User:Frans Fowler/sandbox

=Girl Singing (Hals)=

Girl Singing is a figurative painting in oils on a wooden panel by the Dutch Golden-Age master Frans Hals. The subject is an expressive face. Interesting generic faces were a popular subject for pictures in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Girl Singing is one of a pair Hals painted at Haarlem in about 1628; its pendant is the . Both paintings have a musical theme. Both show casually dressed young people, presumably at home. They are the same quite small size and both are in regular lozenge format. Possibly the models were two of Hals's own children. The Girl Singing and the Boy Playing a Violin currently (2024) hang together, on long-term loan, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the United States.

Description
Seymour Slive remarked that Girl Singing and Boy Playing a Violin, which are Hals's smallest known genre paintings, exhibit the same sparkling technique and blond tonality we can see in the commissioned portraits on the same scale that he painted in the second half of the 1620s.

Girl Singing depicts the head, part of the upper body, and hands of a young woman singing from a book. The light shines down from her right (our left). Towards the right in the otherwise plain background there is a patch of shade (her shadow) in which Hals has put his usual FH monogram signature. The painting is not dated; the conjectured date of "about 1628" relies on comparison with other works by Hals.

The lines of the Girl's brow, mouth, shoulders, finger tips, and song book echo one of the diagonals of the painting's shape; her nose and her one visible ear rhyme with the other diagonal.

The Catholic Herald discerns something angelic in the young woman's countenance. Her face is cheerful, gently animated, and open. Her lips part as she sings, and she is clearly absorbed in her singing. She is keeping rhythm with her right hand (at the bottom left of the painting). She turns her face a little to her left and downwards towards her song book, which she holds in her left hand at the lower right-hand edge of the picture. Because the artist looks up from a position slightly lower than the young woman's face, we can see her eyes. The uppermost page of the song book flitters above the others, refusing to lie flat. Over all, Hals's picture convincingly captures a young woman's energy and joy at a fleeting moment. Discussing Hals's pictures of singing children, Moes commented that the play of the face muscles does not just paint for us a singing figure: they do truly sing, and we can all but hear their voices.https://archive.org/details/franshalssavieet00moesuoft/page/35/mode/1up?q=chante

Girl Singing is (unusually for Hals) square (about 7½ x 7½ inches) and (also unusually for Hals) in lozenge format (that is, it hangs as if from one corner rather than perpendicular to the floor). Boy Playing a Violin is the same size and shape. Both are currently (2024) in elaborate perpendicular tortoise-shell frames — "delightful carapace" in "uncompromising good taste".

Clothes and hair: social conventions
The young woman is dressed casually in a green bodice over a white linen chemise, reminiscent of Hals's similarly attired and similarly posed lusty Bohémienne (known in the past as "The Gypsy Girl"), which is also from about 1628. (For these reasons, the Girl Singing and La Bohémienne have adjacent entries in Cornelis Hofstede de Groot's Catalogue Raisonné.)

The conventions applying to girls' and women's clothes, hairstyles, and headwear were stern in the Dutch Republic at Hals's time—and particularly so in Haarlem, where Mennonite influence was strong. Bared bosom, unbound hair, or even too skimpy headwear could attract outrage. (In this context, Isabella Coymans' marriage portrait was unusual and risqué, for example. )

The art market also expected tight propriety. For instance, the model for Hals's Smiling Fishergirl wears a chemise closed right up to the throat and a big black bonnet concealing nearly all her hair. This contrasts with the model for Girl Singing, who is bare-headed. The Girl Singing has her hair tied back loosely in a "low messy bun" which seems on the point of coming undone, with strands spilling out in almost every direction. Her chemise gapes perilously. That was not the fashion of the time at Haarlem, nor are her loose hair and loose chemise wiles to attract attention—she is just busy singing. But they suggest an enthusiastic singer in action, and they may suggest a domestic, rather than a public, setting: in 1628 a respectable young woman might have preferred not to be seen out and about in Haarlem in such disarray.

A tronie?: the "titles" and models for Hals's paintings
The titles by which we now know the works of Hals have often been ascribed by their later owners or by auctioneers, curators, and art historians—not necessarily for the purpose of identifying the work in question unambiguously. Hofstede de Groot's Catalogue Raisonné lists Girl Singing as "A Girl Singing from a Book". Slive has it as "Singing Girl".

It may be a "tronie", a Dutch term for a work of art of which the subject is an expressive, interesting, or funny generic face, and which is intended to be offered on the open art market. A tronie is distinct from a portrait (a conterfeytsel in the Dutch of the seventeenth century), which shows a specific individual and is typically made to order for a paying client. Normally, we cannot tell who the individuals were who modelled for tronies and, as far as we know, Hals did not usually give his paintings titles.

We can put names to some of the relatively wealthy merchant-class people who sat, and paid, for portraits by Hals, for instance the Portrait of Isabella Coymans mentioned above—but not to others, such as the person who sat for the  at the Ferens in Hull. Conversely, the tronie face is a type rather than an individual. If anyone was paid, it was an unidentifiable model, although one Hals picture conventionally categorised as a tronie, namely La Bohémienne, may actually be an instance of commercial art commissioned to advertise sexual services. And in at least one case we can identify the the model for a painting sometimes considered to be a tronie: "Malle Babbe" was Barbara Claes; she lived in the same institution as one of Hals's grown-up children and died in 1663.

There is a possibility that the models for Girl Singing and Boy Playing a Violin were two of Frans Hals's own children: Hals had many children, and a Haarlem resident who claimed to have known most of them told Arnold Houbraken they were keen musicians. Hals seldom painted square pictures, but "two square portraits [specifically conterfeytsels, not tronies] of the children of Hals done in Haarlem by [Hals]" are recorded in a 1644 inventory.

Location, owners, exhibitions, and catalogues
Girl Singing and Boy Playing a Violin are in the collection of Jordan Saunders and the late Thomas A. Saunders III. They are now (2024, since 2022) on long-term loan to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts at Richmond in the United States, and can be seen in the Elegance and Wonder galleries there.

At the time Hofstede de Groot compiled his 1910 Catalogue Raisonné of the Dutch masters, Girl Singing was owned by American railway financier Charles T. Yerkes, who developed the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines of the London Underground. Girl Singing was not available for the 1962 centenary exhibition at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. The picture was shown at the Frans Hals exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in late 1989, and subsequently at the Royal Academy, London, and the Frans Hals Museum in 1990. It was also shown in the London (National Gallery) and Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) Frans Hals exhibitions in 2023–2024 but did not travel on to Berlin (Gemäldegalerie) for a similar 2024 exhibition there, Frans Hals, Meister des Augenblicks.

Girl Singing is no. 118 in Cornelis Hofstede de Groot's Catalogue Raisonné of 1910 and is also included with an illustration at p. 68 in Wilhelm Valentiner's exhaustive 1923 catalogue of Hals's paintings. It is no. 25 in Seymour Slive's catalogue for the 1990 Hals exhibition at the Royal Academy, London. Claus Grimm did not include Girl Singing in his 1989 German catalogue of Hals's complete work (Gesamtwerk).