PLATE III.—THE MERRY TRIO
(In America. A copy by Dirk Hals, Royal Museum, Berlin)
Painted in 1616. A girl of the town gaily dressed, with open bosom—a thing abhorred by all worthy Dutch vrouwen—sits willy-nilly between the knees of a Falstaffian lover. He was probably the very pork-butcher who, in after years, became one of Hals' heaviest creditors. A saucy apprentice is holding over the amorous pair a coronal, not of orange-blossom but of sausages! He has gripped his master's shoulders to make him release his hold upon the girl's arm. Hals' treatment of the group was doubtless a remembrance of an allegorical picture he had seen at Antwerp, "The Feast of Love," by Franz Pourbus (1540-1601), and which now hangs in the Wallace Collection.
Haarlem story is blank—Haarlem tradition is silent with respect to Franz Hals' young manhood. The only hint that we have of his existence is in 1604, when it is recorded that he was working still in Van Mander's Academy. There is not the least tint of local colour, nor the faintest trace of romance to be seen or heard until we are brought face to face with the "Portrait of Dr. Pieter Schrijver," now at Monsieur Warnecks' in Paris.
Upon the picture we see "F. H." and the date, 1613. This then is the first intimation that Franz Hals had blossomed out as a painter of portraits! The doctor was a well-known Haarlem poet, writer, chemical student, and art critic. He flourished between the years 1570 and 1640. The portrait shows us a middle-aged man of serious mien, but with no peculiar characterisation of expression or figure. It is a sombre production—black and grey, with merely a little brick-red here and there; but the shadows upon the skin strike one as clever.
Franz Hals was thirty-three years of age in 1613—an age when artists have either dismally failed and turned aside to more suitable employment, or when they have established some sort of reputation and their work is recognised, and examples of their style are broadcast. Not so Franz Hals; but then there are, to be sure, scores of portraits "attributed" to him of men and women and children to which no dates are attached, and many of these are comparable with the portraits of Schrijver in technique, colour, and finish. That he worked laboriously to maintain his family, if for no other reason—and artists had to work hard in those days of small payments—is evident both directly and indirectly.
A few—very few—studies are extant, in black crayon upon dull blue paper, which are noteworthy for simplicity and firmness. Two of these are in the Teyler Museum at Haarlem, but they are evidently sketches for his first great "Group of Shooters," in the Stadhuis. Three or four are in England—one at the British Museum, and the Albertina Collection at Vienna has a few, and that seems to be all.
Where, may we ask, are his studio canvases, his early panel portraits, and all the thousand-and-one sketches and freaks of a young artist? Perchance destroyed—possibly otherwise attributed—probably hidden away in the high-pitched lofts of old Haarlem houses and hofjes or asylums, and in many an oaken chest and press.
Indirectly we are assured that he had been, all the thirteen years of his residence in Haarlem, an indefatigable worker in the art of portraiture—from the simple fact of his intimacy with Mijnheer Aert Jan Druivesteen (1564-1617), who five times served the high office of Burgomaster of Haarlem. He was a man of independent means and refined tastes, a lover of artists, and himself also a very passable painter of landscape and animals, which he painted solely for amusement.