This is a great time for Frans Hals in the U.S., what with the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum — and now, news from the Toledo Museum of Art.
It has purchased a beautiful painting by Hals, called Family Portrait in a Landscape, from the 1620s. It’s big — almost five feet square — and Toledo will hang the work in its Great Gallery, near Rubens’s The Crowning of St. Catherine and Guercino’s Lot and His Daughters, which the museum acquired in 2009.
The museum plans a press conference for today at 10 a.m., and it will be unveiled publicly at the museum on Oct. 13.
But in its advance word, the release quotes Old Master scholar Gregory Martin calling its new treasure “an extraordinary picture for the 1620s that underlines Hals’s inventive genius. Nothing like it–for breadth and relaxed tone–had been painted in the Netherlands.”
The museum’s director, Brian Kennedy, added that “It is one of only four known family portraits by Hals to have survived and is the earliest of the four. Its strong composition and the way Hals captures the personalities and personal interactions of the family members will delight our visitors.”
I’d heard hints of this acquisition last spring, when Larry Nichols, the museum’s senior curator of European and American painting and sculpture before 1900, told me he was working on something big — but gave no other clues.
Today, we learn that he first saw the Hal’s portrait in a London gallery July, 2010. He told Kennedy, the museum’s incoming director, and asked to put his discovery on hold. Kennedy agreed, and “the yearlong process of research, conservation assessment, art committee approval, negotiating the terms of the sale and then obtaining an export license from the British government began.” The license was granted on July 11, 2011.
This is, the museum says, the only Hals group portrait still in private hands. It was acquired by a British viscount, Lord Boyne, in the mid 19th century and passed down to his heirs, who had lent it the National Gallery of Wales before deciding to sell.
Their loss, our gain.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art