Frans Hals's younger brother Dirck probably studied with him and perhaps with the Rotterdam genre painter Willem Buytewech (1591/92–1624), who worked in Haarlem about 1612–17. Like Buytewech, Dirck was a specialist in depicting small figures, often with close attention to fashionable costume details. His colorful and painterly technique owed a great deal to his more gifted older brother. The present painting is generally abraded by cleaning in the past; wood grain is visible throughout the thinned paint layers, especially in the lighter passages.
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Dirck Hals usually signed his paintings DH in monogram, DHALS in block letters, or not at all (many accepted works are not signed). This picture, however, is fully signed in an elegant script and dated 1628. Examination with a microscope reveals clearly that the signature is in the original paint layer, that the third digit of the date (transcribed in the past as a 3) is certainly a 2, and that the last digit is a "lazy 8," tilted with the top forward so that it nearly parallels the long diagonal tail of the "h" in the signature.
The painting is typical of Hals in execution, and may be described as a routine effort derived in good part from a much better work by the artist. All the figures seated at the table, with the exception of the man in a dark hat to the right, and also the wine cooler and the young servant with a pewter pitcher, are adopted from the more multifigure Garden Party, dated 1627, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Some figures are essentially the same, but a few (like the third from the left) have been altered. The Amsterdam panel is one of Hals's finest works, made in the year of his entry into the Haarlem painters' guild. It is not surprising that he would repeat part of the figure group in another setting. Similar examples of recycling, and also borrowing from other artists' compositions, are fairly common in his oeuvre.
To give the figures a different stage from that employed in the Amsterdam panel, Hals turned to his familiar shoe-box design, with light- and dark-gray tiles on the floor, a curtained bed to the left, an entrance wall to the right, a fireplace flanked by a generic seascape and landscape, and a bench. Large bottles of red and white wine stand in the wine cooler, placed, like the chairs, somewhat uncertainly on the floor. Hals was exceptional among Haarlem and Amsterdam genre painters of his generation for the frequency with which he defined interior spaces with the help of tiled floors (which were almost unknown at this date in Dutch houses). This practice may have been encouraged to some extent by his association with the architectural painter Dirck van Delen (1604/5–1671), but examples of tiled floors and boxy rooms in Hals's oeuvre predate their collaboration, and a similar approach is found occasionally in the work of North Holland contemporaries (for example, Isack Elyas's Merry Company of 1620, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
The women to the left hold apples, while four of the men raise wineglasses, one to his lips. A large cooked fowl sits on a pewter platter in front of the smiling woman in a yellow dress. The four figures seated on this side of the table are quite well painted, with special attention paid to the vivid colors and the highlights on their clothes. (X-radiographs show how deftly Hals sketched the figures in paint, with little or no drawing beforehand.) Though titled "A Banquet" for more than a century, the subject is really a drinking party with much less food than in Frans Hals's comparably composed portrait of the officers of the Saint George civic guard company (1616; Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem), to which the Hals brothers belonged.
A simplified version of the composition, apparently by another hand, has been on the art market.
[2016; adapted from Liedtke 2007]
Inscription: Signed and dated (lower center): Dirck hals / 1628
?Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré [W. Bürger] (until d. 1869); [Léon Gauchez, Paris, and Alexis Febvre, Paris, until 1870; sold to Blodgett]; William T. Blodgett, Paris and New York (1870–71; sold half share to Johnston); William T. Blodgett, New York, and John Taylor Johnston, New York (1871; sold to The Met)
Nashville. Carl Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk University. "22nd Festival of Music and Art: Metropolitan Museum of Art Loan Exhibition," April 20–August 15, 1951, no catalogue.
Atlanta University. "22nd Festival of Music and Art: Metropolitan Museum of Art Loan Exhibition," September 1, 1951–January 30, 1952, no catalogue.
New Orleans. Dillard University. "22nd Festival of Music and Art: Metropolitan Museum of Art Loan Exhibition," February 1–April 30, 1952, no catalogue.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," September 18, 2007–January 6, 2008, no catalogue.
W. Bürger [Théophile Thoré]. "Dirk Hals et les fils de Frans." Gazette des beaux-arts 25 (November 1868), p. 394, refers to "mon 'Intérieur de maison galante'" and dates it to the same time as a painting of 1628 now attributed to Dirck Hals and Dirck van Delen in the Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna.
Catalogue of the Pictures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 681 Fifth Avenue, in the City of New York. [New York], 1872, p. 44, no. 109, states that it is from the collection of W. Bürger; reads the date as 1625.
F[ritz von]. Harck. "Berichte und Mittheilungen aus Sammlungen und Museen, über staatliche Kunstpflege und Restaurationen, neue Funde: Aus amerikanischen Galerien." Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 11 (1888), p. 75, describes it as extremely well preserved.
Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 46.
Peter C. Sutton. A Guide to Dutch Art in America. Grand Rapids, Mich., 1986, p. 187, refers to it as "a routine Dirck Hals dated 163[?]".
Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 305, ill.
Britta Nehlsen-Marten. Dirck Hals, 1591–1656: Œuvre und Entwicklung eines Haarlemer Genremalers. Weimar, 2003, p. 306, no. 323, as signed and dated "1636(?)" and as last in the MMA in 1931.
Elmer Kolfin inSatire en vermaak. Ed. Pieter Biesboer and Martina Sitt. Exh. cat., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Zwolle, The Netherlands, 2003, p. 96 [German ed., "Von Frans Hals bis Jan Steen: vergnügliches Leben, verborgene Lust," Stuttgart, 2004], dates it about 1630–31 and notes that many of the figures are repeated from the artist's "Garden Party" (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) of 1627.
Frances Suzman Jowell. "Thoré-Bürger's Art Collection: 'A Rather Unusual Gallery of Bric-à-Brac'." Simiolus 30, no. 1/2 (2003), pp. 93–94, fig. 61, as probably owned by Thoré-Bürger.
Katharine Baetjer. "Buying Pictures for New York: The Founding Purchase of 1871." Metropolitan Museum Journal 39 (2004), pp. 197, 209, 245, appendix 1A no. 109, ill. p. 209 and fig. 35 (installation photograph), dates it to the 1630s.
Walter Liedtke. Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2007, vol. 1, pp. 247–49, no. 57, colorpl. 57.
Old Masters: Property from a Private Collection. Christie's, New York. October 29, 2019, unpaginated, under no. 617.
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