Frans Hals

The exhibition was prompted by the acquisition by the Toledo Museum of Art in 2011 of Frans Hals’s Van Campen Family in a Landscape, as well as the recent conservation of Children of the Van Campen Family with a Goat Cart (now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium). These two works originally formed one composition, separated for unknown reasons likely in the early 19^th century. The restoration work undertaken in Brussels also confirmed that a Head of a Young Boy, currently in a private collection in Europe, was also a fragment of the scattered painting. For the first time in two hundred years, the three surviving sections of the monumental family portrait, which must at the outset have measured nearly 3.80 metres long, are presented side by side on the occasion of this unique exhibition.

Frans Hals’s family portraits display a hitherto unprecedented degree of relaxation, demonstrating the intimacy of relations between parents and their children. The children interact joyfully amongst themselves. Smiles and laughter were Hals’s trademark; the artist’s genius is also illustrated in the other paintings in the exhibition: Family Group in a Landscape from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), the Dutch Family from the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Family Group in a Landscape from the National Gallery, London.

Echoing Frans Hals’s paintings, the Fondation Custodia presents a selection of preparatory drawings for family portraits, executed by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists. Although no drawings by Hals himself are known, these works throw light on the artistic challenges which confronted portrait painters when they had to represent a family group. These sheets form a transition to the second exhibition, Children of the Golden Age. Works from the Fondation Custodia.

Frans Hals was probably born in Antwerp in 1582 or 1583. While he was still a child, his family fled the disturbances in Flanders and set up house in Haarlem, in the young and prosperous Republic of the Netherlands. In 1610, he became a member of the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem and opened his own studio. He had three children from his first marriage and eleven from the second: four of his children became painters themselves. Hals’s career spanned most of the Dutch Golden Age as he died in 1666, at the ripe old age of 84, a very long life for the seventeenth century.

We know of more than 220 works by Frans Hals. He painted mainly individual portraits, some of them (husband and wife for example) as pendants, but he is also one of the greatest exponents of the typically Dutch genre of group portraits. Thirteen of these monumental paintings survive, eight of them now in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. The painter revolutionised the genre, giving it the dynamism and freshness which earlier, often stuffy, official portraits lacked. Among Hals’s thirteen group portraits, his four family portraits are here presented together for the first time.