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Lot Essay
The re-emergence of this small-scale portrait of Johannes Hoornbeeck after more than a century offers an opportunity to look afresh at an important part of Frans Hals’s oeuvre: the small-scale portrait. Hals’s small-scale portraits on panel or copper, nearly forty of which are known or documented today, occupied a critical place in his artistic production and count among the artist’s liveliest and most spontaneous works. This relatively small group of paintings amounting to little more than fifteen percent of Hals’s known output would come to be especially prized by generations of collectors and commentators in ensuing centuries.
Théophile Thoré, the driving force behind the resurgence of interest in the artist and his work in the middle of the nineteenth century, first gave voice to the particular appeal of these intimately scaled works when, in 1860, he enthused about the artist’s 1634 portrait of the Haarlem historian Pieter Christiaansz. Bor: ‘What a jewel this little Frans Hals is!...Here in Rotterdam, Frans Hals enclosed his man in an oval medallion 22 centimetres high; only the bust, but with one hand…All of this is of such skill, such knowledge, such freedom, such spirit!’ The painting was sadly destroyed when a fire broke out four years later at the Museum Boymans in Rotterdam, but its appearance is known today through a print executed in the same year by Adriaen Matham.
PORTRAITS AND PRINTS
The identities of a surprising number of Hals’s sitters for his small-scale portraits have come down to us, in large part due to the fact that – as with his portrait of Bor and the present picture – they often served as models for engravings in which the sitter’s name is inscribed in the print. Nearly one-third of the surviving or documented small-scale panels by Hals were copied in prints, generally appearing in reverse on account of the printing process and of identical scale, suggesting they were traced by the printmaker. In addition to the lost Bor portrait, evidence exists for at least three further modellos – the portraits of Arnold Möller (Slive, op. cit., no. L9), Caspar Sibelius (Slive, op. cit., no. L11) and Theodor Wickenburg (Slive, op. cit., no. L17) – for which only a print is known today. The panel portrait depicting the Deventer preacher Sibelius, sadly destroyed by fire in 1956 when in the collection of Billy Rose, was regarded by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1910), Wilhelm von Bode (1914), Wilhelm Valentiner (1921) and, most recently, Justine Rinnooy Kan (2023) as Hals’s modello for a print of similar scale by Jonas Suyderhoef (for an image of the painting, see W.R. Valentiner, op. cit., 1923, p. 150). Seymour Slive, who knew the portrait of Sibelius solely from a poor black-and-white photograph, described it instead as ‘either very badly abraded and clumsily restored or…a copy by another hand after one of Suyderhoef’s prints’ (op. cit., III, under no. L12). That the ex-Rose painting was executed in reverse of Suyderhoef’s print confirms that it is not a copy after the print but most likely the lost prototype by Hals.
Hals enjoyed particularly friendly relations with the select group of contemporary printmakers who made engravings after his painted portraits. No fewer than twenty-six of Hals’s portraits were engraved in his lifetime, though by only nine engravers, three of whom hailed from the Matham family. As Rinnooy Kan has pointed out (‘Portrait Prints’, Frans Hals, exhibition catalogue, London and Amsterdam, 2023, p. 143), both Jacob Matham – who was perhaps the first to engrave a portrait by Hals when, in 1618, he produced a scaled print after the portrait of Theodorus Schrevelius – and Hals were members of the local chamber of rhetoric, De Wijngaertrancken (Vine Tendrils). Hals similarly knew Jacob’s son, Adriaen, whom he painted at far left in a civic guard portrait around 1627. Adriaen, who made three prints after Hals’s portraits in the mid-1630s, also witnessed the baptism of Hals’s daughter, Susanna, in 1634. Jan van de Velde II, who produced a further six prints after Hals’s portraits, similarly served as a witness to the baptisms of Hals’s niece, Hester, in 1624 and his son, Reynier, in 1627. But it was Jonas Suyderhoef, a precociously talented Haarlem engraver nearly thirty years his junior, who enjoyed the strongest binding ties with the elder artist and, perhaps unsurprisingly, produced the largest number of reproductive prints after his portraits. Archival records reveal that Jonas’s brother, Adriaen, appeared in 1641 as a witness in a court case alongside Hals’s second wife. A decade later the engraver would become a member of Hals’s extended family through Adriaen’s marriage to the painter’s niece, Maria.
Suyderhoef produced thirteen prints after portraits by Hals between about 1638, when he engraved Hals’s extraordinary portrait of Jean de la Chambre, and at least 1651, the year in which he engraved both the present portrait (fig. 1) and Hals’s lost depiction of Willem van der Cramer (collaboration between the two artists may have continued several years thereafter with the portrait of Theodor Wickenburg, which was probably painted in the first half of the 1650s). The close working relationship between these two artists can be inferred not only through the sheer number of collaborations but their consistent approach to working together. Of the nine instances in which Hals’s painting survives, small-scale portraits to aid the engraver are known for all but one – the Conradus Viëtor of 1644 (New York, The Leiden Collection). This stands in stark contrast to Hals’s collaborations with the other eight printmakers, where in nearly two-thirds of cases where Hals’s portrait survives, small-scale portraits are unknown. This striking dichotomy between Hals’s collaboration with Suyderhoef on the one hand and that of other printmakers on the other apparently bespeaks a particular preference on Suyderhoef’s behalf to work directly from a modello at scale rather than be compelled to personally reduce a large-scale portrait.
The present example is exceptional within the Hals/Suyderhoef collaboration in that it is the only instance in which both a life-size portrait (fig. 2) and small-scale modello by Hals have survived. However, evidence exists for several further instances in which Hals painted both life-size and small modello portraits that functioned as an aid to the printmaker. Archival documents, for example, suggest that the surviving small-scale portrait of the Haarlem minister Hendrick Swalmius was probably once accompanied by a life-size example. The 1662 estate inventory compiled following the death of his wife, Yda Willems, mentions two portraits of the sitter: ‘A portrait of Henricus Swalmius’ (‘Een conterfeytsel van Henricus Swalmius’) and ‘Another small portrait of Henricus Swalmius’ (‘Noch een cleijn conterfeytsel van Henricus Swalmius’) (Haarlem, NHA, acc. no. 1617, ONA, inv. no. 388, notary Jacob van de Camer, fols. 76-80, 12 September 1662). While Frans Grijzenhout, who has recently studied Hals’s portraits of Protestant ministers, interpreted this as ‘the painted version, probably in a somewhat bigger frame, and the print, either in smaller frame or unframed’ (‘The Religion(s) of Frans Hals', Frans Hals: Iconography – Technique – Reputation, N.E. Middelkoop and R.E.O. Ekkart, eds., Amsterdam, 2024, p. 25), this likely more straightforwardly references two paintings, one small and one large.
Similarly, Hals’s portrait of René Descartes, the artist’s most famous sitter, is known today through a small, compromised modello (Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek) and no fewer than eight copies (the best of which is in the Louvre Museum in Paris). Five of these paintings measure ± 76 x 65 cm., a format Hals frequently employed in the mid-1640s, including for his life-size portrait of Hoornbeeck in Brussels. There is a strong likelihood, therefore, that each of these copies is modelled after a now-lost life-size portrait by Hals. As Slive himself has previously concluded, ‘the possibility that an original life-size painting based on the Copenhagen sketch [of Descartes] may turn up one day cannot be excluded’ (op. cit., p. 90).
Nor was Hals opposed to making autograph replicas of his portraits. In the mid-1630s, he executed the first of two informal portraits of Willem van Heythuysen (fig. 3). Following the sitter’s death in 1650, the artist painted a replica for the regents' room of the Van Heythuysen hofje in Haarlem, which is now thought to be the version in Brussels (fig. 4; P. Biesboer, ‘Willem van Heythuysen en zijn twee portretten’, Hart voor Haarlem: Liber amicorum voor Jaap Temminck, H. Brokken et al., eds., Haarlem, 1996, pp. 113-126).
THE SITTER
Johannes Hoornbeeck was precisely the type of man who would have valued having his visage painted by Hals and engraved by Suyderhoef. He belonged to a group of at least fifteen clergymen to have been painted by Haarlem’s leading portraitist. Most, including Hoornbeeck, who was born in Haarlem in 1617, had connections to the city in which Hals lived and worked. However, unlike many of the other prelates who sat for Haarlem’s greatest portraitist, Hoornbeeck was less orthodox in his Calvinist sensibilities, preferring moderation and unity over dogma and conflict.
Hoornbeeck, whose eponymous grandfather had immigrated from Flanders to Haarlem in 1548, left Haarlem to begin his university studies in Leiden in 1633. Two years later, an outbreak of the plague in the city compelled him to transfer to Utrecht. He would stay there until September 1636, by which point the plague subsided and he returned to Leiden. The death of his father, the merchant Tobias Hoornbeeck, in April 1637 necessitated a return to his hometown, where he would remain until early 1639. On 1 March of that year, he became a minister at Mülheim near Cologne and remained there through late 1642, when he again returned to Haarlem. On 2 December 1643, he was promoted to Doctor of Theology in the Utrecht academy. Several months later, he was named minister in Maastricht on 19 February 1644 and on 3 March he accepted the same position in Graft in Noord-Holland. In May of 1644, he took up the position of professor of theology at Utrecht University, giving his inaugural lecture in July, as well as the Illustre School in Harderwijk. It was these appointments that may well have induced him to commission the life-size portrait from Hals in Brussels. On 20 April 1650, he married Anna Bernard of Amsterdam, whose grandfather was the famous geographer Jodocus Hondius. After nearly a decade at Utrecht University, Hoornbeeck – who spoke thirteen languages – left for Leiden University, where he gave his inaugural address on 9 June 1654. He remained in the position until he passed away, aged 48, on 1 September 1666.
Described as ‘a scholar of no ordinary stamp’ (‘een geleerde van niet alledaagschen stempel’; J.P. de Bie and J. Loosjes, Biographisch Woordenboek van Protestantsche Godgeleerden in Nederland, IV, The Hague, 1931, p. 278), Hoornbeeck was a notably prolific writer. Between 1644 and 1674, more than forty treatises were published (and at least four texts appeared posthumously) dealing with topics as diverse as euthanasia (1651; 2nd ed. 1660) and the origins of Arminianism (1662), many going through multiple editions.
Hals presents his sitter in a manner befitting his role as both a preacher and academic. As Grijzenhout has pointed out (op. cit., pp. 21-2), all but two of Hals’s portraits of Protestant ministers depict their sitter wearing a skullcap. Moreover, these religious men frequently hold a book, a finger placed between the pages. It is as if their reading has been momentarily interrupted, either by the painter or viewer.
THE ATTRIBUTION
Since it first came to light nearly 200 years ago, this small portrait has generally, if not universally, been given to Hals. Hals’s production of small-scale portraits on panel reached their apogee between about 1645 and 1660, with around fifteen surviving examples dating to this decade-and-a-half period. As Dr. Norbert E. Middelkoop has recently pointed out following first-hand inspection of the present picture (private communication, 9 May 2025), this portrait of Hoornbeeck anticipates a number of similar works painted in the second half of the 1650s or shortly thereafter. These include the Portrait of a preacher of circa 1657-60 (fig. 5); the Portrait of a man of circa 1660 (The Hague, Mauritshuis) and the Portrait of a preacher of circa 1660 (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).
In the course of the twentieth century, all major scholars of Hals and his work attributed the painting to Hals without reservation, the only exception being Seymour Slive (op. cit., 1974; 1989). These include Ernst Wilhelm Moes (op. cit., 1909), Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (op. cit., 1910), Wilhelm von Bode (op. cit., 1914) and Wilhelm Valentiner (op. cit., 1923; 1936). In a letter dated 7 September 1911 that was transcribed in full and included in the catalogue of the 1915 exhibition at the Detroit Museum of Art (now Detroit Institute of Arts), von Bode not only praised the painting’s quality but was the first to point out the relationship between it and the print:
‘the free, spiritful and broad way in which it is handled, proves absolutely that it is an original direct from nature…Taking Snyderhoef’s [sic] engraving into consideration, one can positively conclude that this engraving was copied from that little portrait of Franz Hals, as it is exactly of the same size’ (op. cit.).
The attributional history of this painting is, therefore, comparable to the aforementioned portrait of Heythuysen, now regarded as Hals’s prime. Slive only appears to have had the opportunity to study the small portrait of Hoornbeeck on one occasion, at the Detroit Institute of Arts on 26 January 1974, just as the third volume of his catalogue raisonné was about to go to press (private communication between Frederick J. Cummings and the painting’s then-owner). In published opinions, Slive would come to regard the painting as ‘a reduced copy by another hand after the Brussels painting’ (op. cit.,1974) and a ‘copy after Hals’ (op. cit., 1989), much as he had with the portrait of Heythuysen. The unpublished letter from Cummings, then the director of the Detroit museum, relayed Slive’s further belief that this and other known copies of Hoornbeeck ‘were probably produced for members of the sitter’s family or for his friends’. At no point does Slive appear to have recognised the function of this small portrait of Hoornbeeck as the modello for Suyderhoef’s print.
Recent dendrochronological examination of the present panel undertaken by Ian Tyers demonstrates that the portrait was all but assuredly produced in advance of Suyderhoef’s print (report dated April 2025, available upon request). The latest heartwood ring present in the board dates from 1633 and no sapwood was present, suggesting the panel dates from after circa 1639 if one is to allow for a minimum number of sapwood rings. To this can be added the fact that the painting and print overlay with almost no discrepancies, save a millimetre or two in the fingers.
Middelkoop has also presciently noted that certain details, including the unusually long baby finger in the painting in Brussels, have been corrected in the modello, a detail Suyderhoef adopted in his print. He further noted that the sitter’s face in the present painting is slightly thinner than that of his visage in the picture in Brussels. Unlike so many of us, Hoornbeeck appears to have lost a bit of weight in the years that had elapsed since the Brussels portrait. Middelkoop noted a similar phenomenon in the two versions of Heythuysen, whose appearance is that of a man more advanced in age in the portrait in Brussels when compared with the one that appeared on the market in 2008.
With the purpose of this small painting firmly established, its authorship should be on equally firm ground. It is instructive that the attribution of none of the other seven known modellos for prints by Suyderhoef has been credibly questioned. Only Claus Grimm has regarded the majority of these works – with the notable exception of the portrait of Jean de la Chambre in London – as workshop productions, often, as in the case of the extraordinarily penetrating portrait of Samuel Ampzing on copper in The Leiden Collection, as the product of a workshop assistant ‘working from a no longer extant model by Hals’ (Frans Hals and His Workshop: RKD Studies, online, under 1.15, 'A presumably more expensive commission'). Among the other modello portraits that Grimm consigns to a studio hand are the portraits of Petrus Scriverius (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Swalmius (fig. 6) and Theodorus Schrevelius (Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum; for further information on the relationship between modello and print, see M. Bijl, ‘The Portrait of Theodorus Schevelius', The Learned Eye: Regarding Art, Theory, and the Artist’s Reputation: Essays for Ernst van de Wetering, M. van den Doel et al., eds., Amsterdam, 2005, pp. 47-55). The notion that, in each instance, Hals’s prototype has been lost while a workshop variant survives strains credulity.
Martin Bijl (private communication, 8 May 2025) and the late Pieter Biesboer (private communication, 14 May 2025), both on the basis of photographs, have proposed that the present painting is a joint venture between Frans Hals and his son, Frans II. Few, if any, pictures have generally been given to Frans II with certitude, making this suggestion difficult to prove. In light of the close collaboration between Hals and Suyderhoef, the lack of evidence for two distinct hands, the painting's small scale and, not least, its evident quality, the notion that Hals might have uniquely entrusted the production of a modello for one of Holland’s leading academics and theologians in part to his son is not a wholly satisfactory one. If nothing else, Bijl and Biesboer raise interesting questions about the degree to which others would come to participate in Hals’s portrait production in the final two decades of his career.
The attribution has been endorsed by Dr. Norbert E. Middelkoop and others upon first-hand inspection of the portrait. We are further grateful to Dr. Middelkoop for his insightful thoughts on this entry and to Martin Bijl and Pieter Biesboer for their comments on the basis of photographs.
Théophile Thoré, the driving force behind the resurgence of interest in the artist and his work in the middle of the nineteenth century, first gave voice to the particular appeal of these intimately scaled works when, in 1860, he enthused about the artist’s 1634 portrait of the Haarlem historian Pieter Christiaansz. Bor: ‘What a jewel this little Frans Hals is!...Here in Rotterdam, Frans Hals enclosed his man in an oval medallion 22 centimetres high; only the bust, but with one hand…All of this is of such skill, such knowledge, such freedom, such spirit!’ The painting was sadly destroyed when a fire broke out four years later at the Museum Boymans in Rotterdam, but its appearance is known today through a print executed in the same year by Adriaen Matham.
PORTRAITS AND PRINTS
The identities of a surprising number of Hals’s sitters for his small-scale portraits have come down to us, in large part due to the fact that – as with his portrait of Bor and the present picture – they often served as models for engravings in which the sitter’s name is inscribed in the print. Nearly one-third of the surviving or documented small-scale panels by Hals were copied in prints, generally appearing in reverse on account of the printing process and of identical scale, suggesting they were traced by the printmaker. In addition to the lost Bor portrait, evidence exists for at least three further modellos – the portraits of Arnold Möller (Slive, op. cit., no. L9), Caspar Sibelius (Slive, op. cit., no. L11) and Theodor Wickenburg (Slive, op. cit., no. L17) – for which only a print is known today. The panel portrait depicting the Deventer preacher Sibelius, sadly destroyed by fire in 1956 when in the collection of Billy Rose, was regarded by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1910), Wilhelm von Bode (1914), Wilhelm Valentiner (1921) and, most recently, Justine Rinnooy Kan (2023) as Hals’s modello for a print of similar scale by Jonas Suyderhoef (for an image of the painting, see W.R. Valentiner, op. cit., 1923, p. 150). Seymour Slive, who knew the portrait of Sibelius solely from a poor black-and-white photograph, described it instead as ‘either very badly abraded and clumsily restored or…a copy by another hand after one of Suyderhoef’s prints’ (op. cit., III, under no. L12). That the ex-Rose painting was executed in reverse of Suyderhoef’s print confirms that it is not a copy after the print but most likely the lost prototype by Hals.
Hals enjoyed particularly friendly relations with the select group of contemporary printmakers who made engravings after his painted portraits. No fewer than twenty-six of Hals’s portraits were engraved in his lifetime, though by only nine engravers, three of whom hailed from the Matham family. As Rinnooy Kan has pointed out (‘Portrait Prints’, Frans Hals, exhibition catalogue, London and Amsterdam, 2023, p. 143), both Jacob Matham – who was perhaps the first to engrave a portrait by Hals when, in 1618, he produced a scaled print after the portrait of Theodorus Schrevelius – and Hals were members of the local chamber of rhetoric, De Wijngaertrancken (Vine Tendrils). Hals similarly knew Jacob’s son, Adriaen, whom he painted at far left in a civic guard portrait around 1627. Adriaen, who made three prints after Hals’s portraits in the mid-1630s, also witnessed the baptism of Hals’s daughter, Susanna, in 1634. Jan van de Velde II, who produced a further six prints after Hals’s portraits, similarly served as a witness to the baptisms of Hals’s niece, Hester, in 1624 and his son, Reynier, in 1627. But it was Jonas Suyderhoef, a precociously talented Haarlem engraver nearly thirty years his junior, who enjoyed the strongest binding ties with the elder artist and, perhaps unsurprisingly, produced the largest number of reproductive prints after his portraits. Archival records reveal that Jonas’s brother, Adriaen, appeared in 1641 as a witness in a court case alongside Hals’s second wife. A decade later the engraver would become a member of Hals’s extended family through Adriaen’s marriage to the painter’s niece, Maria.
Suyderhoef produced thirteen prints after portraits by Hals between about 1638, when he engraved Hals’s extraordinary portrait of Jean de la Chambre, and at least 1651, the year in which he engraved both the present portrait (fig. 1) and Hals’s lost depiction of Willem van der Cramer (collaboration between the two artists may have continued several years thereafter with the portrait of Theodor Wickenburg, which was probably painted in the first half of the 1650s). The close working relationship between these two artists can be inferred not only through the sheer number of collaborations but their consistent approach to working together. Of the nine instances in which Hals’s painting survives, small-scale portraits to aid the engraver are known for all but one – the Conradus Viëtor of 1644 (New York, The Leiden Collection). This stands in stark contrast to Hals’s collaborations with the other eight printmakers, where in nearly two-thirds of cases where Hals’s portrait survives, small-scale portraits are unknown. This striking dichotomy between Hals’s collaboration with Suyderhoef on the one hand and that of other printmakers on the other apparently bespeaks a particular preference on Suyderhoef’s behalf to work directly from a modello at scale rather than be compelled to personally reduce a large-scale portrait.
The present example is exceptional within the Hals/Suyderhoef collaboration in that it is the only instance in which both a life-size portrait (fig. 2) and small-scale modello by Hals have survived. However, evidence exists for several further instances in which Hals painted both life-size and small modello portraits that functioned as an aid to the printmaker. Archival documents, for example, suggest that the surviving small-scale portrait of the Haarlem minister Hendrick Swalmius was probably once accompanied by a life-size example. The 1662 estate inventory compiled following the death of his wife, Yda Willems, mentions two portraits of the sitter: ‘A portrait of Henricus Swalmius’ (‘Een conterfeytsel van Henricus Swalmius’) and ‘Another small portrait of Henricus Swalmius’ (‘Noch een cleijn conterfeytsel van Henricus Swalmius’) (Haarlem, NHA, acc. no. 1617, ONA, inv. no. 388, notary Jacob van de Camer, fols. 76-80, 12 September 1662). While Frans Grijzenhout, who has recently studied Hals’s portraits of Protestant ministers, interpreted this as ‘the painted version, probably in a somewhat bigger frame, and the print, either in smaller frame or unframed’ (‘The Religion(s) of Frans Hals', Frans Hals: Iconography – Technique – Reputation, N.E. Middelkoop and R.E.O. Ekkart, eds., Amsterdam, 2024, p. 25), this likely more straightforwardly references two paintings, one small and one large.
Similarly, Hals’s portrait of René Descartes, the artist’s most famous sitter, is known today through a small, compromised modello (Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek) and no fewer than eight copies (the best of which is in the Louvre Museum in Paris). Five of these paintings measure ± 76 x 65 cm., a format Hals frequently employed in the mid-1640s, including for his life-size portrait of Hoornbeeck in Brussels. There is a strong likelihood, therefore, that each of these copies is modelled after a now-lost life-size portrait by Hals. As Slive himself has previously concluded, ‘the possibility that an original life-size painting based on the Copenhagen sketch [of Descartes] may turn up one day cannot be excluded’ (op. cit., p. 90).
Nor was Hals opposed to making autograph replicas of his portraits. In the mid-1630s, he executed the first of two informal portraits of Willem van Heythuysen (fig. 3). Following the sitter’s death in 1650, the artist painted a replica for the regents' room of the Van Heythuysen hofje in Haarlem, which is now thought to be the version in Brussels (fig. 4; P. Biesboer, ‘Willem van Heythuysen en zijn twee portretten’, Hart voor Haarlem: Liber amicorum voor Jaap Temminck, H. Brokken et al., eds., Haarlem, 1996, pp. 113-126).
THE SITTER
Johannes Hoornbeeck was precisely the type of man who would have valued having his visage painted by Hals and engraved by Suyderhoef. He belonged to a group of at least fifteen clergymen to have been painted by Haarlem’s leading portraitist. Most, including Hoornbeeck, who was born in Haarlem in 1617, had connections to the city in which Hals lived and worked. However, unlike many of the other prelates who sat for Haarlem’s greatest portraitist, Hoornbeeck was less orthodox in his Calvinist sensibilities, preferring moderation and unity over dogma and conflict.
Hoornbeeck, whose eponymous grandfather had immigrated from Flanders to Haarlem in 1548, left Haarlem to begin his university studies in Leiden in 1633. Two years later, an outbreak of the plague in the city compelled him to transfer to Utrecht. He would stay there until September 1636, by which point the plague subsided and he returned to Leiden. The death of his father, the merchant Tobias Hoornbeeck, in April 1637 necessitated a return to his hometown, where he would remain until early 1639. On 1 March of that year, he became a minister at Mülheim near Cologne and remained there through late 1642, when he again returned to Haarlem. On 2 December 1643, he was promoted to Doctor of Theology in the Utrecht academy. Several months later, he was named minister in Maastricht on 19 February 1644 and on 3 March he accepted the same position in Graft in Noord-Holland. In May of 1644, he took up the position of professor of theology at Utrecht University, giving his inaugural lecture in July, as well as the Illustre School in Harderwijk. It was these appointments that may well have induced him to commission the life-size portrait from Hals in Brussels. On 20 April 1650, he married Anna Bernard of Amsterdam, whose grandfather was the famous geographer Jodocus Hondius. After nearly a decade at Utrecht University, Hoornbeeck – who spoke thirteen languages – left for Leiden University, where he gave his inaugural address on 9 June 1654. He remained in the position until he passed away, aged 48, on 1 September 1666.
Described as ‘a scholar of no ordinary stamp’ (‘een geleerde van niet alledaagschen stempel’; J.P. de Bie and J. Loosjes, Biographisch Woordenboek van Protestantsche Godgeleerden in Nederland, IV, The Hague, 1931, p. 278), Hoornbeeck was a notably prolific writer. Between 1644 and 1674, more than forty treatises were published (and at least four texts appeared posthumously) dealing with topics as diverse as euthanasia (1651; 2nd ed. 1660) and the origins of Arminianism (1662), many going through multiple editions.
Hals presents his sitter in a manner befitting his role as both a preacher and academic. As Grijzenhout has pointed out (op. cit., pp. 21-2), all but two of Hals’s portraits of Protestant ministers depict their sitter wearing a skullcap. Moreover, these religious men frequently hold a book, a finger placed between the pages. It is as if their reading has been momentarily interrupted, either by the painter or viewer.
THE ATTRIBUTION
Since it first came to light nearly 200 years ago, this small portrait has generally, if not universally, been given to Hals. Hals’s production of small-scale portraits on panel reached their apogee between about 1645 and 1660, with around fifteen surviving examples dating to this decade-and-a-half period. As Dr. Norbert E. Middelkoop has recently pointed out following first-hand inspection of the present picture (private communication, 9 May 2025), this portrait of Hoornbeeck anticipates a number of similar works painted in the second half of the 1650s or shortly thereafter. These include the Portrait of a preacher of circa 1657-60 (fig. 5); the Portrait of a man of circa 1660 (The Hague, Mauritshuis) and the Portrait of a preacher of circa 1660 (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).
In the course of the twentieth century, all major scholars of Hals and his work attributed the painting to Hals without reservation, the only exception being Seymour Slive (op. cit., 1974; 1989). These include Ernst Wilhelm Moes (op. cit., 1909), Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (op. cit., 1910), Wilhelm von Bode (op. cit., 1914) and Wilhelm Valentiner (op. cit., 1923; 1936). In a letter dated 7 September 1911 that was transcribed in full and included in the catalogue of the 1915 exhibition at the Detroit Museum of Art (now Detroit Institute of Arts), von Bode not only praised the painting’s quality but was the first to point out the relationship between it and the print:
‘the free, spiritful and broad way in which it is handled, proves absolutely that it is an original direct from nature…Taking Snyderhoef’s [sic] engraving into consideration, one can positively conclude that this engraving was copied from that little portrait of Franz Hals, as it is exactly of the same size’ (op. cit.).
The attributional history of this painting is, therefore, comparable to the aforementioned portrait of Heythuysen, now regarded as Hals’s prime. Slive only appears to have had the opportunity to study the small portrait of Hoornbeeck on one occasion, at the Detroit Institute of Arts on 26 January 1974, just as the third volume of his catalogue raisonné was about to go to press (private communication between Frederick J. Cummings and the painting’s then-owner). In published opinions, Slive would come to regard the painting as ‘a reduced copy by another hand after the Brussels painting’ (op. cit.,1974) and a ‘copy after Hals’ (op. cit., 1989), much as he had with the portrait of Heythuysen. The unpublished letter from Cummings, then the director of the Detroit museum, relayed Slive’s further belief that this and other known copies of Hoornbeeck ‘were probably produced for members of the sitter’s family or for his friends’. At no point does Slive appear to have recognised the function of this small portrait of Hoornbeeck as the modello for Suyderhoef’s print.
Recent dendrochronological examination of the present panel undertaken by Ian Tyers demonstrates that the portrait was all but assuredly produced in advance of Suyderhoef’s print (report dated April 2025, available upon request). The latest heartwood ring present in the board dates from 1633 and no sapwood was present, suggesting the panel dates from after circa 1639 if one is to allow for a minimum number of sapwood rings. To this can be added the fact that the painting and print overlay with almost no discrepancies, save a millimetre or two in the fingers.
Middelkoop has also presciently noted that certain details, including the unusually long baby finger in the painting in Brussels, have been corrected in the modello, a detail Suyderhoef adopted in his print. He further noted that the sitter’s face in the present painting is slightly thinner than that of his visage in the picture in Brussels. Unlike so many of us, Hoornbeeck appears to have lost a bit of weight in the years that had elapsed since the Brussels portrait. Middelkoop noted a similar phenomenon in the two versions of Heythuysen, whose appearance is that of a man more advanced in age in the portrait in Brussels when compared with the one that appeared on the market in 2008.
With the purpose of this small painting firmly established, its authorship should be on equally firm ground. It is instructive that the attribution of none of the other seven known modellos for prints by Suyderhoef has been credibly questioned. Only Claus Grimm has regarded the majority of these works – with the notable exception of the portrait of Jean de la Chambre in London – as workshop productions, often, as in the case of the extraordinarily penetrating portrait of Samuel Ampzing on copper in The Leiden Collection, as the product of a workshop assistant ‘working from a no longer extant model by Hals’ (Frans Hals and His Workshop: RKD Studies, online, under 1.15, 'A presumably more expensive commission'). Among the other modello portraits that Grimm consigns to a studio hand are the portraits of Petrus Scriverius (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Swalmius (fig. 6) and Theodorus Schrevelius (Haarlem, Frans Hals Museum; for further information on the relationship between modello and print, see M. Bijl, ‘The Portrait of Theodorus Schevelius', The Learned Eye: Regarding Art, Theory, and the Artist’s Reputation: Essays for Ernst van de Wetering, M. van den Doel et al., eds., Amsterdam, 2005, pp. 47-55). The notion that, in each instance, Hals’s prototype has been lost while a workshop variant survives strains credulity.
Martin Bijl (private communication, 8 May 2025) and the late Pieter Biesboer (private communication, 14 May 2025), both on the basis of photographs, have proposed that the present painting is a joint venture between Frans Hals and his son, Frans II. Few, if any, pictures have generally been given to Frans II with certitude, making this suggestion difficult to prove. In light of the close collaboration between Hals and Suyderhoef, the lack of evidence for two distinct hands, the painting's small scale and, not least, its evident quality, the notion that Hals might have uniquely entrusted the production of a modello for one of Holland’s leading academics and theologians in part to his son is not a wholly satisfactory one. If nothing else, Bijl and Biesboer raise interesting questions about the degree to which others would come to participate in Hals’s portrait production in the final two decades of his career.
The attribution has been endorsed by Dr. Norbert E. Middelkoop and others upon first-hand inspection of the portrait. We are further grateful to Dr. Middelkoop for his insightful thoughts on this entry and to Martin Bijl and Pieter Biesboer for their comments on the basis of photographs.