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拍品专文
This convivial gathering of fashionably dressed men before a substantial chimney-piece is a typical example of the art of Dirck Hals. The scene is one of boisterous indulgence of tobacco and beer to the tune of a flute, played by one of the guests, and the noise of glimpsed wood crackling in the fireplace.
Dirck was the younger brother (perhaps by as much as ten years) and pupil of Frans Hals, who had emigrated north from his native Antwerp with his parents at least by 1591, the year that saw Dirck's birth in Haarlem. The city was one of the thriving centres of the officially Calvinist United Provinces, still at war with its suzerain, the King of Spain. The young artist would reach his maturity during the Twelve Years Truce in the Netherlands, agreed in 1609. Not long after, Esias van de Velde and William Buytewech were to join the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and the city became one of the most artistically adventurous in the Northern provinces. Part of the new speciality was to be 'landscapes with little figures in contemporary dress' ('landtschappen met moderne beeldekens'). The 'merry companies' executed by Buytewech and van de Velde lie at the heart of Dutch genre painting as it developed during the Golden Age.
Indeed Buytewech was to prove initially of greater influence on Dirck than his elder brother. While Frans' innovation was to treat popular, exuberant subject matter on a scale to life, Dirck was to remain faithful to the smaller format favoured by Buytewech and van de Velde. It is noteworthy that while for present day connoisseurs Frans's art is by far superior, for at least one contemporary observer, Samuel Ampzing, writing in 1628, Frans and Dirck were mentioned in the same breath without qualitative distinction: 'Come Halses, Come forward and take a place here that rightfully belongs to you. How nimbly Frans paints people from life! What neat little figures Dirck knows how to give us...' (see S. Slive, Frans Hals, I, 1970, p. 6).
Dirck's work has been represented in the great surveys of Dutch genre paintings in recent decades: the Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting in Philadelphia, Berlin and London of 1984, the Mauritshuis Seventeenth Century Dutch Masterpieces from Dutch Private Collections of 1995, and the Rotterdam and Hamburg exhibition of 2004/5 Frans Hals bis Jan Steen, Vernügliches Leben-Verborgene Lust. Indeed, in January 1998, an ambitious banquet scene painted in collaboration with Dirck van Delen fetched $1,047,500 (Christie's, New York, 29 January 1998, lot 17).
The present work was probably executed towards the end of Hals' epic series of collaborations with van Delen. The bright colours of his vision in the 1620s have been replaced - as descibed by Wayne Frantis (Dutch Seventeenth Century Genre Painting, 2004, p. 33) - by 'a limited range of ochres, browns and olives, applied with fairly broad brushwork, of a type asscoiated with Frans Hals... The novel coloristic effects... can be associated with a large-scale shift in stylistic conventions in Dutch genre, landscape and still-life painting during the late 1620s, 1630s and early 1640s. Art historians have identified this phenomenon as the tonal phase of Dutch painting...'. The costume of the young man in the left foreground is very similar to that worn by a violinist in an interior of 1630 in the Abdijmuseum in Geerardsbergen, Belgium.
The scene here depicted by Hals is unusual, although not wholly exceptional, for the absence of women. Could Hals have been here inspired by the off-duty mess-room life of the Haarlem Civic Companies, whose feasts his elder brother had so memorably commemorated?
Dirck was the younger brother (perhaps by as much as ten years) and pupil of Frans Hals, who had emigrated north from his native Antwerp with his parents at least by 1591, the year that saw Dirck's birth in Haarlem. The city was one of the thriving centres of the officially Calvinist United Provinces, still at war with its suzerain, the King of Spain. The young artist would reach his maturity during the Twelve Years Truce in the Netherlands, agreed in 1609. Not long after, Esias van de Velde and William Buytewech were to join the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and the city became one of the most artistically adventurous in the Northern provinces. Part of the new speciality was to be 'landscapes with little figures in contemporary dress' ('landtschappen met moderne beeldekens'). The 'merry companies' executed by Buytewech and van de Velde lie at the heart of Dutch genre painting as it developed during the Golden Age.
Indeed Buytewech was to prove initially of greater influence on Dirck than his elder brother. While Frans' innovation was to treat popular, exuberant subject matter on a scale to life, Dirck was to remain faithful to the smaller format favoured by Buytewech and van de Velde. It is noteworthy that while for present day connoisseurs Frans's art is by far superior, for at least one contemporary observer, Samuel Ampzing, writing in 1628, Frans and Dirck were mentioned in the same breath without qualitative distinction: 'Come Halses, Come forward and take a place here that rightfully belongs to you. How nimbly Frans paints people from life! What neat little figures Dirck knows how to give us...' (see S. Slive, Frans Hals, I, 1970, p. 6).
Dirck's work has been represented in the great surveys of Dutch genre paintings in recent decades: the Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting in Philadelphia, Berlin and London of 1984, the Mauritshuis Seventeenth Century Dutch Masterpieces from Dutch Private Collections of 1995, and the Rotterdam and Hamburg exhibition of 2004/5 Frans Hals bis Jan Steen, Vernügliches Leben-Verborgene Lust. Indeed, in January 1998, an ambitious banquet scene painted in collaboration with Dirck van Delen fetched $1,047,500 (Christie's, New York, 29 January 1998, lot 17).
The present work was probably executed towards the end of Hals' epic series of collaborations with van Delen. The bright colours of his vision in the 1620s have been replaced - as descibed by Wayne Frantis (Dutch Seventeenth Century Genre Painting, 2004, p. 33) - by 'a limited range of ochres, browns and olives, applied with fairly broad brushwork, of a type asscoiated with Frans Hals... The novel coloristic effects... can be associated with a large-scale shift in stylistic conventions in Dutch genre, landscape and still-life painting during the late 1620s, 1630s and early 1640s. Art historians have identified this phenomenon as the tonal phase of Dutch painting...'. The costume of the young man in the left foreground is very similar to that worn by a violinist in an interior of 1630 in the Abdijmuseum in Geerardsbergen, Belgium.
The scene here depicted by Hals is unusual, although not wholly exceptional, for the absence of women. Could Hals have been here inspired by the off-duty mess-room life of the Haarlem Civic Companies, whose feasts his elder brother had so memorably commemorated?