|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 - Haarlem 1666)
|
| St Mark
|
|
|
| |
|
Signed upper right with monogram: FH
Oil on canvas
27 x 20 ¾ in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Provenance: Sale Gerard Hoet, The Hague, 25 August 1760, Lot 134; ‘De vier Evangelisten, zynde vier Borst-Stukken met Handen, door F. Hals; hoog 26 1/2, breet 21 duimen’ (Dfl. 120, Jan yver); sale The Hague, 13 April 1771, Lot 35 (the four Evangelists as a lot); Sale F.W Baron van Borck, Amsterdam, 1 May 1771, Lot 34 (the four as a lot; Dfl. 33, Jan Yver); the set of four acquired by Catherine II for the Imperial Hermitage by 1773; the Imperial Hermitage 1773-1812;the set of four removed from the Hermitage 20 March 1812 and transferred to a church in the Tauride Province, Crimea; The Mattioli Collection, Salerno, probably by the 1850s; Anon. Sale 1955 (as Luca Giordano); Silvio Severi, Milan: Christie's London, 20 October 1972, Lot 83 (Portrait of a Bearded Man) Unsold; Private Collection, Germany.
Literature: P. Terwesten, Catalogus of naamlyst van schilderyen, met zelver prysen, zedert den 22. Aug.1752 tot den Aug. 1752 tot den 21.Nov 1768…verkogt… The Hague, 1770, vol. 3, p. 321, no. 124; E. Minich, Catalogue des tableaux qui se trouvent dans les galleries, salons et cabinets du Palais Impérial de S. Petersbourg, St Petersburg, 1774, nos. 1895, 1896; C. Kramm, De Levens en Werken der Hallandsche en Vlaamsche Kunstschilders, Amsterdam, 1858, vol. 2, p. 362; P. Lacroix, ‘Musée du palais de l’Ermitage sous la règne de Catherine II’, Revue Universelle des Arts XIII, (1862, p. 114, nos. 1895, 1896 (reprint of Minich 1774); H. de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, 1910, Vol III, nos 4-7; Claus Grimm, ‘St Markus von Frans Hals’, Maltechnik/Restauro I, 1974, pp. 21-31; E. C. Montagni, Tout l’oeuvre peint de Frans Hals, (introduction by A. Chatelet), Paris, 1976 (translation of the Italian edition Milan 1974), 41, 42 (c1625); Y. Kuznetsov and I Linnik, Dutch Paintings in Soviet Museums, New York and Leningrad, 1982, nos. 125, 126; S. Slive, Frans Hals, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1 October – 31 December 1990, Royal Academy, London, 13 January – 8 April 1990, Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, 11 May – 22 July 1990, pp. 193-7, Figs 22a and 22b, ill.fig 22a (before cleaning and removal of the ruff) and 22b (after cleaning). [not exhibited]; C. Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, 1990 [English translation of the original German edition], pp13-15, figs 2a and 2b; cat 43, colour plate 89.
Exhibitions: The paintings of St Luke and St Mark were exhibited: Haarlem 1962, nos. 77, 78; on loan to the Hermitage, Leningrad 1960 and September 1962, and to Pushkin State Museum of Art, Moscow, 1965; 1989/1990, S.Slive (ed), Frans Hals, exhibition National Gallery of Art Washington, Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, October 1989-July 1990, nos 22 (St Luke) and 23 (St Matthew) lent by the Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa (inv. nos. 180, 181).
Comparative Literature: W. Bode, ‘Frans Hals und seine Schule’, Studien zur Geschichte der holländischen Malerei, 1883, p. 70, note 1; I. Linnik, ‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Frans Hals’, Iskusstvo, 1959, no. 10, pp. 70-6 (Russian text); I. Linnik, ‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Frans Hals’, Soobcheniia Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, XVIII (1960), pp. 40-6 (Russian text); S. Slive, ‘Frans Hals Studies: II. St Luke and St Matthew, at Odessa’, Oud Holland, LXXVI (1961), pp. 174-6; S. Slive, Frans Hals, 1970-4, vol. I, pp. 100-3; ; Catalogue of the Museum of Western European and Oriental Art, Odessa, 1973, p. 27; Y. Kutznetsov and I. Linnik, Dutch Paintings in Soviet Museums, 1982 nos. 125 and 126; N. Lutskevich (ed.) The Museum of Western and Oriental Art, Odessa, 1985, nos. 18 & 19.
This rare and intriguing early work by Frans Hals, one of his very few religious pictures, was recently acquired from a German private collection, having last appeared at auction in 1972. It is one of a set of four remarkable canvases of the Evangelists, dated by Slive and Grimm to the mid to late 1620s, the others of which are now in the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museum of Western and Oriental Art, Odessa, which were in the Hermitage Collection, St Petersburg from the 1770s until the 1820s. The painting is notable for its forceful characterisation, expressive power and mastery of rapid brushwork, qualities which were much praised in the eighteenth century by Ernst Minich, author of the 1774 Hermitage museum catalogue of paintings. More recently the Evangelists have attracted the admiration of modern scholars both because of the rarity of their religious subject matter and the quality and drama of their execution. Of all the four paintings, the Colnaghi-Bernheimer St Mark is arguably, as Grimm wrote 'the most Italianate, most theatrical of Hals's saints', a 'bold male figure' which, together with its companions in Odessa and the Getty Museum, is invested with the solemnity of 'historical figures on a theatrical stage'. These qualities, however, are combined with a notable realism, compared to its Italian counterparts and a mastery of brushwork, whose brilliance and fluency has been revealed by its recent cleaning.
While the researches of Linnik, Grimm and Slive, have enabled much of the earlier history of the series to be reconstructed, much still remains conjectural. In particular, nothing is known of the circumstances of the commission. These pictures may have been painted for a Catholic or Lutheran church, however the relatively small size and intimate character of the four paintings suggest that they were more probably conceived, as Slive argued for a small private chapel, or possibly a clandestine Catholic church (schuilkerk) in Haarlem, or they could have been intended for a Protestant patron, since the subjects of the Evangelists, unlike representations of many of the other saints, had a strong appeal to Protestants, with their belief in the primacy of biblical as opposed to ecclesiastical authority, as guardians and champions of the word of God. Paintings of the Evangelists were not necessarily hung in ecclesiastical settings: Hals’s patron, Willem Van Huythusysen, for example, had a set of Four Evangelist grisaille paintings hanging in the entry hall of his house on Oude Gracht and there was also a vogue in the Netherlands for hanging ‘galleries of Apostles’ in private homes where they were exhibited as viri illustri, illustrious men of the Bible. The upright format adopted by Hals would naturally lend itself to such a humanist library or gallery setting and therefore his Evangelists might have were conceived for exemplary, rather than devotional purposes, hung possibly in the company of busts of classical authors or portraits of famous men of antiquity. One further possibility is that this set of Evangelists were not commissioned at all, but painted by Hals for personal, artistic or religious reasons, as was the case with Terbrugghen’s Evangelists, (Historisch Museum, Deventer) and Rembrandt’s pictures of Apostles and Evangelists painted the 1660s. But this seems unlikely given that Hals seems to have had had 'neither a strong urge to paint Old or New Testament subjects, nor made much of an effort to find patrons who would commission them’ and they were more likely a one-off commission.
On the 25th August 1760 we find the first surviving record of Hals's Evangelists: in Gerard Hoet’s posthumous sale in The Hague. The Hals Evangelists were listed in Volume 3 of Hoet’s Catalogus, compiled after his death by Pieter Terwesten, where they were praised as masterly works and given the relatively high valuation of 100 florins. Purchased at the Hoet sale by the Dutch auctioneer Jan Yver for 120 florins, the the paintings appeared again at auction on 13th April 1771 in the Hague, where they were acquired by the Prussian collector, Baron Van Borck, and bought back following month for the bargain price of 33 florins by their former owner, Jan Yver, who had been commissioned that year by the Tsarina Catherine II to acquire paintings for the Hermitage. In 1773 the paintings were included in the catalogue of the Hermitage with the Colnaghi-Bernheimer St Mark listed at the head of the group as number 1894. The Odessa paintings retain their original inventory numbers, which correspond to the numbers in Minich’s catalogue and the sizes given also correspond both with the current dimensions of all four pictures and with those given in the catalogues of the sales held in Holland in 1760 and 1771. In 1812 Tsar Alexander I instructed the curator of the Paintings Collection at the Hermitage, F. Labensky, to select around 30 pictures, including Hals's Evangelists for the decoration of churches in Crimea. From there, two of the paintings (the St Luke and St Matthew) found their way eventually to the Odessa Museum, whereas the Colnaghi-Bernheimer St Mark and the Getty St John disappeared only to be rediscovered in the twentieth century. Grimm suggests plausibly, that their disappearance may have been connected with the Crimean War and it may well have been in the 1850s that the St Mark found its way to Italy and into the collection of the Mattioli Family in Salerno.
Like Rembrandt's later Apostles and Evangelists, Hals's Evangelists were painted, to quote Volker Manuth, 'in a predominantly Protestant environment in which traditional image worship and the Catholic cult of saints had been renounced' where such representations might seem anachronistic. This may explain why they are almost unique in Hals's oeuvre. A handful of other religious pictures were listed by Hofstede de Groot, including a Penitent Magdalene, a St Francis Praying in the Desert, a Virgin and Child with St Anthony in the Desert and two paintings of the Prodigal Son, but of these, the only painting which can now tentatively be identified, masquerading as a genre painting, is one of the two Prodigal Son paintings, possibly the original identity of Jonker Ramp and His Sweetheart of 1623 (Metropolitan Museum, New York). This makes The Evangelists Hals’s only overtly religious paintings to have survived.
In the 1989 Hals exhibition catalogue, Slive observed that in his Evangelists Hals was following well-established Netherlandish prototypes, comparing them with the Evangelists, painted in 1621 and now in Deventer by Terbrugghen. If one compares the Hals group with the earlier group painted by Terbrugghen, there are obvious similarities in the use of chiaroscuro and the quality of earthy realism, particularly noticeable in the case of Hals’s St Luke and St Matthew. Another common feature is the way in which the Evangelists are given strongly individualised characters. Terbrugghen divides his Evangelists into two distinct cross-related pairs: St Mark and St Matthew seen in profile while St John and St Luke are presented frontally. Within those pairings, one Evangelist is shown writing while the other is shown reading, reflecting as Slatkes observed, the two main meanings of the word 'Evangelist’: a ‘publisher of glad tidings’, for which the activity of writing was appropriate, and the secondary sense of the reader of the gospel of the day. Hals’s Evangelists are similarly differentiated, both in terms of their physiognomies and their activities. St. Luke and St Matthew (Odessa Museum) are shown as readers, St John (Getty Museum), who is markedly more youthful than in the Terbrugghen series, as a writer, and St Mark presented as one who hears the word of the Lord and proclaims it. The poses of the Evangelists are also differentiated. While there some notable similarities between the two groups of Evangelist paintings, the differences, as Slive pointed out, are as marked as the similarities. Terbrugghen’s paintings are much more Italianate in feeling and far more detailed. ‘Hals’s brushwork’, wrote Slive ‘remained free and impulsive even when he painted the Evangelists' and his Evangelists are more decorously clad than the Terbrugghen saints, reflecting, perhaps, a certain unease in painting the nude. Terbrugghen’s paintings, employ a horizontal format, which owes more to Caravaggio’s paintings of saints, such as the St Jerome in the Villa Borghese than to northern prototypes . Hals’s Evangelists, on the other hand, with their upright format, go back to a much older northern tradition of Evangelist portraits, which ultimately has its roots in Carolingian art. This tradition, which can be seen in such mediaeval masterpieces as the Lorsch and Ebbo Gospels in turn developed out of an earlier Roman tradition of the scholar or author portrait. Interestingly the Ebbo St Mark, like our St Mark, is shown in a more reflective mood rather than reading or writing, because he and St John, tend often to be portrayed as the more mystical figures among the Evangelists.
This tradition of the Evangelists as scholar-saints, was boosted by the growth of humanism and the vogue for studioli in fifteenth-century Italy, where scholar saints and classical luminaries were presented in half or three-quarter-length formats, seated at desks in shallow interior spaces, a format later adopted in the Netherlands. The scholar saint tradition was transmitted north of the Alps in Dürer’s engraving of St Jerome in his Study and, because St Mark shares with St Jerome the attribute of the lion, the iconography of the two writer saints was sometimes confused. One of the effects of the Reformation was the removal of the cult of saints, but this did not mean that they entirely disappeared from Protestant iconography; rather that there were certain changes of emphases. The Evangelists remained relatively popular as subjects for painters, because of the protestant emphasis on the primacy of scriptural over ecclesiastical authority, and this led, in some extreme cases, to the Evangelists becoming instruments of the most virulent Protestant propaganda, as in the Evangelists Stoning St Peter, by Girolamo da Treviso (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle), a picture which belonged to Henry VIII. A less notorious example of Protestant image making is Dürer’s ‘Apostles’ (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Here the four saints are so strongly characterised and differentiated that Panofsky suggested that they reflected the four humours or Temperaments: St Mark, the lion saint, with rolling eyes and gnashing teeth, being associated with the choleric humour; St John, with the sanguine, St Paul the melancholic and finally St Peter as the phlegmatic humour. In the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century the Evangelists and the Apostles remained popular subjects for sets of engravings and paintings by artists such as Wtewael and Goltzius both of whom adopted the half-length format of Hals’s later Evangelist series. Their very direct manner of presentation, with the saints making eye-contact with the viewer, also characterises Van Dyck’s depiction of St Mark (Private Collection) from a series of paintings of Evangelists and Apostles dating from around 1618. This series of Apostles and Evangelists was directly inspired by the famous series painted by Rubens about five years earlier for the Duke of Lerma, but whereas Rubens painted his saints half length in statuesque poses giving them the heroic air of antique philosophers, Van Dyck’s paintings are cropped in to focus on the heads and hands of his saints, anticipating Hals, in a less monumental approach, which brings out their individuality and their humanity.
In the United Provinces, representations of the Apostles and Evangelists tended to be far less idealised than in the Southern Netherlands, for reasons partly connected with Protestantism, and the Calvinist emphasis on humility, and partly with the more down-to-earth traditions of Dutch realism. Jan Lievens’s Evangelists, (Historiches Museum, Bamberg) for example, which are exactly contemporary with Hals's, have a more down-to earth character than those of Rubens and Van Dyck: St Mark shown, not wrapped in thought, but prosaically sharpening his quill. The most telling contrast is provided by Rembrandt’s marvellous series of pictures of Evangelists and Apostles painted in the 1660s, which are far humbler in their representations than Rubens's heroic patriarchs.
Hals Evangelists draw upon these earlier traditions as well as looking forward to Rembrandt. Like the earlier humanist scholar saints, Hals’s Evangelists are presented in half-length portrait format, in shallow room spaces suggestive of studies, but, like Van Dyck, Hals indicates these room spaces in a very summary manner and lavishes little attention on accessories or on the traditional symbolic attributes, focussing instead on the heads and hands of his saints, which, like Dürer’s, are sharply characterised. In his rendering of the heads of St Luke and St Matthew (Odessa Museum of Western and Oriental Art) which would appear to be taken from the same model, there is a quality of portrait realism which ties in closely with Hals’s practice as a portrait and genre painter in the 1620s. The head of St Luke, is very close to that of Provost Johan Damius, in the Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian Civic Guards (c. 1627, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem). The overall composition of St Matthew and the Angel is closely related to his Two Boys Singing (Cassel) and the Two Laughing Boys (Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam) which supports a dating to the mid 1620s. Where Hals’s Evangelists differ from the majority of his portraits is that there is no eye contact made with the viewer, giving them a quality of abstraction, as though they are lost in their own thoughts. Secondly, although there is a quality of earthy realism about St Luke and, to an extent, St Matthew, who are presented as homely types in accordance with Calvinist teaching, St John and St Mark, are more idealised: visionary rather than every-day figures, St John, his eyes looking heavenwards for inspiration as he writes, deriving perhaps from fifteenth and sixteenth-century images of St John on Patmos. Just as with the Terbrugghen Evangelists, reading and writing, the two principal aspects of evangelism are expressed: St John, as writer, counterbalancing St Luke and St Matthew as gospel readers. In Hals's St Matthew, like Rembrandt's St. Matthew, the angel is more boy than angel, showing how both artists were more strongly attached to realism than the majority of their Italian baroque counterparts. But, in a subtle modification of the traditional iconography of St Matthew, the usual roles have been reversed, and the boy angel, who looks up admiringly at the saint reading the gospel, has become a pupil of St Matthew rather than his source of inspiration.
Hals’s depiction of the Colnaghi-Bernheimer St Mark is also highly original in its departures from traditional iconography. While St John looks upwards for inspiration, St Mark looks downwards with his head turned across the line of his body describing a diagonal contrapposto movement counterbalancing St John's. As Grimm observed, he is ‘the most theatrical, the most Italianate of Frans Hals’s saints.’ Compared to the earthy, rubicund faces of the Odessa Evangelists, St Mark is relatively ethereal and idealised, and his whispy hair and beard have invited comparisons with Rubens’s bearded figures, such as the ‘the striking head of the old man from the Adoration of the Magi in Antwerp.’ He is a figure of inspiration, a prophet type, albeit far more realistic and less elevated than his Italianate forerunners. He alone of the four Evangelists neither reads nor writes, but holds his holy book in one hand with his right hand on his heart and like Michelangelo’s Isaiah, who also holds a half-closed book, he seems rapt in thought. But there are other, much more down-to-earth parallels in Hals’s many portraits of preachers, such as Hendrick Swalmius, (engraved in 1639), which are also presented with hand on heart, holding their bibles or prayer books. Unlike the preachers in these portraits, Hals’s St Mark makes no eye contact with the viewer, but with his book in his hand, he may well have been intended to symbolise the preaching aspects of the Ministry of the Word, a preacher saint to counterbalance the reading and writing activities of the other Evangelists, albeit a preacher-saint caught in a prayerful moment rather than in the act of declamation.
All four paintings are lit from the left, suggesting they may have been intended to be hung to the right of a window, probably in a tiered arrangement, as was the case earlier with the humanist portraits in Federico da Montefeltro’s studiolo. Assuming that this was the case, in what order might they have been hung? In the Middle Ages St Matthew (the Man) and St John (the Eagle) were often placed on the upper tier surrounding Christ in Majesty. St Mark (the Lion) and St Luke (the Ox) as ‘lower beasts’ would occupy the lower tier with the lion on the left (God’s right hand, theologically) taking precedence over the ox, corresponding both to mediaeval notions of the hierarchy of beasts and to the text of Ezekiel (1:10). This arrangement was by no means invariable, however: the cover of the Book of Kells shows Matthew and Mark occupying the upper tier with Luke and John below. The Terbrugghen Evangelists, seem to have been were conceived as cross-related pairs: two seen in profile, two full frontally. Similarly with the Hals Evangelists, St Luke and St Matthew, which seem to be taken from the same model, are more ‘roughly hewn’ and they make an obvious pair of writing and reading saints, with their attributes on opposing sides, with St Luke hung on the left and St Matthew on the right. Their more ‘homely’ style of presentation suggest that they may have been destined for the lower tier. The Colnaghi-Bernheimer St Mark and the Getty St John are a less homogenous pair, partly because of the relative youth of St John, and partly because, unlike the other three saints, which are painted in earth colours, St John is painted with a much brighter palette. They nevertheless make a balanced pair in terms of their attributes and their diagonal poses, with St Mark probably originally hung on the upper left turning inwards towards St John, whose gaze and pose also turn inwards, hung on the top right. They are the more ‘spiritual’ saints, which would naturally fit them for a position on the upper tier and since the eye naturally reads from left to right and from top to bottom, if St Mark was originally destined to be hung in the top left-hand corner, as suggested here, this arrangement would explain why St Mark was listed as the first painting of the group in the eighteenth-century Hermitage Collection catalogue and why the St Mark was also the only painting in the series which the artist chose to monogram. All this makes it likely that the Colnaghi-Bernheimer St Mark hung on the left-hand side on the upper tier flanked by St John and with the Odessa Evangelists hung below.
The previous existence of Hals's Evangelists was recorded by Hofstede de Groot on the basis of references in old auction catalogues, but the paintings themselves disappeared from view for over a century and a half. Then, in 1959, Hals’s St Luke and St Matthew were rediscovered in a storeroom of the Odessa Museum by Irina Linnik. Three years later, in 1973, a further piece in the art-historical jigsaw was supplied by Claus Grimm, who published a Portrait of a Bearded Man holding a Bible as being one of the missing pictures in the series: the present St Mark, which had been overpainted, presumably in the nineteenth century with a ruff and lacy sleeves, giving the Evangelist the air of a seventeenth-century gentleman. Grimm identified the metamorphosis, confirmed by technical examination, and during cleaning the figure of the lion emerged from the background revealing the true identity of the painting as St Mark, the third missing painting in the series. The rediscovery of the original St John, acquired ten years ago by the Getty Museum and the reappearance on the art market of the Colnaghi-Bernheimer St Mark, provide the missing links in this important and remarkable series.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
P. and D. Colnaghi and Co., Ltd - 15 Old Bond Street London W1S 4AX, United Kingdom Tel: +44-20-7491 7408 Fax: +44-20-7491 8851 contact@colnaghi.co.uk
|
|
Designed and managed by Antiques Trade Net
|
|
|
|