[] Cook Collection, London.
[c] By Herbert Cook in Giorgione.
[d] Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
[e] The Brera, Milan.
[f] Giorgione e il Giorgionismo, 1913.
[NOTE 52. PAGE 156]
Hals is another artist as to whom many misconceptions have arisen in regard to his use of a very broad manner in his portraits. There is a total of about 350 works attributed to him, of which some two thirds are single portraits, and twenty are portrait groups. The balance includes over thirty genre pictures, mostly with single figures, and fifty heads of boys and girls generally shown in the act of laughing. It is in his genre work that the broad manner is mostly observable, and only very occasionally is it to be found in his portraits. In the more important works of the artist, even during his later period, his manner is by no means broad,[a] though it is not so fine as in his best years, say from 1635 to 1650. This estimate can however only be general, as his dated paintings of different periods after 1630 often correspond so closely that it is difficult to assign dates to the other pictures with certainty.
Perhaps the frequent attribution to Hals of works by his pupils and imitators, has had something to do with the public estimation of the breadth of his manner. This was often greatly exaggerated by his followers, and many portraits are given to him which he could not possibly have painted. In his important work on the artist, Dr. von Bode points out that some of the duplicates of his pictures were apparently executed by his pupils, but these are not separated in the book.[] It is a simple matter to divide the works painted by Hals from the studio copies and the portraits of imitators. His brushwork and impasto were quite exceptional. He had a firm direct stroke, never niggled or scumbled, and his loading was restrained though very effective. Quite naturally his pupils, however industrious and skilled, could not closely imitate his remarkable freedom in handling. They were incapable of firm decisive strokes throughout a portrait, and endeavoured to overcome the loading difficulty by using brushes of a coarseness foreign to the master when rendering light tones. Moreover Hals was nearly perfect in drawing, and in this there are usually marked defects in the studio copies.
[a] See Stephanus Gereardts, Antwerp Museum; Isabella Coymans, E. Rothschild Collection, Paris; Lady with a Fan, National Gallery, London; and William van Heythuysen, Liechtenstein Collection, Vienna.
[] Frans Hals: his Life and Work, 1914.