Lot Essay
In a palatial Renaissance-styled interior, a convivial party of more than thirty people converse, play music, partake of an oyster meal and play tric-trac. Children and dogs complete the merry company. Although only signed by Dirck Hals, this painting is a collaboration between Hals, who executed the figures, and the architectural painter, Dirck van Delen, who painted the setting. Although C. Hofstede de Groot and others rejected the theory that van Delen ever painted any of the interiors in Dirck Hals's works (see U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexicon der Bildenden Knstler, IX, 1922, p. 530), Plietzsch (Randbemerkungen zur hollndischen Interieurmalerei am Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts, Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, 18, 1956) first persuasively advanced and investigated this collaboration. Most recently, Trnek, op. cit., has offered a detailed analysis of the present work and two very similar large scale panel paintings of merry companies in grandly conceived interiors also dated 1628. The first of these related pictures is in the Gemldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Knste, Vienna (Inv. no. 684; signed and dated 'DHals AN 1628'), has identical dimensions (77 x 135.5cm.), and also arrays a large party of elegantly attired figures horizontally across a Renaissance style hall but features an open portico at the left (see P.C. Sutton, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, 1984, no. 45, pl. 11). The second painting is a somewhat larger panel (93 x 156cm.) in the Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, Inv. no. 674, which repeats virtually to a man the merry company in the foreground of the present work but completely changes the architecture, omits the couple visible through the vaulted colonnade on the right and adds a serving boy departing through a doorway at the right (see P.C. Sutton, op. cit., p. 205, fig. 2). Whilst it is undoubtedly a collaborative effort, the painting in Haarlem is only signed and dated by van Delen ('D. van Delen/fecit/1628'). There are additional examples of van Delen and Dirck Hals collaborating (for example, two paintings dated 1629, one in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, for which see H. Potterton, Dutch Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland: A Complete Catalogue, 1986, pp. 32-3, no. 119, fig. 42; and the other formerly in the collection of Sir Cecil Newman, Burloes Royston, 1953) but none as large and ambitiously conceived as the three of 1628. Van Delen's architectural paintings were inspired in part by the pattern books of Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries (see for example, Scenographiae sive Perspectiva, 1560) as well as Sebastiano Serlio's D'Architettura et Prospetiva (1619), however, direct quotations from these sources are exceptional (for a discussion of the above, see Timothy Blade, op. cit., pp. 21-70).
Trnek (op. cit., 1992, pp. 169-70) analysed the working methods of the two artists in their collaboration and concluded from close examination of the Haarlem and Vienna paintings with infra-red reflectograms that the process began with the perspective of the architecture drawn on the painting's ground. However van Delen seems not to have painted the architecture completely; rather he apparently left a reserve for Hals's figures in white underpaint since the figures' contours rarely are painted over the architecture. Dirck Hals is known to have worked from preparatory figure drawings and oil sketches on paper, the latter a rare practice for a Dutch painter. The many figures who recur in the same poses in his art are explained by this working method; for example, the seated tric-trac player at the far left and variants of his standing companion reappear in several of Hals's other paintings, including a guardroom scene dated 1628, formerly with P. de Boer (see P.C. Sutton's 1984 exhibition catalogue, op. cit., p. 149, fig. 3) and in works formerly in the von Malmann collection and the Lindenmeyer collection, Basel. The violinist on the right in the present painting was originally conceived in an oil sketch of a seated pipe smoker (Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, Inv. no. 1965:180; see Peter Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings, 1981-2, no. 56, fig. 1) preparatory to paintings by Hals in the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, and the Gemldegalerie, Berlin (Schatborn, op. cit., figs. 2 and 4); in the present painting and the Haarlem version not only is the violin substituted for the pipe but also the figure's beard is omitted and he wears boots that were already conceived in individual studies of legs on the same sheet in Amsterdam. Hals also evidently made studies on which he based his still life details since the chair with silver ewer, basin and flask at the right in the present lot recurs at the left in the San Francisco painting. However, some of Hals's repeated figures have more to do with the traditional conventions of merry companies; the stout tavernmaster with goatee holding a large pie on a platter at the very center of the company has a close counterpart on the left in the Vienna painting as well as relatives in other works by Dirck Hals and Willem Buytewech. Indeed they all share features with the famous Shrovetide character 'Hanswurst' who figures so prominently in the work of Dirck's brother Frans Hals, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Inv. no. 14.40.605.
We are grateful to Dr. Peter C. Sutton for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Trnek (op. cit., 1992, pp. 169-70) analysed the working methods of the two artists in their collaboration and concluded from close examination of the Haarlem and Vienna paintings with infra-red reflectograms that the process began with the perspective of the architecture drawn on the painting's ground. However van Delen seems not to have painted the architecture completely; rather he apparently left a reserve for Hals's figures in white underpaint since the figures' contours rarely are painted over the architecture. Dirck Hals is known to have worked from preparatory figure drawings and oil sketches on paper, the latter a rare practice for a Dutch painter. The many figures who recur in the same poses in his art are explained by this working method; for example, the seated tric-trac player at the far left and variants of his standing companion reappear in several of Hals's other paintings, including a guardroom scene dated 1628, formerly with P. de Boer (see P.C. Sutton's 1984 exhibition catalogue, op. cit., p. 149, fig. 3) and in works formerly in the von Malmann collection and the Lindenmeyer collection, Basel. The violinist on the right in the present painting was originally conceived in an oil sketch of a seated pipe smoker (Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, Inv. no. 1965:180; see Peter Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings, 1981-2, no. 56, fig. 1) preparatory to paintings by Hals in the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, and the Gemldegalerie, Berlin (Schatborn, op. cit., figs. 2 and 4); in the present painting and the Haarlem version not only is the violin substituted for the pipe but also the figure's beard is omitted and he wears boots that were already conceived in individual studies of legs on the same sheet in Amsterdam. Hals also evidently made studies on which he based his still life details since the chair with silver ewer, basin and flask at the right in the present lot recurs at the left in the San Francisco painting. However, some of Hals's repeated figures have more to do with the traditional conventions of merry companies; the stout tavernmaster with goatee holding a large pie on a platter at the very center of the company has a close counterpart on the left in the Vienna painting as well as relatives in other works by Dirck Hals and Willem Buytewech. Indeed they all share features with the famous Shrovetide character 'Hanswurst' who figures so prominently in the work of Dirck's brother Frans Hals, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Inv. no. 14.40.605.
We are grateful to Dr. Peter C. Sutton for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.