Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [85]
The museum begins with a small group of early sixteenth-century paintings, the most prominent of which is a triptych from the School of Hans Memling. Next door are two works by Jan van Scorel (1495–1562): a polished Adam and Eve and Pilgrims to Jerusalem, one of the country’s earliest group portraits, and, beyond that, Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem’s (1562–1638) giant Wedding of Peleus and Thetis, an appealing rendition of what was then a popular subject, though Cornelisz gives as much attention to the arrangement of his elegant nudes as to the subject. This marriage precipitated civil war among the gods and was used by the Dutch as an emblem of warning against discord, a call for unity during the long war with Spain. Similarly, and in the same room, the same artist’s Massacre of the Innocents connects the biblical story with the Spanish siege of Haarlem in 1572, while three accomplished pictures by Hendrik Goltzius (1558–1617) hang opposite – depictions of Hercules, Mercury and Minerva. Look out also for Adam and Eve by the Haarlem painter Marten van Heemskerck (1498–1574), whose work dominates the next room, in particular a brutal and realistic Christ Crowned with Thorns and a painting of St Luke with the Virgin and infant Jesus, a gift to the Haarlem St Luke’s guild. Moving on, the next rooms hold several paintings by the Haarlem Mannerists, including two tiny and precise works by Karel van Mander (1548–1606), leading light of the Haarlem School and mentor of many of the city’s most celebrated painters, including Hals, and depictions of the Grote Kerk by Gerrit Berckheyde (1638–98) and others. Look out also for Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s (1564–1638) berserk Dutch Proverbs, illustrating a whole raft of contemporary proverbs – a detailed key next to the painting gives the lowdown.
The Hals paintings begin in earnest in Room 14 with a set of five “Civic Guard” portraits – group portraits of the militia companies initially formed to defend the country from the Spanish, but which later became social clubs for the gentry. With great flair and originality, Hals made the group portrait a unified whole instead of a static collection of individual portraits, his figures carefully arranged, but so cleverly as not to appear contrived. For a time, Hals himself was a member of the Company of St George, and in his Officers of the Militia Company of St George he appears second from left in the top left-hand corner – one of his few self-portraits. See also Hals’s Haarlem contemporary Johannes Verspronck’s (1600–62) Regentesses of the Holy Ghost Orphanage – one of the most accomplished pictures in the gallery.
Hals’s later paintings are darker, more contemplative works, closer to Rembrandt in their lighting and increasingly sombre in their outlook. The artist’s Regents of St Elizabeth Gasthuis has a palpable sense of optimism, whereas his twin Regents and Regentesses of the Oudemannenhuis are quite the opposite – commissioned when Hals was in his eighties, a poor man despite a successful painting career, hounded for money by the town’s tradesmen and by the mothers of his illegitimate children. As a result he was dependent on the charity of people like those depicted here: their cold, self-satisfied faces staring out of the gloom, the women reproachful, the men only marginally more affable. There are those who claim Hals had lost his touch by the time he painted these pictures, yet their sinister, almost ghostly power suggests quite the opposite. Van Gogh’s remark that “Frans Hals had no fewer than 27 blacks” suddenly makes perfect sense.
Day-trips from the city | Haarlem | The Town | The Frans Hals Museum |
Frans Hals
Little is known about Frans Hals (c.1580–1666). Born in Antwerp, the son of Flemish refugees who settled in Haarlem in the late 1580s, he