew out the perspective on the panel’s ground, leaving a reserve for Hals’ figures in white underpaint, which is visible in their contours. Yet while the relationship between the figures and the architecture in the Christie’s New York picture was fully resolved before execution, in the present work, Hals was evidently still experimenting with the balance of the composition as he worked. Most notably, the seated dog in the middle foreground was seemingly added only after the tablecloth and tiles had been blocked in, painted thinly on top with the trenchant freedom of his sketches, as if it had been sketched from life. A pentiment in the dog’s muzzle, which was originally painted lower, also attests to this fluency, suggesting that of the two versions of this figure group from 1628, the present painting may have been conceived first.
Hals is known to have worked from a repertoire of preparatory figure drawings and oil sketches on paper, the latter a rare practice for a Dutch painter. The violinist on the right, for example, was originally conceived in a sketch of a seated pipe smoker (fig. 2; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. 1965:180), who can also be found in his Merry Companies in the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (inv. no. 1957.160) and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (inv. no. 816A). In the present picture and the Christie’s New York painting, Hals substituted the pipe for a violin and omitted the man’s beard, replacing the boots with ones already devised in individual leg studies on the same sheet. The woman standing in the doorway with her arm akimbo, who also featured in the Dublin picture, originated in a sketch in which her head was turned to look out at the viewer (fig. 3; see Schatborn, op. cit.). The seated tric-trac player at the far left and a variant of his standing companion equally reappeared in several of Hals’ other works, including a guardroom scene dated 1628, formerly with P. de Boer (see Sutton, op. cit., p. 149, fig. 3). Hals also evidently made studies on which he based his still life details, with the chair with a silver ewer, basin and flask at the right of this composition recurring in the left of the San Francisco painting. Van Delen's architectural paintings were meanwhile inspired in part by the pattern books of Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries (see, for example, Scenographiae sive Perspectivae, 1560), as well as Sebastiano Serlio's D'Architettura et Prospetiva (1619), although direct quotations from these sources are exceptional (for a discussion of the above, see T.T. Blade, The Paintings of Dirck van Delen, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, Ann Arbor, 1976, pp. 21-70).
While such repetitions of figures were used to satisfy the high demand for Hals’ Merry Company scenes, they also carried mildly moralising messages and were paradigmatic of the Dutch mentality of the seventeenth century, which revelled in prosperity yet was anxious about the moral consequences of wealth. Rather than communicating an obvious narrative, these fancily attired youths pose in attitudes of merriment, swagger and romance with humorous and clever efficacy, pressing on us their enjoyment of wine, music and those notorious aphrodisiacs, oysters. In the figure of the stout, goateed tavern master holding a large pie at the very centre of the company, one can see the influence of Willem Buytewech and Dirck’s elder brother, Frans Hals, whose merry and intoxicated figure of Hans Worst from his Merrymakers at Shrovetide (dated to circa 1616-17; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 14.40.605) was seemingly an inspiration. Merry Companies such as this allowed artists to represent the latest fashions and modes of courtship and conversation, while forcing the viewer to assess the propriety of each scene for themselves.
On long-term loan at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem since 1948, it is here offered for sale for the first time in eighty years, further to its restitution in 2019 to the heirs of its last rightful owner - Jacob Lierens. A Jewish businessman and art collector in Amsterdam, Lierens sold the picture at auction in 1941 before his company was ‘Aryanised’ by the Nazis and he and his wife were interned at Westerbork. The picture was acquired at the sale by Hans Posse for the projected ‘Führermuseum’ at Linz before being returned to the Netherlands after the war.
In a palatial Renaissance-style interior, young gentry are at play. Across Hals’ entanglement of figures, elegant society feast, converse, play tric-trac and court to the accompaniment of music, while children and dogs play nearby. Although only here signed by Dirck van Delen, who painted the setting, this picture is the largest of three similar large-scale panel paintings on which Hals and van Delen collaborated in 1628. The second, sold at Christie’s, New York, 29 January 1998, lot 17 ($1,047,500) (fig. 1) includes different architecture by van Delen and is of slightly smaller dimensions (77 x 135.5 cm.), yet repeats virtually to a man the present figure group by Hals, who alone signed and dated the work ‘DHALS / AN / 1628’. The serving boy departing through the doorway in the present work is also replaced with a seated couple, seen through a vaulted colonnade on an open portico added on the right (see P.C. Sutton, op. cit., p. 205). A third collaboration from this year, of the same dimensions as the painting sold at Christie’s New York in 1998, is in the Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna (inv. no. 684), also signed and dated ‘DHals AN 1628’. Further examples of their collaborations exist, such as two paintings dated 1629, one in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin – which includes variations of the figure of the woman standing in the doorway and the seated violin player in this picture – and a work formerly in the collection of Sir Cecil Newman, Burloes Hall, Royston. None, however, are painted on as grand a scale as the present painting.
The working methods of Hals and van Delen’s collaborations was explored by Renate Trnek (op. cit., pp. 169-70) through a close examination of infrared reflectograms of the present picture and that in Vienna. Starting with the architecture, van Delen first drew out the perspective on the panel’s ground, leaving a reserve for Hals’ figures in white underpaint, which is visible in their contours. Yet while the relationship between the figures and the architecture in the Christie’s New York picture was fully resolved before execution, in the present work, Hals was evidently still experimenting with the balance of the composition as he worked. Most notably, the seated dog in the middle foreground was seemingly added only after the tablecloth and tiles had been blocked in, painted thinly on top with the trenchant freedom of his sketches, as if it had been sketched from life. A pentiment in the dog’s muzzle, which was originally painted lower, also attests to this fluency, suggesting that of the two versions of this figure group from 1628, the present painting may have been conceived first.
Hals is known to have worked from a repertoire of preparatory figure drawings and oil sketches on paper, the latter a rare practice for a Dutch painter. The violinist on the right, for example, was originally conceived in a sketch of a seated pipe smoker (fig. 2; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. 1965:180), who can also be found in his Merry Companies in the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (inv. no. 1957.160) and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (inv. no. 816A). In the present picture and the Christie’s New York painting, Hals substituted the pipe for a violin and omitted the man’s beard, replacing the boots with ones already devised in individual leg studies on the same sheet. The woman standing in the doorway with her arm akimbo, who also featured in the Dublin picture, originated in a sketch in which her head was turned to look out at the viewer (fig. 3; see Schatborn, op. cit.). The seated tric-trac player at the far left and a variant of his standing companion equally reappeared in several of Hals’ other works, including a guardroom scene dated 1628, formerly with P. de Boer (see Sutton, op. cit., p. 149, fig. 3). Hals also evidently made studies on which he based his still life details, with the chair with a silver ewer, basin and flask at the right of this composition recurring in the left of the San Francisco painting. Van Delen's architectural paintings were meanwhile inspired in part by the pattern books of Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries (see, for example, Scenographiae sive Perspectivae, 1560), as well as Sebastiano Serlio's D'Architettura et Prospetiva (1619), although direct quotations from these sources are exceptional (for a discussion of the above, see T.T. Blade, The Paintings of Dirck van Delen, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, Ann Arbor, 1976, pp. 21-70).
While such repetitions of figures were used to satisfy the high demand for Hals’ Merry Company scenes, they also carried mildly moralising messages and were paradigmatic of the Dutch mentality of the seventeenth century, which revelled in prosperity yet was anxious about the moral consequences of wealth. Rather than communicating an obvious narrative, these fancily attired youths pose in attitudes of merriment, swagger and romance with humorous and clever efficacy, pressing on us their enjoyment of wine, music and those notorious aphrodisiacs, oysters. In the figure of the stout, goateed tavern master holding a large pie at the very centre of the company, one can see the influence of Willem Buytewech and Dirck’s elder brother, Frans Hals, whose merry and intoxicated figure of Hans Worst from his Merrymakers at Shrovetide (dated to circa 1616-17; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 14.40.605) was seemingly an inspiration. Merry Companies such as this allowed artists to represent the latest fashions and modes of courtship and conversation, while forcing the viewer to assess the propriety of each scene for themselves.