MASP

By Frans Grijzenhout
The Museu de Arte de Sᾶo Paulo boasts the possession of three portraits by the famous Dutch painter Frans Hals (ca. 1582/83-1666). Thanks to the coat of arms that has (later) been painted on the surface of the man’s portrait, we are familiar with his identity: it shows Andries van Hoorn (or van der Horn) in a dark hat, with a bravoura lace collar around his neck, his gloved hands holding a stick, maybe intended as a reference to his activities as a leading officer in the city militia. Hals painted this piece and its pendant in 1638, undoubtedly at the occasion of Hoorn’s second marriage in that same year with Maria Pieters Olycan, member of a very influential family of brewers and city administrators in the city of Haarlem in the Dutch Republic. Hals adorned the deceivingly modest looking woman with luxurious lace work, a precious broche, a fan and strings of pearls around her wrists, partly done in his characteristic, beautiful loose brush work. A third painting by Frans Hals in the MASP is usually called the ‘portrait of an officer’. It is indistinctively dated (1631? 1637?) and the indication of the age of the man as it is inscribed on the canvas, is also unclear. Both these inscriptions have been tampered with over the years. A recent careful study of the inscriptions under infrared and UV-light led to the preliminary conclusion that 1631 is the more probable reading of the year of production of the painting. This seems to be confirmed by the particular form of the collar on the man’s shoulders, which can be found in other portraits of the early 1630s as well. As to the sitter’s age, the margins of uncertainty are much wider: the inscription could be read as either 56, 55 or 52. A more definitive result can only be obtained after a complete removal of varnish, study of paint layers under a microscope and removal of layers of overpaint. The elderly man in the portrait wears a big hat that fills almost the complete width of the painting, whilst his elbow and fist, clutching a stick, seem to protrude from its surface. The man’s face is fleshy, his glance towards us seems uncomplicated. He seems to be wearing a white, very thin satin jerkin (‘wambuis’ in Dutch); its beautifully decorated sleeves with lace cuffs appear from under a leather ‘kolder’, in Dutch portraits of this period usually worn only by military men. Above this, the man wears a ‘ringkraag’, a metal plate which covers his breast and shoulders. In contrast, these military elements seem to be partly covered by the fashionable lace collar with a double, à jour sculpted board. All in all this portrait has a disarmingly direct and unpolished appearance. Who could this man be? Already in 1974 the Amsterdam archivist Isabella van Eeghen suggested to connect the ‘portrait of an officer’ in the MASP to the mention of ‘a portrait of the old captain Soop, done by Hals’ in the inventory of the goods of Willem Schrijver, who died in Amsterdam in 1661. Until now, her humble suggestion, almost done in passing, remained unnoticed in the art historical literature on Hals, but Van Eeghen was probably right, as I will try to demonstrate in the following. Jan Hendricksz Soop, ‘the old captain’ to which the 1661 inventory refers, was, in fact, 52 years old at the beginning of 1631. He was born in 1578 in Amsterdam as the second son of a seller of milk, butter and other dairy products. His family had many ties with the nearby city of Haarlem: Soop’s mother was born in that city and his older brother, the scholar Petrus Scriverius, lived there and was portrayed by Hals. Between 1601 and 1631 Soop ran a studio on one of the Amsterdam canals, where luxury glass work of a high quality was produced. In 1628 he was appointed captain of a regiment of mercenaries, to maintain public order in town. Hence his description as a captain in the inventory of his nephew Willem Schrijver. Apart from the possible age of the man in the portrait, his dress specifically pleads for the identification of the MASP portrait as ‘the old captain Soop’. Like we saw earlier, the man is dressed in a so-called ‘kolder’, a garment primarily worn by soldiers. The thick, yellowish leather it was made of, offered a first protection from enemy blows with a sword, but it could obviously not stop a bullet from a pistol, let alone a rifle. Originally and steadily used as a functional protection in battle, the kolder became popular in Dutch portraiture from the 1620s onwards. This sleeveless and quite stiff piece of military dress was worn by many male sitters in portraits, often over a finely cut cloth jerkin and under a metal ‘ringkraag’, covered with a flat lace collar, just like in Hals’s portrait in Sao Paolo. We find the same combination with some of the officers in the corporate military portraits by Hals, like in his Officers of the militia of Saint-George from 1627. We know that some painters kept a kolder as a regular accessory to their portraits in their studio, but in this particular case this seems not to have been necessary. Upon making the inventory of the goods of the late Floris Soop, the oldest son of captain Soop, in 1657, the notary found in a cupboard in the so-called ‘capiteinskamer’– obviously the room in which goods from the late captain were kept – ‘an old, white satin suit’ and a ‘leather jerkin’, just like the man in Hals’s portrait wears. The military status of the man is furthermore underscored by the stick or staff that he holds in his right hand. Normally, Hals is very sparing with his use of accessories like these, but when he does, the accessory is quite telling as an attribute. A stick in the hand in Hals’s portraits usually hints at a military position. For instance, in 1635 Hals portrayed captain Pieter Hasselaer in the same twisted, somewhat informal attitude of the sitter, with the right elbow protruding towards the viewer of the painting, and the left hand akimbo, and also with a rod of command in his right hand. Another very similar example can be found in Hals’s beautiful portrait of Pieter van den Broecke of 1633, now in the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London. Therefore, there are several good reasons to confirm Isabella van Eeghen’s suggestion, done in 1974: Jan Hendricksz Soop’s age of 52 in 1631 concords with one of the possible readings of the inscriptions in the painting in São Paolo, and the dress of the man in the picture is without doubt that of a military officer, like Soop was. There are no other portraits by Hals that comply so well with the biographical data concerning Soop. Besides, the dress the man in the portrait is wearing, seems to have been kept by his sons in captain Soop’s wardrobe after his death.

— Frans Grijzenhout, 2017

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Seated Officer depicts a nonidentified officer or petty officer, most probably from a Haarlem military company such as Sint Adrien Mosqueteers, to which Andries van Hoorn, sitter for the other male portrait by Hals in the Masp Collection, also belonged. After a throrough cleaning of the canvas before 1988, museum experts discovered that the date inscribed on the right, previously thought to be 1637, as recorded in documents at the Masp’s archives, is actually 1631. The superimposition of dates and the rarefied nature of the paint itself bring about different hypotheses about the real condition of the artwork, which was either impoverished as result of excessive cleaning or actually left unfinished. Notwithstanding the precariousness of any assertion about an artwork with such unreliable visibility, it should be noted that the date 1631 seems more convenient in any case. The more expedite and brittle brushwork, and the lower, more ton-sur-ton palette the painter used to build the figure approximate this painting, of the Masp Collection and Young Girl Fishing (private collection, New York) that Slive (1989, n. 35) has dated 1630-1632. However, the Masp canvas must be submitted to more in-depth examination before we can answer any outstanding questions.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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The first known facts about the life of Frans Hals tell that his family moved from Antwerp to Haarlem, in Holland, in 1585, fleeing from the Spanish occupation and the fierce persecution of Protestants by Catholics. Hals joined the city’s artists’ guild in 1610 and quickly garnered recognition and a numerous clientele among the wealthy bourgeoisie. His naturalist vocation became evident in his depiction of everyday scenes and in individual and group portraits, his specialty, executed on commission or motivated only by his interest in the character and physiognomy of the models. Hals’s technique aimed to express the theme in an immediate and vibrant way, with quick, irregular brushstrokes, allowing the artist’s emotional state to emerge through his touch. This pictorial procedure was an important legacy for 19th century modern realism. Seated Officer portrays an unidentified officer, probably from a civic militia of Haarlem. The civic militias – armed groups that represented citizen power in light of attacks by monarchic power – played a fundamental role in the struggles for the independence of the Netherlands. This work from MASP’s collection is part of a recognized set of portraits of civic militia officers that the artist painted during his life.

— Unknown authorship

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