FRANS HALS ST MARK - Colnaghi

F r a n s H a l s
S T M A R K
A L o s t M a s t e r p i e c e
R e d i s c o v e r e d
C O L N A G H I
S A L O M O N L I L I A N
MMVIII

F r a n s H a l s
S T M A R K
A L o s t M a s t e r p i e c e
R e d i s c o v e r e d
C O L N A G H I
S A L O M O N L I L I A N
MMVIII

FOREWORD
One of the most rewarding things about being an art dealer is the joy of discovery: the opportunity, once in a while,
to bring to the attention of the public a little-known masterpiece which casts new light on a great artist. The subject of
the present catalogue is just such a painting: one of Frans Hals’s very rare religious pictures, which belonged to one of
the greatest collectors of the eighteenth-century, the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, and hung for a time in the
Hermitage Museum; but then disappeared for over a century, before being rediscovered in the 1970s, masquerading as
a Portrait of a Gentleman and correctly identified as one of Hals’s missing Evangelist paintings. Since then, the picture
has remained largely hidden from public view in a private collection, and it gives us great pleasure to commemorate its
resurrection through this monographic publication, which, it is hoped, will highlight one of the least familiar aspects
of an artist, who, next to Rembrandt, was unquestionably the greatest Dutch portrait painter of the seventeenth
century, but who was also, as we hope to show through the present catalogue, a powerful and original religious artist.
In compiling this catalogue we are enormously indebted both to the researches of previous scholars, above all Irine
Linnik, Claus Grimm and Seymour Slive, and to the museums who have kindly allowed us to reproduce works from
their collections. Particular thanks go to Scott Schaefer and Anne Woollett of the J. Paul Getty Museum, for allowing
us to reproduce their Frans Hals St. John and for all their help in the preparation of this catalogue and Ludmila
Lukjanovna Saulenko at the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art, for allowing us to reproduce the paintings
of St. Matthew and St. Luke and for her kindness in supplying photographs. Thanks go also to our conservator Nancy
Krieg, and to Jeremy Howard and Sarah Gallagher at Colnaghi, and Lu Begum of Arvan Williams designers, who put
together the catalogue. We hope that this publication will give pleasure to the many lovers of the work of Frans Hals
and prompt a reassessment of the one of the most unusual aspects of the great Dutch seventeenth-century master.
Konrad O.Bernheimer, Chairman of Colnaghi
October 2008
Salomon Lilian
PLATE 1
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Mark (detail of head)
Signed upper right with monogram: FH
Oil on canvas
27 x 20 3 /4 in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Colnaghi/Lilian
PLATE 2 (Overleaf)
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Mark (detail of hands)
Signed upper right with monogram: FH
Oil on canvas
27 x 20 3 /4 in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Colnaghi/Lilian
3

INTRODUCTION
Today Frans Hals is regarded as one of the greatest of all Dutch
seventeenth-century painters. Yet, while Rembrandt’s fame
endured throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Hals, like his great contemporary Vermeer, was largely
forgotten for over two hundred years. Then, in the 1860s, after
two centuries of neglect, Hals was rediscovered. It is probably
no coincidence that his dazzling brushwork and virtuoso
technique began to be admired again at exactly the moment
when the Impressionist movement was entering its first decade,
an era when Whistler was also conducting his bold experiments
in free brushwork which caused Ruskin to accuse him of
‘flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public.’ Thanks to the
pioneering writings of the critic and art-historian Thoré-Bürger
and the opening of the the Haarlem Municipal Museum (later
the Frans Hals Museum) in the 1860s, Hals’s reputation was
reinstated and he became popular, both with avant-garde artists
like Manet and Whistler and with collectors, such as the 4th
Marquess of Hertford, who paid, in the same decade, what was
regarded at the time as a crazy price for The Laughing Cavalier
(PLATE 3), now one of the most popular paintings in the
Wallace Collection. Lord Hertford’s taste was soon vindicated
by the soaring market for Hals’s work and, one hundred and
fifty years on, the enthusiasm for Hals’s work shows no sign
of abating. Hals has been the subject of numerous books and
articles, including the centenary exhibition of the opening of
the Frans Hals Museum in 1962 and the major retrospective
in 1989, and he was one of the stars of the recent exhibition,
Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals held at the
National Gallery, London and the Mauritshuis, The Hague.
He is now widely recognised as a great colourist and ‘master
of the loaded brush’, Holland’s ‘fa presto’ and an artist who,
after Rembrandt, was the greatest Dutch portrait painter of the
seventeenth century.
Frans Hals’s story, therefore, is a story of rediscovery; and
rediscovery is also the theme of the present catalogue. The
catalogue showcases a long-lost masterpiece: Hals’s St. Mark
(PLATE 4), one of his very few surviving religious paintings,
which, in the 1970s was found masquerading as a Portrait of a
Gentleman, (PLATE 37) with lacy ruff and sleeves under a layer
of nineteenth-century over-paint, having previously appeared
in an auction in Italy miscatalogued as Luca Giordano. Since
then, the painting has attracted the attention and admiration
of the leading Hals scholars, Seymour Slive and Claus Grimm,
whose researches have established that the Colnaghi/Lilian St.
Mark formed part of a once-famous series of paintings that
had belonged to the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia,
but which had been broken up in the nineteenth century.
Two of the paintings: St. Luke (PLATE 9) and St. Matthew
(PLATE 10) were rediscovered in the 1950s by Irine Linnik
gathering dust in the store-room of the Museum in Odessa,
and the exciting re-emergence in 1997 of the missing St. John
(PLATE 8), now in the Getty Museum, has enabled the series
to be completed. Although the Odessa paintings were included
in the major Frans Hals exhibition held in Washington, London
and Haarlem in 1989/90, the Getty St. John was still missing
at the time and the Colnaghi/Lilian St. Mark has never been
exhibited publicly, having only recently re-emerged from a
German private collection. The present catalogue, therefore,
provides an exciting new opportunity to reassemble the original
PLATE 3
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
Portrait of an Officer (The Laughing Cavalier), 1624
Oil on canvas
33 7 /8 x 26 3 /4 in. (85.7 x 68 cm.)
By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London.
series of Evangelists, to review what has been written about the
paintings by other scholars, and to suggest some new thoughts
about the iconography and original interrelationship of what
are possibly Hals’s only surviving religious paintings.
In attempting this reconstruction, we owe a great debt to the
research of previous scholars, above all Irine Linnik, whose
brilliant rediscovery of the Odessa paintings paved the way
for all subsequent research, and to Claus Grimm, Herrmann
Kühn (who carried out the chemical anlaysis) and the restorer
Rüdiger von Oheimb, whose art-historical and forensic skills
revealed the lost St. Mark in his true guise. Thanks are due also
to Seymour Slive, whose extremely perceptive analysis of the
Odessa paintings, included in the major 1989/90 Frans Hals
exhibition, brought them to the attention of a much wider
public, demonstrated their significance within Hals’s oeuvre,
and provided the critical and art-historical context within which
to evaluate the Evangelist series as well as suggesting new lines of
enquiry. Finally, we are greatly indebted to Scott Schaefer and
Anne Woollett at the Getty Museum, and Ludmila Lukjanovna
Saulenko at the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art
for allowing us to publish their pictures in this catalogue,
enabling us to reassemble within its covers Hals’s four paintings
of the Evangelists.
Jeremy Howard, Colnaghi, October 2008
5

PLATE 4
FRANS HALS (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Mark
Signed upper right with monogram: FH
Oil on canvas
27 x 20 3 /4 in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Provenance:
Sale Gerard Hoet, The Hague, 25 August 1760, lot 134: ‘De
vier Evangelisten, zynde vier Borst-Stukken met Handen, door F.
Hals; hoog 26 1 /2, breet 21 duimen’ (Dfl. 120, Jan Yver); sale
The Hague, 13 April 1771, lot 35 (the four Evangelists as a
lot); Sale F.W Baron van Borck, Amsterdam, 1 May 1771,
lot 34 (the four as a lot; Dfl. 33, Jan Yver); the set of four
acquired by Catherine II for the Imperial Hermitage by 1773;
1773-1812, the Imperial Hermitage, St. Petersburg; the set of
four removed from the Hermitage 20 March 1812 and transferred
to a church in Tauride Province; Mattioli Collection, Salerno
probably by the 1850s; Anon. Sale 1955 (as Luca Giordano);
Silvio Severi, Milan; Christie’s London, 20 October 1972,
lot 83 (Portrait of a Bearded Man) Unsold; Private Collection,
Germany.
Exhibited:
The paintings of St. Luke and St. Mark were exhibited: Haarlem
1962, nos. 77, 78; on loan to the Hermitage, Leningrad 1960
and September 1962, and to Pushkin State Museum of Art,
Moscow, 1965; S. Slive (ed), Frans Hals, exhibition National
Gallery of Art Washington, Royal Academy of Arts, London,
and Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, October 1989-July 1990,
nos 22 (St. Luke) and 23 (St. Matthew) lent by the Museum of
West European and Oriental Art, Odessa.
Literature:
P. Terwesten, Catalogus of naamlyst van schilderyen, met
zelver prysen, zedert den 22. Aug.1752 tot den 21.Nov 1768
…verkogt… The Hague, 1770, vol. 3, p. 321, no. 124; E.
Minich, Catalogue des tableaux qui se trouvent dans les galleries,
salons et cabinets du Palais Impérial de S. Petersbourg, St.
Petersburg, 1774, no. 1894; C. Kramm, De Levens en Werken
der Hallandsche en Vlaamsche Kunstschilders, Amsterdam, 1858,
vol. 2, p. 362; P. Lacroix, ‘Musée du palais de l’Ermitage sous
la règne de Catherine II’, Revue Universelle des Arts XIII, 1862,
p. 114, no. 1894 (reprint of Minich 1774); H. de Groot, A
Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch
Painters of the Seventeenth Century, 1910, Vol III, nos. 4-7; C.
Grimm, ‘St. Markus von Frans Hals’, Maltechnik/Restauro I,
1974, pp. 21-31; E. C. Montagni, Tout l’oeuvre peint de Frans
Hals, (introduction by A. Chatelet), Paris, 1976 (translation of
the Italian edition Milan 1974), 41, 42 (c1625); Y. Kuznetsov
and I Linnik, Dutch Paintings in Soviet Museums, New York
and Leningrad, 1982, nos. 125, 126; S. Slive, Frans Hals,
exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington
DC, 1 October – 31 December 1990, Royal Academy,
London, 13 January – 8 April 1990, Frans Halsmuseum,
Haarlem, 11 May – 22 July 1990, pp. 193-7, Figs 22a and
22b, ill.fig 22a (before cleaning and removal of the ruff) and
22b (after cleaning) [not exhibited].
Comparative Literature:
W. Bode, ‘Frans Hals und seine Schule’, Studien zur Geschichte
der holländischen Malerei, 1883, p. 70, note 1; I. Linnik,
‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Frans Hals’, Iskusstvo, 1959,
no. 10, pp. 70-6 (Russian text); I. Linnik, ‘Newly Discovered
Paintings by Frans Hals’, Soobcheniia Gosudarstvennogo
Ermitazha, XVIII (1960), pp. 40-6 (Russian text); S. Slive,
‘Frans Hals Studies: II. St. Luke and St. Matthew, at Odessa’,
Oud Holland, LXXVI (1961), pp. 174-6; S. Slive, Frans Hals,
1970-4, vol. I, pp. 100-3; Y. Kuznetsovi and I. Linnik, Dutch
Painting in Soviet Museums, 1982, nos. 125 and 126; C.
Grimm, Frans Hals, The Complete Works, 1990, nos. 41 and
42; Catalogue of the Museum of Western European and Oriental
Art, Odessa, 1973, p. 27.
7

GENESIS
This rare and intriguing early work by Frans Hals, one of his
very few religious pictures, was recently acquired from a German
private collection, having last appeared at auction in 1972. It
is one of a set of four remarkable canvases of the Evangelists,
dated by Slive i and Grimm ii to the mid-to-late 1620s (PLATES
7-10), which were in the Hermitage Collection, St. Petersburg
from the 1770s until the 1820s. The painting is notable for its
forceful characterisation, expressive power and mastery of rapid
brushwork, qualities which were much praised in the eighteenth
century by Ernst Minich, iii author of the 1774 Hermitage
Museum catalogue of paintings. More recently, the Evangelists
have attracted the admiration of modern scholars both because
of the rarity of their religious subject matter and the quality and
drama of their execution. Of all the four paintings the Colnaghi/
Lilian St. Mark (PLATE 4) is arguably, as Grimm wrote ‘the most
Italianate, most theatrical of Hals’s saints’, a ‘bold male figure’
which, together with its companions in Odessa and the Getty
Museum, is invested with the solemnity of ‘historical figures
on a theatrical stage.’ iv These qualities, however, are combined
with a notable realism, compared to its Italian counterparts and
a mastery of brushwork, whose brilliance and fluency has been
revealed by its recent cleaning.
While the researches of Linnik, Grimm and Slive, have enabled
much of the earlier history of the series to be reconstructed,
much still remains conjectural. In particular, nothing is known
of the circumstances of the commission, assuming, that is, that
the paintings were commissioned, rather than painted by Hals
for personal, rather than professional, reasons. These pictures
may have been painted for a Catholic or Lutheran church,
however the relatively small size and intimate character of the
four paintings suggest that they were more probably conceived,
as Slive argued, for a small private chapel, or possibly a
clandestine Catholic church (schuilkerk) in Haarlem, or even for
a private house. In Haarlem Catholic services were proscribed
officially in April 1581, but soon afterwards private chapels
were consecrated, often in houses. While Carel Van Mander
wrote that after the Reformation, the Church provided very
few commissions for Dutch artists, in recent years, scholars have
shown v that not only in cities such as Utrecht (where there was
a substantial Roman Catholic population) but even in Haarlem,
artists such as Salomon and Jan de Bray, Frans and Pieter de
Grebber and Pieter Soutman were able to find work painting
religious pictures. But the original destination need not have
been a Catholic chapel or household: the Evangelists could
equally well have been intended for a Protestant patron, since the
subjects of the Evangelists, unlike representations of many of the
other saints, were not considered to be overtly Catholic. They
had, in fact, a strong appeal to Protestants, with their belief in
the primacy of biblical as opposed to ecclesiastical authority, by
whom the Evangelists were seen as guardians and champions of
the word of God. Nor were paintings of Evangelists necessarily
hung in ecclesiastical settings. Hals’s patron, Willem Van
Huythusysen, for example, had a set of four Evangelist grisaille
paintings hanging in the entry hall of his house on Oude Gracht,
though the fact that the inventory specifies that they were ‘en wit
en swart geschildert’, vi (painted in black and white) unfortunately
rules out any identification with the present series and Jan
Lievens painted at least one set of Evangelists (PLATE 25) very
comparable in date and style to the Hals Evangelists which were
recorded originally in private collections rather than being public
commissions. vii One further possibility is that this set of
Evangelists was not commissioned at all, but painted by Hals
for personal, artistic or religious reasons. This would seem to
have been the case with the famous series which Slive suggests viii
may have inspired him: Ter Brugghen’s Evangelists, (PLATE 12)
which do not appear to have been commissioned, remaining
in his family’s possession long until after the artist’s death
until presented by his son to the Town Hall of Deventer. It
also seems to have been the case, in the opinion of most recent
scholars, with Rembrandt’s sublime series of Apostles and
Evangelists, painted over thirty years later, in the 1660s, for
which again there is no evidence of a commission and which
Wheelock argues therefore may have been painted ‘for his
own satisfaction, out of inner conviction.’ ix But in Hals’s case,
though little is known about his religious faith, the fact that so
few religious pictures were painted by him over the course of
a career spanning five decades, would suggest that he had, as Slive
argued, ‘neither a strong urge to paint Old or New Testament
subjects, nor made much of an effort to find patrons who would
commission them.’ x This would suggest that the Evangelist series
is unlikely to have been painted by Hals for religious reasons and
were more probably a one-off commission for an ecclesiastical or
domestic setting.
The fact that Hals’s Evangelists are painted half-length, in an
interior setting, accompanied by their holy books, suggests links
with a long humanist tradition stretching back to the Renaissance.
They show distant affinities with both the scholar saints of
Botticelli (PLATE 16) and Ghirlandaio painted for the church
of Ognissanti in Florence in the 1470s and, in a more secular
context, Justus Van Ghent’s exactly contemporary paintings of
the 1470s for the studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro, where
portraits of the early Fathers of the Church were hung in the
company of Euclid and other humanist scholars of antiquity
(PLATE 40). This humanist tradition travelled north of the Alps
in the sixteenth century and and by the seventeenth century,
there was a vogue in the Netherlands for hanging ‘galleries of
Apostles’ in private homes where they were exhibited as viri
illustri, illustrious men of the Bible. xi The upright format adopted
by Hals would naturally lend itself to such a humanist library or
gallery setting and therefore it is possible that his Evangelists were
conceived for exemplary or decorative, rather than specifically
devotional purposes, to be hung in a library or study, perhaps in
the company of busts of classical authors or portraits of famous
men of antiquity.
8

EARLY HISTORY
On the 25th August 1760 we find the first surviving record
of Hals’s Evangelists: in Gerard Hoet’s posthumous sale in
the Hague. Gerard Hoet the Younger (1698-1760), their
first recorded owner, was a painter, art dealer and artistic
biographer. A pupil of his father, Gerard Hoet I (1648-1733)
he had a relatively undistinguished career as an artist, copying
his father’s pictures and executing decorative paintings, but
he was an important writer about art and his publications
provide important information about the lives of seventeenth
and eighteenth-century Dutch artists and invaluable records
of paintings sold in the eighteenth century. These include
De nieuwe schoubourg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en
schilderessen (‘The new theatre of Dutch painters’) (The Hague,
1751) and Catalogus of naamlyst van schilderijen, met derzelven
pryzen (‘Catalogue, or list of titles of paintings with their prices’)
(The Hague, 1752), an index of old Dutch auction catalogues,
which, for the first time attempted to document the prices of
paintings as well as including important information about
contemporary picture collections. The Hals Evangelists were
recorded in Volume 3 of Hoet’s Catalogus, compiled after his
death by Pieter Terwesten, xii where they were praised as masterly
works and given the relatively high valuation of 100 florins.
Purchased at the Hoet sale by the Dutch auctioneer Jan Yver
for 120 florins, the paintings appeared again at auction on
13th April 1771 in the Hague, where they were acquired by
the Prussian collector, Baron Van Borck. The following month
(1st May 1771) they were bought back for the bargain price
of 33 florins by their former owner, Jan Yver, who had been
commissioned that year by the Tsarina Catherine II (PLATE 5)
to acquire paintings for the Hermitage (PLATE 6). A large part
of the shipment which Yver sent to Russia was lost at sea, but
fortunately a smaller shipment, which must have included the
Hals Evangelists, arrived safely and in 1773 the paintings were
listed in the Hermitage, fully attributed to Hals (though in the
case of St. Mark with the artist’s surname spelt the Russian way
as ‘Gals’), in a catalogue written by Minich. xiii The Colnaghi/
Lilian St. Mark (PLATE 7), was listed at the head of the group
(PLATES 7-10) as number 1894 with the Odessa paintings,
listed as number 1895 (St. Luke) and 1896 (St. Matthew) and
the Getty St. John as number 1897. The Odessa paintings retain
their original inventory numbers, which correspond to the
numbers in Minich’s catalogue; the sizes given also correspond
both with the current dimensions of all four pictures and with
those given in the catalogues of the sales held in Holland in
1760 and 1771.
In 1812 Tsar Alexander I instructed the curator of the Paintings
Collection at the Hermitage, F. Labensky, to select around
30 pictures for despatch to Crimea to decorate the churches
in the Tawritschewskaja Gubernaja district of the Crimean
Peninsular, and a shipment, which included the Hals Evangelists,
left the Hermitage on 30th March 1812. xiv From there two of
the paintings (the St. Luke and St. Matthew) must have been
transferred in due course to the Odessa Museum, but the
Colnaghi/Lilian St. Mark and the Getty St. John disappeared
only to be rediscovered a hundred years later. Grimm xv suggests,
quite plausibly, that their disappearance may be connected with
the Crimean War and it may well have been in the 1850s that
the St.Mark found its way to Italy and into the collection of the
Mattioli Family in Salerno, where it was later rediscovered.
PLATE 5
Enamel based on a painting by Fyodor Rokotov (1763)
Portrait of Catherine II
Enamel on copper
3 1 /2 x 3 in. (9 x 7 cm.)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburgh
Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburgh
PLATE 6
View of the exterior of The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburgh
St. Petersburgh Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburgh
9

PLATE 7 (Upper left)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Mark
Signed upper right with monogram: FH
Oil on canvas
27 x 20 3 /4 in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Colnaghi/Lilian
PLATE 8 (Upper right)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. John
Oil on canvas
27 9 /16 x 21 5 /8 in. (70.5 x 55 cm.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles
PLATE 9 (Lower left)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Luke
Oil on canvas
27 5 /8 x 20 1 /2 in. (70 x 52.2 cm.)
By kind permission of the Museum
of Western and Oriental Art,
Odessa, Ukraine
PLATE 10 (Lower right)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Matthew
Oil on canvas
27 5 /8 x 21 5 /8 in. (70 x 55 cm.)
By kind permission of the Museum
of Western and Oriental Art,
Odessa, Ukraine
10

The Iconography of Hals’s Evangelists
‘Created in a predominantly Protestant environment in which
traditional image worship and the Catholic cult of saints had been
renounced, [these] representations ... seem anachronistic monuments
of a time when Catholicism dominated even the northern provinces
of the Netherlands.’ (Volker Manuth) xvi
Although these words were written about Rembrandt’s
Apostles and Evangelists rather than those of Hals, they prompt
interesting questions about the iconography of Hals’s Evangelists
as well as explaining why they are almost unique in his oeuvre.
A handful of other religious pictures were listed by Hofstede de
Groot, xvii some of them, such as a Penitent Magdalene, a St.
Francis Praying in the Desert, and a Virgin and Child with
St. Anthony in the Desert, surprisingly ‘Catholic’ subjects for
Protestant Haarlem, another, The Denial of St. Peter, just
about acceptable to a Protestant audience, although St. Peter
was somewhat suspect because of his associations with the
papacy. Also listed were a final group including a David
with the Head of Goliath, and two representations of the
Prodigal Son, subjects which would have appealed equally to
Protestant or Roman Catholic patrons. Of these, the David
is thought not to be by Hals, and the only painting, which
can now tentatively be identified, is one of the two Prodigal
Son paintings, masquerading as a genre painting, which Slive
suggested xviii might be the original identity of Jonker Ramp and
His Sweetheart of 1623 (PLATE 11) now in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. Given how long and productive
was Hals’s career, the number of religious pictures painted by
him is negligible and this makes the Evangelists all the more
remarkable. Pending further discoveries, they are Hals’s only
overtly religious paintings to have survived.
In the 1989 Frans Hals exhibition catalogue, Slive observed xix
that in his Evangelists Hals was following well-established
Netherlandish prototypes, comparing them with the
Evangelists, painted in 1621 and now in Deventer (PLATE 12)
by the Utrecht master, Ter Brugghen, whose Caravaggesque
paintings of musicians and merry topers, have often been cited
as an important influence on Hals’s genre pictures. Not only
have Ter Brugghen Evangelists been considered the prototypes
for those which Hals painted, they also may have influenced
the exactly contemporary series painted by Jan Lievens
(PLATE 25). xx
PLATE 11
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Harlem)
Young Man and Woman in an
Inn (Yonker Ramp and his
Sweetheart), 1623
Oil on canvas
41 1 /2 x 31 1 /4 in. (105.4 x 79.4 cm.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913
(14.40.602)
Image © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art
PLATE 12
Hendrick Ter Brugghen (The Hague 1588 – 1629 Utrecht)
The Four Evangelists, St. John, St. Luke, St. Matthew and St. Mark, 1621
Oil on canvas
Each 30 x 40 1 /4 in. (76.5 x 102 cm.)
Reproduced with kind permission of the Historisch Museum, Deventer
If one compares the Hals group with the earlier group
(PLATES 7-10) painted by Ter Brugghen (PLATE 12), there
are obvious similarities in the use of chiaroscuro, though this
is more marked in the case of Ter Brugghen than Hals. There
is also in both groups a quality of earthy realism, which is
particularly noticeable in the case of Hals’s St. Luke and St.
Matthew: these are humble men, very different from the
elevated and idealised Apostles of Rubens (PLATE 22). Another
common feature is the way in which the Evangelists are given
strongly individualised characters. Ter Brugghen divides his
Evangelists into two distinct cross-related pairs: St. Mark and St.
Matthew seen in profile while St. John and St. Luke are presented
frontally, and within those pairings, one Evangelist is shown
writing while the other is shown reading, reflecting, as Slatkes
points out, xxi the two main aspects of the term ‘Evangelist’: the
earlier sense of ‘publisher of glad tidings’, for which the activity
of writing was appropriate and the secondary sense of the
reader of the gospel of the day. Hals’s Evangelists are similarly
differentiated, both in terms of their physiognomies and their
activities: St. Luke and St. Matthew are shown as readers, St.
John (markedly more youthful than in Ter Brugghen’s series)
as writer, and St. Mark, possibly as one who hears the word
of the Lord or, as will be suggested below, proclaims it. The
poses of the Evangelists are also differentiated, albeit less
noticeably than in the Ter Brugghen series. While there are
some notable similarities between the two groups of Evangelist
paintings, the differences, as Slive pointed out, are as marked
as the similarities, Ter Brugghen’s paintings being much more
Italianate in feeling and far more detailed. ‘Hals’s brushwork’,
wrote Slive xxii ‘remained free and impulsive even when he painted
the Evangelists. He concentrated on the heads of his figures.
His wingless angel, who looks up in innocent admiration at St.
Matthew (PLATE 10), is a closer cousin of the young boys who
11

appear in his genre pictures (PLATE 29) than he is to the curly
haired one in Ter Brugghen’s work shown dictating to the saint’
(PLATE 12). xxiii Hals’s Evangelists are also much more decorously
clad than the Ter Brugghen saints, reflecting, perhaps, a
certain unease in painting the nude, and his treatment of
hands and accessories is much less detailed, and more ‘broadly
mapped’. xxiv So, despite the affinities between Hals’s Evangelists
and Ter Brugghen’s paintings, there are also marked differences.
The question of influence is further complicated by the fact that
Ter Brugghen’s Evangelists remained in his family’s possession
after his death and were therefore were not apparently in the
public domain. It is possible therefore that Hals was influenced
by them second-hand via copies or engravings. But equally
Hals may have been inspired by northern artists of an earlier
generation, such as Jacques de Gheyn and Goltzius, whose head
of St. James the Greater (PLATE 14) has certain affinities with
Hals’s St. Luke (PLATE 13).
PLATE 15
French School (9th century)
St. Mark at his desk, from the Ebbo Gospels, c.816-835
Ink and colours on vellum
10 1 /4 x 8 3 /16 in. (26 x 20.5 cm.)
Bibliotheque Municipale, Epernay © The Bridgeman Art Library
PLATE 13
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Luke (detail)
Oil on canvas
27 5 /8 x 20 1 /2 in. (70 x 52.2 cm.)
By kind permission of the Museum
of Western and Oriental Art,
Odessa, Ukraine
PLATE 14
Hendrick Goltzius
(Millebrecht 1588 – 1617 Haarlem)
St. James Major, 1586 (detail)
Brush and red chalk on paper
Leiden, Rijksuniversiteit,
Prentenkabinet
This tradition of the Evangelists as scholar-saints, was given a
further boost by the growth of humanism and the vogue for
studioli in fifteenth-century Italy, as we have seen, (PLATE 40)
where scholar saints and classical luminaries are presented in
half or three-quarter-length formats, seated at desks in shallow
interior spaces, a format later adopted in the Netherlands.
In Renaissance Italy the Early Church fathers, such as St.
Augustine (PLATE 16) and St. Jerome, were much more
popular subjects than the Evangelists for these humanistic
presentations and this tradition found its way north of the
Alps, perhaps most famously in Dürer’s well-known engraving
of St. Jerome in his Study (PLATE 17) However the pictorial
conventions of the humanist scholar-saint, were easily
While Ter Brugghen’s paintings employ a horizontal format,
which owes more to Caravaggio’s paintings of saints, such as the
St. Jerome in the Villa Borghese than to northern prototypes,
Hals’s Evangelists, with their upright format, go back to a
much older northern tradition of Evangelist portraits, which
ultimately has its roots in Carolingian art. This tradition, which
can be seen in such mediaeval masterpieces as the Lorsch and
Ebbo Gospels (PLATE 15) in turn developed out of an earlier
Roman tradition of the scholar or author portrait, the first
recorded example being the Rossano Gospels (6th century AD),
where St. Mark is shown writing on a scroll. The Evangelists
are generally presented in Roman togas, normally accompanied
by their attributes, seated on Roman-style thrones and in the
act of reading, writing or contemplation. Here, in essence, are
the roots of the tradition upon which Hals was drawing in his
presentation of the Evangelists as scholar-saints. Interestingly,
and almost certainly coincidentally, the Ebbo St. Mark,
(PLATE 15) like our St. Mark, is shown in a more reflective
mood rather than reading or writing: and he, and St. John,
tend often to be portrayed as the more mystical figures among
the Evangelists.
PLATE 16
Sandro Botticelli
(Florence 1445 – 1510 Florence)
St. Augustine in his Cell, 1480
Fresco
59 7 /8 x 43 3 /4 in. (152 x 111 cm.)
Church of Ognissanti, Florence
PLATE 17
Albrecht Dürer
(Nuremberg 1471 – 1528 Nuremberg)
St. Jerome in his Study, 1514
Etching
Monogram and date on a tablet
9 3 /4 x 7 2 /3 in. (24.7 x 18.8 cm.)
12

transferred to the depiction of the Evangelists, and this was
particularly true of St. Mark, whose iconography was so similar
to that of St. Jerome, both writer saints sharing the common
attribute of the lion, that the two were sometimes confused.
Since St. Jerome was a penitent saint, as well as a scholar, he
was often shown at prayer accompanied by a skull, (PLATE 18)
and these penitential aspects of the iconography of St. Jerome
in turn become attached also to the figure of St. Mark. This
accounts for the symbols of skull and candle which appear in
the Ter Brugghen St. Mark (PLATE 19), a version of which
is described ambigiously in Slatkes’s monograph as ‘either
St. Jerome or St. Mark.’ xxv
PLATE 18
After Anthony Wierix
(Antwerp 1552 – 1624 Antwerp)
St Jerome. Dominus
illuminatio mea. Pl. 25
Engraving by Hieronymus Wierix
PLATE 19
Hendrick Ter Brugghen
(The Hague 1588 – 1629 Utrecht)
St Mark, 1621 (detail)
Oil on canvas
30 x 40 1 /4 in. (76.5 x 102 cm.)
Reproduced with kind permission of
the Historisch Museum, Deventer
PLATE 20
Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg 1471 – 1528 Nuremberg)
St. John with St. Peter and St. Paul with St. Mark, 1526
Oil on panel
84 3 /4 x 30 in. (215.5 x 76 cm.)
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
© The Bridgeman Art Library
The Effects of the Reformation
One of the effects of the Reformation was the removal of the cult
of saints. But this did not mean that they entirely disappeared
from Protestant iconography; rather that there were certain
changes of emphases. St. Paul, for example, was promoted as a
‘Protestant’ saint; St. Peter on the other hand, being associated
with the papacy, became increasingly marginalised, a process
which can already be observed in the 1520s in Dürer’s famous
so-called ‘Apostles’ (PLATE 20), where St. Paul is given a much
more dominant position than St. Peter. The Evangelists, on the
other hand, remained relatively popular as subjects for painters,
because of the Protestant emphasis on the primacy of scriptural
over ecclesiastical authority. This led, in some extreme cases,
to the Evangelists becoming instruments of the most virulent
Protestant propaganda, as in the case of a painting which once
belonged to Henry VIII of the Evangelists Stoning St. Peter, by
Girolamo da Treviso (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.) This
also accounts for the prominence given to the Lutheran texts
which form the inscriptions at the base of Dürer’s ‘Apostles’,
two of whom, in fact, were Evangelists: one, St. Mark, not
technically an Apostle, while St. John was both an Apostle and an
Evangelist. This led in turn to the blurring of two iconographical
traditions. Historically, St. Mark was a disciple of St. Peter (he
was believed to have written down Peter’s oral account of the
life of Christ) and yet here he can be seen standing behind St.
Paul, allying himself with the favourite Protestant saint. One
of the remarkable aspects of Dürer’s panels is the way in which
the four individual saints are strongly characterised and sharply
differentiated. Panofsky suggested xxvi that they reflected the four
humours or Temperaments: St. Mark, the lion saint, with rolling
eyes and gnashing teeth, being associated with the choleric
humour; St. John, with the sanguine; St. Paul the melancholic
and finally St. Peter as the phlegmatic humour. Dürer’s panels
were also associated by Panofsky with the Ages of Man: with
St. John representing youth, St. Mark maturity and the other
two saints middle and old age. Some of these distinctions may
underly the representation of Hals’s Evangelists.
13

Northern Precursors and Contemporaries
In the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century the Evangelists
and the Apostles remained popular subjects for sets of engravings
and paintings, both in Wtewael’s city of Utrecht, where there
was a substantial Catholic population, and in Goltzius’s
Haarlem, where older traditions of Catholic iconography
persisted into the 1580s. Both artists adopted the half-length
format of Hals’s later Evangelist series and, despite the outdoor
setting of Goltzius’s St. Peter (PLATE 21), the cave with the
ledge on which the bible and keys are placed derives in essence
from the earlier traditions of scholar saints in their libraries.
Dürer presented St. Mark, as we have seen, as a choleric saint,
but a picture by a follower of Wtewael xxvii highlights a more
contemplative side to his character, depicting him in a classic
melancholic pose looking directly out at the viewer.
This very direct manner of presentation, with the saint making
eye-contact with the viewer, also characterises Van Dyck’s
depiction of St. Mark (PLATE 23), from a series of paintings
of Evangelists and Apostles dating from around 1618. With his
head resting on one hand, elbow on the table, his St. Mark, like
Wtewael’s, strikes a traditional melancholic pose, but there is
also a fierceness about the eyes, which recalls the more choleric
St. Mark painted a hundred years earlier by Dürer. Van Dyck’s
series of Apostles and Evangelists was directly inspired by the
famous series painted by Rubens about five years earlier, the
so-called Apostelado Lerma, commissioned by the Duke of
Lerma and generally dated 1610-12. But whereas Rubens
painted his saints half-length (PLATE 22), in statuesque poses,
giving them the heroic air of antique philosophers, Van Dyck’s
(PLATE 23) paintings are cropped to focus on the heads and
hands of his saints, in a way which looks forward to Hals: a
less monumental approach which brings out their individuality
and their humanity. We have seen how Dürer’s St. Peter was
upstaged by St. Paul and how the general trend in Protestant
iconography was towards emphasizing the evangelical aspects
of the saints, rather than their apostolic authority. In Rubens’s
Apostolado, by contrast, apostolic authority is splendidly affirmed,
above all in the figure of St. Peter, founder of the apostolic
succession, whose vestments confirm his ecclesiastical authority
(PLATE 22). Rubens, in Wheelock’s memorable phrase,
‘conceived the Apostles as heroic patriarchs... physically powerful
men endowed with the wisdom of ancient philosophers.’ xxviii
In the United Provinces, on the other hand, representations of
the Apostles and Evangelists tended to be far less idealized than
in the Southern Netherlands, for reasons which were partly to
do with Protestantism, and the Calvinist emphasis on humility,
and partly connected with the more down-to-earth traditions
PLATE 21
Hendrick Goltzius (Millebrecht 1588 – 1617 Haarlem)
St. Peter (Christ and the Apostles), 1589
4 3 /4 x 3 1 /2 in. (12 x 9 cm.)
Signed with monogram
of Dutch realism. According to Van Mander, Cornelius Ketel,
for example, painted a series of pictures of the Apostles which
were modelled on portraits of contemporary artists and art
lovers, and some of Jan Lievens’s Evangelists, painted in the
1620s also have a certain down-to-earth character compared to
Rubens and Van Dyck: St. Mark, for example, (PLATE 25) not
wrapped in thought, but sharpening his quill.
But arguably the most telling contrast with Van Dyck and
Rubens is provided by Rembrandt’s marvellous series of pictures
of Evangelists and Apostles painted in the 1660s, probably for
reasons which were entirely personal and connected with his
Mennonite beliefs. Compared to the ‘heroic patriarchs’ of
Rubens, Rembrandt’s Evangelists and Apostles are, in Benesch’s
phrase ‘poor rugged men... sceptics who have been turned
into true believers through the miraculous experience of their
lives’ rather than through ‘spiritual eminence demonstrated by
superior beauty and vigour of body.’ xxix These characteristics are
particularly marked in Rembrandt’s St. Matthew (PLATE 24)
where, in Wheelock’s phrase, ‘the artist projects the
uncertainties of a mind struggling to comprehend the ideas being
whispered in his ear.’ xxx
14

PLATE 22 (Upper left)
Sir Peter Paul Rubens
(Siegen 1577 – 1640 Antwerp)
St. Peter
Oil on panel
36 1 /2 x 26 1 /4 in. (92.5 x 66.5 cm.)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
© The Bridgeman Art Library
PLATE 23 (Upper right)
Sir Anthony van Dyck
(Antwerp 1599 – 1641 London)
St. Mark
Oil on panel
24 2 /3 x 18 7 /8 in. (62 x 48 cm.)
Location unknown
PLATE 24 (Lower left)
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn
(Leiden 1606 – 1669 Amsterdam)
The Evangelist St. Matthew inspired
by the Angel, 1661
Oil on canvas
37 3 /4 x 32 in. (96 x 81 cm.)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
©The Bridgeman Art Library
PLATE 25 (Lower right)
Jan Lievens
(Leiden 1607 – 1674 Amsterdam)
St. Mark
Oil on panel
35 3 /4 x 30 3 /4 in. (91 x 78 cm.)
By kind permission of the Museen
der Stadt Bamberg, Historisches
Museum Bamberg
15

Stylistic & iconographic interrelationships
Returning now to the Hals Evangelists, we can see how they both
draw upon earlier traditions and look forward to Rembrandt.
As with the earlier depictions of humanist scholar-saints, Hals’s
Evangelists are presented in half-length portrait format, in
shallow room spaces suggestive of studies, but, like Van Dyck,
Hals indicates these room spaces in a very summary manner
and lavishes little attention on accessories or on the traditional
symbolic attributes, focussing instead on the heads and hands
of his saints, which, like Dürer’s a hundred years earlier, are
sharply characterised. In his rendering of the heads of St.
Luke and St. Matthew, which would appear to be taken from
the same model, there is a quality of portrait realism, which
recalls Van Mander’s description of the lost series of Apostles by
Cornelius Ketel and which also ties in very closely with Hals’s
practice as a portrait and genre painter in the 1620s. The head
of St. Luke, (PLATE 27) for example, as Slive pointed out, xxxi
is very close to that of Provost Johan Damius, (PLATE 26)
who appears in the Banquet of the Officers of the St. Hadrian
Civic Guards. Likewise, the overall composition of St. Matthew
(PLATE 28) is closely related to his Two Boys Singing (PLATE
29) and the Two Laughing Boys (Boymans van Beunigen
Museum, Rotterdam) all of which supports a dating to the
mid 1620s, not later than around 1627 for the Hals’s paintings
of the Evangelists. There is also a certain family resemblance
between the head of the boy angel looking up in admiration
at St. Matthew (PLATE 28) and the figure of the Getty St.
John (PLATE 31), who might well be taken from the same
model. Where Hals’s Evangelists differ from the majority of his
portraits in that there is no eye contact made with the viewer,
which gives them a quality of abstraction, as though they are
lost in their own thoughts. Secondly, although there is a quality
of earthy realism about St. Luke (PLATE 9) and, to an extent,
St. Matthew (PLATE 10), who are presented as homely types
in accordance with the teachings of Calvin, St. John (PLATE 8)
and St. Mark (PLATE 7), are more idealised: visionary rather
than everyday figures, which reflect the influence of Italian and
Flemish prototypes. St. John, his eyes looking heavenwards for
inspiration as he writes, derives from fifteenth and sixteenthcentury
images of St. John on Patmos (PLATE 30).
Just as with the Ter Brugghen Evangelists, reading and writing,
the two principal aspects of evangelism are expressed: St. John,
as writer, counterbalancing St. Luke and St. Matthew, who
are reading the gospels. In the case of Hals’s St. Matthew,
(PLATE 28) as with the Rembrandt (PLATE 24), the angel
is more boy than angel, showing how both artists were more
strongly attached to realism than the majority of their Italian
Baroque counterparts. But, in a subtle modification of the
PLATE 26
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
Banquet of the Officers of the
St. Hadrian Civic Guard,
c. 1626 (detail)
Oil on canvas
72 x 105 in. (190.5 x 267 cm.)
By kind permission of the Frans
Hals Museum, Haarlem
PLATE 27
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Luke (detail)
Oil on canvas
27 5 /8 x 20 1 /2 in. (70 x 52.2 cm.)
By kind permission of the Museum
of Western and Oriental Art,
Odessa, Ukraine
traditional iconography of St. Matthew, the usual roles have
been reversed and the boy angel has become a pupil of St.
Matthew rather than his source of inspiration. In the paintings
of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, St. Matthew is shown in the
act of writing down the holy words told to him by the angel;
but in Hals’s version (PLATE 28) it is the angel who seems
to be looking up admiringly at St. Matthew, listening to the
gospel being read, rather than dictating to him. St. Matthew,
in other words, has become the teacher rather than the disciple
in a master-pupil relationship.
Hals’s depiction of the Colnaghi/Lilian St. Mark (PLATE 33)
is also highly original in the ways in which it departs from
traditional iconography. Whereas St. John (PLATE 31) looks
upwards for inspiration, St. Mark looks downwards with his
head turned across the line of his body describing a diagonal
contrapposto movement counterbalancing that of St. John. As
Grimm observed, St. Mark is ‘the most theatrical, the most
Italianate of Frans Hals’s saints.’ xxxii Compared to the earthy,
rubicund faces of the Odessa Evangelists, St. Mark (PLATE
33) is relatively ethereal and idealised, and his whispy hair and
beard have invited comparisons with Rubens’s bearded figures,
such as the ‘the striking head of the old man from the Adoration
of the Magi in Antwerp.’ xxxiii (PLATE 32)
16

PLATE 28 (Upper left)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Matthew
Oil on canvas
27 5 /8 x 21 5 /8 in. (70 x 55 cm.)
By kind permission of the Museum
of Western and Oriental Art,
Odessa, Ukraine
PLATE 29 (Upper right)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
Two Singing Boys, c. 1627
Oil on canvas
26 3 /8 x 20 1 /2 in. (68 x 52 cm.)
Gemäeldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel
© Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel/
Ute Brunzel/The Bridgeman
Art Library
PLATE 30 (Lower left)
Hans Memling
(Frankfurt c.1433 – 1494 Bruges)
St. John the Evangelist at Patmos,
from the Mystic Marriage of
St. Catherine Triptych, 1479 (detail)
Oil on panel
Memling Museum, Bruges
© The Bridgeman Art Library
PLATE 31 (Lower right)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. John
Oil on canvas
27 9 /16 x 21 5 /8 in. (70.5 x 55 cm.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles
17

Hals’s St. Mark is a figure of inspiration, a prophet type, albeit far
more realistic and less elevated than his Italianate forerunners,
who displays a very distant kinship with the Prophets and Sybils
of the Sistine Chapel with whom he shares a certain theatrical
torsion. He alone of the four Evangelists neither reads nor
writes, but holds his holy book in one hand with his right hand
on his heart. Like Michelangelo’s Isaiah (PLATE 34), who also
holds a half-closed book, he seems rapt in thought. But there
are other, much more down-to-earth parallels in Hals’s many
portraits of preachers, such as Hendrick Swalmius (PLATE 35)
who are also presented with hand on heart, holding their bibles
or prayer books, just as modern evangelical preachers do today.
Hals’s St. Mark (PLATE 33) is a more abstracted figure, who,
unlike the preachers in the portraits, makes no eye contact
with the viewer, but with his book in his hand he may well
have been intended to symbolise the preaching aspects of the
Ministry of the Word, a preacher saint to counterbalance the
reading and writing activities of the other Evangelists, albeit a
preacher-saint caught in a prayerful moment rather than in the
act of declamation.
PLATE 32
Sir Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen 1577 – 1640 Antwerp)
Adoration of the Magi, 1624 (detail)
Oil on panel
176 x 132 1 /4 in. (447 x 336 cm.)
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Belgium
© The Bridgeman Art Library
PLATE 33
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Harlem)
St. Mark
Oil on canvas
Signed upper right with monogram: FH
27 x 20 3 /4 in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Colnaghi/Lilian
18

PLATE 34
Michelangelo Buonarotti (Arezzo 1475 – 1564 Rome)
Sistine Chapel Ceiling: The Prophet Isaiah (detail)
Fresco
Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City
© The Bridgeman Art Library
PLATE 35
After Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
Hendrick Swalmius
Engraving by Jonas Suyderhoef, 1639
19

Rediscovery
The previous existence of Hals’s Evangelists was recorded
by Hofstede de Groot in in his 1911 catalogue, on the basis
of references in old auction catalogues, but the paintings
themselves disappeared from view for over a century and a
half. Then, in 1959, two of the lost paintings: St. Luke and
St. Matthew were rediscovered in a storeroom of the Odessa
Museum by Irine Linnik. The inventory numbers on the Odessa
paintings corresponded with the numbers in Ernst Minich’s
1773 catalogue of the Hermitage Collection, as did the sizes
and descriptions of the paintings, providing corroboration of
Linnik’s discovery. Prior to this, as Slive wrote, the chances
of finding a lost religious painting by Hals, seemed ‘almost as
unlikely as discovering a still-life by Michelangelo.’ xxxiv At the
time of publication of Seymour Slive’s 1970 monograph on
Hals, the paintings of the other two Evangelists; St. John and
St. Mark remained untraced, but three years later in 1973, a
further piece in the art-historical jigsaw was supplied by Claus
Grimm, xxxv who published a Portrait of a Bearded Man holding
a Bible as being one of the missing pictures in the series: the
present St. Mark, which had been overpainted, presumably in
the nineteenth century in order to make it more saleable. This
picture had been purchased in Italy in 1955 by the dealer Silverio
Severi of Milan as the work of Luca Giordano, having been
for many years (possibly since the nineteenth century) in the
Mattioli Collection in Salerno. Severi recognised Frans Hals’s
monogram (PLATE 36) and spotted the stylistic connection,
endorsed by Grimm, between the head of St. Matthew and that
of the Odessa St. Luke. The discovery was the more remarkable
because of the fact that at some time, probably during the
nineteenth century, the torso had been overpainted with a
ruff and lacy sleeves, thus giving the Evangelist the air of a
seventeenth-century gentleman (PLATE 37) and the lion had
also been painted out. It was Grimm who astutely identified
the metamorphosis and suggested that the picture must have
been reworked by another, later, hand. Technical examination
corroborated Grimm’s opinion. Paint samples of the collar
and cuffs showed traces of chromium oxide green (viridian), a
pigment not available before the nineteenth century and other
PLATE 36
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Mark (detail of monogram)
Oil on canvas
Signed upper right with monogram: FH
27 x 20 3 /4 in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Colnaghi/Lilian
samples revealed different grounds and surface coatings. As
the nineteenth-century overpaint was removed, the figure of
the lion emerged miraculously from the background revealing
the true identity of the painting as St. Mark, the third missing
painting in the series. This major discovery was published in
the catalogue of the important Frans Hals exhibition curated
by Seymour Slive in 1989/90, in which the two Evangelists
from Odessa were included. At that time the fourth missing
evangelist, St. John, remained untraced and Slive wrote then:
‘there is a slim chance that a copy of St. John may turn up. If
it does it will be a precious document.’ xxxvi In the event Slive’s
hopes have been exceeded by the rediscovery of the original
St. John, acquired ten years ago by the Getty Museum, which
provides the missing link in this important and remarkable
series and the reappearance on the art market of the Colnaghi/
Lilian St. Mark.
20

PLATE 37
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Mark (pre-restoration)
Oil on canvas
27 1 /4 x 20 1 /2 in. (69.2 x 52.2 cm.)
PLATE 38
Frans Hals (Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Mark (post-restoration)
Oil on canvas
Signed upper right with monogram: FH
27 x 20 3 /4 in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Colnaghi/Lilian
21

Reassembly
This now makes it possible to attempt a reconstruction of
the way in which the series may originally have been hung.
All four paintings are lit from the left, which suggests they
may have been intended to be hung to the right of a window,
perhaps in a single tier, which is how they would generally
be hung in a modern museum. Seventeenth-century
galleries, though, tended to be much more densely hung than
their modern counterparts and it is therefore more likely
that they were hung in a tiered arrangement, as was the case
earlier with the humanist portraits in Federico da Montefeltro’s
studiolo (PLATE 40).
Assuming that this was the case, in what order might they
have been hung In the Middle Ages St. Matthew (the Man)
and St. John (the Eagle) were often placed on the upper tier
surrounding Christ in Majesty, as is the case in the
Tympanum of the Church Saint Trophine, Arles
(PLATE 39) with St Mark (the Lion) and St. Luke (the Ox)
as ‘lower beasts’ occupying the lower tier with the lion on
the left (God’s right hand, theologically) taking precedence
over the ox, corresponding both to mediaeval notions of the
hierarchy of beasts and to the text of Ezekiel (1:10). This
arrangement was by no means invariable, however: the cover
of the Book of Kells shows Matthew and Mark occupying the
upper tier with Luke and John below.
PLATE 39
Detail of the Evangelists on the Tympanum of the Church of Saint
Trophine, Arles
Photograph by James Austin, courtesy of The Conway Library,
Courtauld Institute of Art
PLATE 40
Justus van Ghent (active in Italy c. 1410 – c. 1480)
Hippocrates of Cos.
Pietro of Abano.
St. Ambrose.
St. Augustine.
Paintings from the Studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro,
Ducal Palace, Urbino
Ambrose
Augustine
22

We have seen how in the case of the Ter Brugghen Evangelists,
(PLATE 12) they were conceived as cross-related pairs: two
seen in profile, two full frontally. The frontally presented saints
would make sense hung as an upper tier, because their bodies are
tilted forwards towards the spectator, even if, as Slatkes points
out, xxxvii they are so absorbed in their reading and writing
that they make no eye contact with the spectator. Similarly
Hals’s Evangelists, St. Luke and St. Matthew, which seem to
be taken from the same model, are more ‘roughly hewn’ and
they make an obvious pair of writing and reading saints, with
their attributes on opposing sides, with St. Luke hung on the
left and St. Matthew on the right. Their more ‘homely’ style
of presentation, together with their full-frontal perspective,
suggest that they may have been destined for the lower tier. St.
Mark and St. John are a less homogeneous pair, partly because
of the relative youth of St. John, and partly because, unlike the
other three saints which are painted in earth colours, St. John is
painted with a much brighter palette. They nevertheless make
a balanced pair in terms of their attributes and their diagonal
poses, with St. Mark probably originally hung on the upper
left, turning inwards towards St. John, whose gaze and pose
also turn inwards, hung on the top right. They are the more
‘spiritual’ saints, which would naturally fit them for a position
on the upper tier, as does their tilted perspective. Since the eye
naturally reads from left to right and from top to bottom, if
St. Mark was originally destined to be hung in the top lefthand
corner, as suggested here, this arrangement would explain
why St. Mark was listed as the first painting of the group in
the eighteenth-century Hermitage Collection catalogue and
why the St. Mark was also the only painting in the series which
the artist chose to monogram. All this makes it likely that the
Colnaghi/Lilian St. Mark hung on the left-hand side on the
upper tier flanked by St. John and with the Odessa Evangelists
hung below.
Frans Hals’s Evangelists (PLATES 41-44) remain the most
mysterious as well as the most unusual of all his works. The
problems of why they were created and how they were hung,
of the intentions behind Hals’s iconography as well as much of
their earlier and later history must remain, for the time being
an enigma. However, it is hoped that, by bringing together
the four paintings and discussing some of the issues relating
to their genesis and earlier history, we may stimulate further
scholarly enquiry as well as opening many people’s eyes to a
little known and neglected aspect of work of one of the greatest
Dutch artists of the seventeenth century.
PLATE 41 (Upper left)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Mark
Oil on canvas
Signed upper right with
monogram: FH
27 x 20 3 /4 in. (68.5 x 52.5 cm.)
Colnaghi/Lilian
PLATE 43 (Lower left)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Luke
Oil on canvas
27 5 /8 x 20 1 /2 in. (70 x 52.2 cm.)
By kind permission of the Museum
of Western and Oriental Art,
Odessa, Ukraine
PLATE 42 (Upper right)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. John
Oil on canvas
27 9 /16 x 21 5 /8 in. (70.5 x 55 cm.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles
PLATE 44 (Lower right)
Frans Hals
(Antwerp 1580 – 1666 Haarlem)
St. Matthew
Oil on canvas
27 5 /8 x 21 5 /8 in. (70 x 55 cm.)
By kind permission of the Museum
of Western and Oriental Art,
Odessa, Ukraine
23

BIBLIOGRAPHY
BODE 1883: W. von Bode, ‘Frans Hals und seine Schule’ Studien zur Geschichte der holländischen Malerei, 1883, p. 70, note 1.
GRIMM 1974: C. Grimm ‘St Markus von Frans Hals’, Maltechnik/Restauro I (1974), pp. 21-31.
GRIMM 1990: C. Grimm, Frans Hals: The Complete Work, Harry Abrams Inc, New York, 1990 [English translation,
originally published in German as Frans Hals: Das Gesamtwerk, Belser Verlag, Stuttgart, 1989].
HOFSTEDE DE GROOT 1910: C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of
the Seventeenth Century, London, 1910, Vol III, [translated and edited by Edward G. Hawke]
KOZIROD: I. Kozirod, The Odessa Museum of Western and Oriental Art, 1977.
KRAMM 1858: C Kramm., De Levens en Werken der Hallandsche en Vlaamsche Kunstschilders, Amsterdam, 1858, vol. 2, p. 362.
KUZNETSOV AND LINNIK 1982: Y.Kuznetsov and I. Linnik, Dutch Paintings in Soviet Museums, New York and Leningrad, 1982,
nos. 125, 126.
LACROIX 1896, P. Lacroix,‘Musée du palais de l’Ermitage sous la règne de Catherine II’, Revue Universelle des Arts XIII,
(1862, p. 114, nos. 1894-97 (reprint of Minich 1774).
LINNIK 1959: I. Linnik ‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Frans Hals’, Iskusstvo, 1959, no. 10, pp. 70-6 (Russian text).
LINNIK 1960: I. Linnik ‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Frans Hals’, Soobcheniia Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, XVIII (1960),
pp. 40-6 (Russian text).
MANUTH 2005: V. Manuth, ‘Rembrandt’s Apostles: Pillars of Faith and Witnesses of the Word’ in A. K. Wheelock Jr. and P. Sutton
(eds), Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits, exhibition, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 30 Jan – 1 May 2005. p. 39-53.
MINICH 1774: E. Minich, Catalogue des tableaux qui se trouvent dans les galleries, salons et cabinets du Palais Imperial de S. Petersbourg,
St. Petersburg, 1774.
MONTAGNI 1974: E.C. Montagni, Tout l’oeuvre peint de Frans Hals, (introduction by A. Chatelet), Paris, 1976
(translation of the Italian edition Milan 1974), 41, 42 (c1625).
PANOFSKY 1945: E. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 1945.
SLATKES AND FRANITS 2007: L. Slatkes and W. Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, 1588-1629, Amsterdam, 2007.
SLIVE 1961: S. Slive, ‘Frans Hals Studies: II. St Luke and St Matthew, at Odessa’, Oud Holland, LXXVI (1961), pp. 174-6.
SLIVE 1970: S. Slive, Frans Hals, 1970-4, vol. I, pp. 100-3.
SLIVE1989/90: S. Slive (ed.), Frans Hals, exhibition National Gallery of Art Washington, Royal Academy of Arts, London,
and Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, October 1989-July 1990.
SUMOWSKI 1983, W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt Schüler, 1983.
TERWESTEN 1770: P. Terwesten, Catalogus of naamlyst van schilderyen, met zelver prysen, zedert den 22. Aug.1752
tot den 21.Nov 1768…verkogt… The Hague, 1770, vol. 3.
URBACH 1983: S. Urbach, ‘Preliminary remarks on the sources of the Apostle series of Rubens and Van Dyck’,
Canadian Art Review, 10 (1983) pp. 5-22.
VAN ECK 1999: X. van Eck, ‘The Artist’s Religion: Paintings commissioned for Clandestine Catholic Churches in the
Northern Netherlands, 1600-1800’, Simiolus 27 (1999), pp. 70-94.
WHEELOCK & SUTTON 2005: A. K. Wheelock Jr. and P. Sutton (eds), Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits, exhibition,
National Gallery of Arts, Washington, 30 Jan – 1 May 2005.
WHEELOCK 2008: A. K. Wheelock Jr., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, exhibition, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, Milwaukee Art Museum, Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, October 2008-August 2009.
ENDNOTES
i Slive,1989/90, nos. 22 and 23, dates the Odessa Evangelists
c. 1625.
ii Grimm, 1974, p.28 dates the St. Mark c. 1627/8.
iii ‘very expressive and painted with the mastery of a quick
brush’. Cited by Slive 1989/90 p. 192.
iv Grimm, 1990, p. 224.
v Van Eck, 1999, passim.
vi As recorded in the Haarlem City Archives, Not. Prot.153,
vii
fol.328. Cited by Slive 1989/90, p. 107
Sumoski, 1983, p. 1793, no. 1230. Sumoski believes Lievens
painted two sets of Evangelists, but Wheelock 2008 argues
there was probably one set which passed through two
different collections.
viii Slive, 1974, vol I, p. 97. The paintings are now in the
Historisch Museum, Deventer.
ix Wheelock & Sutton, 2005, p. 19.
x Slive, 1989/90, p. 197.
xi Urbach, 1983, pp. 16-17.
xii Terwesten, 1770, vol III, p. 321, no. 124.
xiii Minich, 1774, nos. 1894-7.
xiv Kutznetzov and Linnik 1982, no. 125.
xv Grimm, 1974, p. 30.
xvi Manuth, 2005, p. 39.
xvii Hofstede de Groot, 1910, Vol. III.
xviii Slive, 1974, p. 100.
xix Slive, 1974, p. 101.
xx Wheelock, 2008, p. 99.
xxi Slatkes and Franits, 2007, p.117
xxii Slive, 1974, pp. 101-3.
xxiii ibid, p. 103.
xxiv loc. cit.
xxv Slatkes and Franits, 2007, p. 117, no. A28.
xxvi Panofsky, 1945, Vol I, pp. 234-5.
xxvii Sold Christie’s New York, 30th September 2005, lot 17.
xxviii Wheelock & Sutton, 2005, p. 32.
xxix loc. cit.
xxx loc. cit.
xxxi Slive, 1974, vol I, p. 101.
xxxii Grimm, 1974, p. 28.
xxxiii Grimm, 1974 p. 28.
xxxiv Slive, 1974 p. 100.
xxxv Grimm, 1974, p. 28.
xxxvi Slive, 1989/90, p. 196.
xxxvii Slatkes and Franits, 2007, p. 117.
24

COLNAGHI
ESTABLISHED 1760
SALOMON LILIAN
FINE PAINTINGS