Portrait of a Young Woman (Hals; Hull)

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Portrait of a Young Woman
Frans Hals 114 WGA version.jpg
Artist Frans Hals
YearBetween 1655 and 1660
MediumOil colours on canvas
SubjectHead and upper body of a young woman dressed in black with a white tippet
Dimensions60 cm× 56 cm(24 in× 22 in)
LocationFerens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull, England
OwnerCity Museums and Art Galleries, Hull
AccessionKINCM:2005.5003

The Portrait of a Young Woman is a figurative painting by Frans Hals, who was a male 17th-century Dutch master. It is in the permanent collection at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, East Yorkshire. Its subject is a young woman seen full face against a plain background. Her name is not known; nor is anything else about her beyond what we see in her portrait. She wears a black gown of plain stuff over a white chemise, with a white tippet over her shoulders and a white coif. Hals probably painted her in Haarlem some time between 1655 and 1660, when he was about 75 years old. The work is executed in Hals's "rough" style: that is to say, his brushwork is visible because it not smoothed over or blended. It has been supposed [1] that Hals probably also painted a matching portrait of the young woman's husband and that the two pictures would once have hung side by side.

Contents

Description

"The Portrait of a Young Woman is unforgettable for its serene but direct smile, and for the disarming simplicity with which the figure looks out at us." (Christopher Wright) [1]

The painting is a borststuk, the Dutch term in Hals's time for a "head-and-upper-body portrait". It depicts a single female sitter looking straight at us full face, seemingly on the point of breaking into a little smile or at the onset of some enigmatic affect or feeling, and about almost imperceptibly to raise her left eyebrow. "The moment of expression is arrested, as though accidentally, to give life and character to the face." (W. A. Martin) [2]

The sitter is not doing anything: she is not making lace, playing the spinet, or doing anything else that might, for instance, suggest assiduous domesticity or cultivated recreation. Nor is she seen to be holding any props such as keys, a fan, or a bible, that could encourage us to speculate about her status or aspirations. Just Hals's loose, unblended brushwork, including in her face, conveys the "life and character" Martin writes of.

She is sitting or standing near, and not quite square, to the plane of the canvas; her upper body extends across almost the whole width of the painting. Her left shoulder (to our right) is a little further from us than her right shoulder, so while her face is at the centre of the canvas, her upper body appears to be turned slightly to the right from our point of view (which would mean away from her husband, if this were one of a pair of conventional marriage pendants). She tilts her head a little to her right, as can be seen from the lines of her eyes and mouth. The effect is to modulate what in her day might otherwise, for a woman, have seemed a less than modest head-on gaze. The young woman's flesh is painted pale with warm highlights, her hair is black and drawn back tight under her coif, and her eyes are dark brown. No eyelashes can be seen. The light falls on her face from in front and our left. The plain background is a warm greyish orange-brown, graduated from darker on the left to lighter on the right. Until the picture was restored in about 1952, some parts of the forehead, of the gown, and outer parts of the background showed signs of wear incurred during earlier cleaning work. [2] Hals did not sign or date the Portrait of a Young Woman. The conjectural date of 1655–1660 relies on studies of Hals's painting technique, which changed over time, and on the clothes worn by the sitter.

The portrait is painted in oils on canvas and measures some 60 x 55.6 cm (height x width). W. A. Martin, the first to document the painting as a work by Frans Hals (in 1952), had access to the notes of Horace Buttery, who had cleaned it. Martin makes no mention of any sign that it had been cut down from a larger format. [2]

Clothes and status

The woman who sat for the Portrait of a Young Woman wears a white chemise under an apparently plain black gown, and over her shoulders a white linen tippet or collar tied with a small bow of narrow silvery-golden ribbon. Her tippet has pleats and a simple frill round its lower edge. On her head she wears a coif fastened at the top with a single pearl-headed pin. On her right sleeve is a little brooch or other ornament, the shape and colour of which seem to echo the shape and colour of her ribbon bow. According to W. A. Martin [2] and Lucy West [3] she also wears (simple, sketchily rendered) drop earrings (that appear not to be a matching pair), although those elements in the picture might just as plausibly be construed as the loose ends of a golden-coloured cord meant for tying the coif. Nothing in the portrait signals conspicuous wealth—no elaborate collar, for instance, or any fine lace or embroidery.

The general style of the young woman's attire would have been familiar to the people of Haarlem at her time, at least as an option for older ladies. One of the regentesses of the old men's almshouse (the second figure from the right in their group portrait that Hals painted in about 1664) is similarly dressed.

Pendant marriage portraits and independent women

Christopher Wright, who catalogued the Ferens collection in 2002, observed of the Young Woman portrait: "The sitter is likely to have been the wife of a Haarlem burgher or merchant, as isolated female portraits are very rare in Dutch 17th-century painting—it is therefore probable that Hals also painted the sitter's husband, although no surviving portrait can be put forward as the possible pendant." [1] Here, Wright is distinguishing between portraits (commissioned by or on behalf of the sitter) on the one hand and tronies and other genre paintings featuring a model (who would typically have been paid to sit for the artist) on the other hand. It is stand-alone female portraits that are apparently a rarity. The description of the Portrait of a Young Woman associated with the Ferens Art Gallery's Web site adopts Wright's assumption that there is probably also a pendant portrait, perhaps lost, of the young woman's husband. [4]

Typical characteristics of 17th-century pendant marriage portraits

For comparison: Rembrandt's Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657). Hooghsaet poses as if for a pendant marriage portrait, but without some of the usual specific attributes for such a commission. For instance, she wears no wedding ring or stomacher, because she is separated from her husband. She is dressed stylishly but plainly, without ostentatious ornament, because she is a Mennonite. Nonetheless, her plain clothes are of the best linen and finest silk: she is a wealthy Mennonite woman of independent means. Rembrandt, Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet.jpg
For comparison: Rembrandt's Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657). Hooghsaet poses as if for a pendant marriage portrait, but without some of the usual specific attributes for such a commission. For instance, she wears no wedding ring or stomacher, because she is separated from her husband. She is dressed stylishly but plainly, without ostentatious ornament, because she is a Mennonite. Nonetheless, her plain clothes are of the best linen and finest silk: she is a wealthy Mennonite woman of independent means.

There are several conventional characteristics and attributes of 17th-century Dutch pendant marriage portraits, of which Hals painted several pairs. (See the List of paintings by Frans Hals, where works known confidently to be pendants are glossed as such in the Inventory no. column.) The conventional characteristics and attributes of such pairs include, for example:

Not all pairs of Dutch marriage portraits exhibit all of these conventions. It was the sitters rather than the artist who chose how they were to be portrayed. In the Portrait of a Young Woman at the Ferens we can see none of the conventional attributes of a married woman sitting with her husband for a pair of pendant portraits. We cannot see whether she is wearing or holding gloves, or wearing rings, or other attributes that might indicate her marital status. She does not seem to wear a stomacher, which would have been an indicator that she is married. [6]

Moreover, by 1655–1660, when Frans Hals painted the Portrait of a Young Woman, companionability of the spouses towards one another was a fashionable style in bourgeois Dutch marriage portraits, particularly in the work of Hals and Rembrandt. It was displacing a more staid, courtly style which had prevailed earlier in the century. [7] In the Portrait of a Young Woman, Hals does not portray anything identifiable as companionability towards a putative spouse in another painting; rather, this sitter seems to be alone.

Examples of women from pairs of marriage portraits by Frans Hals

Independent women

"In the 17th century, women in the Dutch Republic had a relatively high degree of independence, both inside and outside the home." [8] Dutch towns in particular are widely thought to have offered women exceptional freedom. [9] Foreign visitors to the Dutch Republic remarked on the visibility of women in business and public life. For significant periods in the 17th century, a substantial proportion of Dutch men were away at sea or at war, which may have left some women space to gain more prominence and independence than was then usual in other Western cultures. Women could establish their own businesses with capital from an inheritance or from relatives. [10] According to one Dutch farce from 1692, the mistress of a household might even reward her maid's discretion so generously that the maid could set herself up in business. [11]

Prof. Danielle van den Heuvel writes that there were fewer obstacles to women's making their own living in the trades regulated by guilds (or obstacles were less stringently applied) in Haarlem than elsewhere in the Dutch Republic. [12]

Provenance, attributions, exhibitions, and authenticity

Before 1952, little was known about the Portrait of a Young Woman. In 1952, George Wyndham of Orchard Wyndham, Somerset, owned the painting and understood that it had come to him by inheritance through several generations from the Earls of Egremont. Until that year, it had been misattributed to Aelbert Cuyp, a landscape and riverscape specialist from Dordrecht and contemporary of Frans Hals—the Cuyps were a family of well-known artists, including at least one portraitist. In 1952, the Portrait of a Young Woman was cleaned for Wyndham by Horace Buttery, assessed and attributed to Hals by W. A. Martin, and shown as "Portrait of a Lady by Frans Hals", catalogue no. 137, at the Royal Academy of Arts' 1952–1953 winter exhibition Dutch Pictures 1450–1750. [2]

The painting was put up at Christie's in 1961, but in 1963 Wyndham sold it to the Ferens for a modest sum. [1]

Among several other exhibitions at which the Portrait of a Young Woman has been shown are:

In 2016, the Portrait of a Young Woman was a guest at the National Gallery in London while refurbishment work was done at the Ferens in preparation for Hull's year (2017) as the UK City of Culture. [3]

Claus Grimm did not include the Hull Portrait of a Young Woman in his 1989 catalogue raisonné of Hals's complete works (Frans Hals—Das Gesamtwerk). [14] However, writing at about the same time as Grimm, Seymour Slive contends in his authoritative and comprehensive Royal Academy catalogue that "Martin rightly recognised it as an authentic work by Hals" and describes it as "an affecting portrait which shows that old Hals lost none of his ability to characterise the poignantly tender side of a young woman's nature". [15] Bart Cornelis, Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings (1600–1800) at the National Gallery, curated and catalogued the London station of the London–Amsterdam–Berlin Frans Hals exhibition of 2023–2024. He included the Portrait of a Young Woman in the London exhibition, remarking in the catalogue that the sitter's "direct yet slightly hesitant expression stops us in our tracks. The picture is impossible to forget." [13]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Wright, Christopher (2002). Old Masters in the Collection of the Ferens Art Gallery—From Medieval to Regency. Hull: Hull City Museums & Art Gallery. ISBN   0904490270. pp. 56, 196, 197.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Martin, W. A., An Unknown Portrait by Frans Hals. Burlington Magazine, volume 94, issue 597, pages 359 and 360. London, December 1952
  3. 1 2 West, Lucy (2016) in The National Gallery Review of the Year April 2015–March 2016, published by the Trustees of the National Gallery, London. See the section about Loans from the Ferens Art Gallery, page 19. ISBN 9781857096156. A PDF file is available at https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/media/24138/booklet_ng_annualreview2016.pdf
  4. ↑ "What to see at Ferens Art Gallery". Hull Museums and Gallery. Hull Museums and Galleries, Hull City Council. 2025. Retrieved 19 May 2025. In the section titled Gallery 2—The Netherlands, choose Portrait of a Young Woman.
  5. ↑ See "Portrait of a "puritan" – Dutch Mennonite". Costume Historian. 10 March 2014. Retrieved 27 August 2025. (An independent blog, apparently reliable enough for this purpose)
  6. ↑ Westermann, Mariët; Luttikhuizen, Henry (1999). A Moral Compass—Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Painting in the Netherlands. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Grand Rapids Art Museum. p. 36, 61. ISBN   0942159233.
  7. ↑ Schama, Simon (1991). The Embarrassment of Riches—An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. Hammersmith, London: Fontana Press. p. 425. ISBN   0006861369.
  8. ↑ "Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer". Dutch Culture USA. Kingdom of the Netherlands. 2015. Retrieved 15 October 2024. A review of the 2015–2016 exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
  9. ↑ Simonton, Deborah; Montenach, Anne, eds. (2015). Female Agency in the Urban Economy—Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. ISBN   9781138952461. See page 5 in the Introduction by the editors.
  10. ↑ Baer, Ronni (2015). "Lecture: Rank and Status in the Dutch Golden Age". Art Gallery Yale. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Retrieved 15 October 2024. A public lecture given at Yale University by Ronni Baer, curator of the 2015–2016 exhibition titled Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer at the MFA, Boston, Massachusetts. Yale University Art Gallery has posted a video recording of Baer's lecture titled Rank and Status in the Dutch Golden Age elsewhere on line. The relevant passage begins at 44m:55s.
  11. ↑ De Winkel, Marieke (2015). "Ambition and Apparel". In Baer, Ronni (ed.). Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. pp. 55–74. ISBN   9780878468300. See page 61. De Winkel quotes as follows from Jacob de Rijk's De besteedster van meisjes en minnemoers (1692): "I know a maid who helped her mistress receive her suitor in her bed, after which she eloped with him, and this earned [the maid] between 700 and 800 guilders, with which she immediately began a stocking shop." No translator is credited; possibly it is Marieke de Winkel herself.
  12. ↑ Van den Heuvel, Danielle Guilds, Gender Policies, and Economic Opportunities for Women in Early Modern Dutch Towns, pp. 116–133 in Simonton, Deborah and Montenach, Anne, eds. (2015) Female Agency in the Urban Economy—Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. ISBN 9781138952461. Van den Heuvel's data refers to the 18th century.
  13. 1 2 Cornelis, Bart (and others), Frans Hals. Catalogue of the 2023–2024 Frans Hals exhibition at the National Gallery, published by National Gallery Global, London. ISBN 9781857097122. See pages 90 and 214.
  14. ↑ Grimm, Claus (1989). Frans Hals—Das Gesamtwerk (in German). Stuttgart & Zürich: Belser. ISBN   9783763019465. There is an English translation of the Grimm Gesamtwerk by Jürgen Riehle: Frans Hals—The Complete Work (1990) ISBN   9780810934047.
  15. ↑ Slive, Seymour (1989). "Catalogue". In Slive, Seymour (ed.). Frans Hals. Royal Academy of Arts, London. pp. 130–369. The catalogue for a London exhibition that also travelled to Washington, D.C., and Haarlem in 1989–1990. pp. 335–337.
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