In letters, in his diary and in his book The Prado, Charles Ricketts mentioned the name of the Dutch painter Frans Hals several times. Fifty key works by Hals are now on show at the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam. (Read more about the exhibition here.) Time to take stock of Ricketts's views on Hals.
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| Frans Hals, 'Portrait of a Man' (c.1634) [Mauritshuis, The Hague] |
Between 1901 and 1930, the name occasionally comes up in Ricketts's work.
On a visit to Paris in 1901, tired by the noise of cars, horses, people, horns and bells, both Ricketts and Shannon needed some time to let the paintings in the Louvre speak to them. Six hours a day they wandered around there, looking for their favourite works, but Titian and Leonarda da Vinci were hiding from their eyes, and:for some days painters whose qualities are utterly exterior charmed, or rather interested us most, i.e. Veronese and Hals, both unusually excellent in the Louvre.
(Diary, 6 June 1901; see also Self-Portrait, 1939, p. 58).
The following three comments are from his 1903 book The Prado. In a review of Velasquez's 'The Spinners', Ricketts says that this work was created in fits and starts over a long period of time, eventually making it look completely different from what the painter initially envisaged:
This is possible, for Velasquez was not in temper or in art a spontaneous painter, and let it be said that those other men of facile execution and vision (like Frans Hals, for instance) are really 'improvisers' contenting themselves with what comes to hand. Their facility is of the wrist, not of the intellect: theirs is more a memory of the fingers than of the brain.
(The Prado, 1903, p. 85)
In a review of Titian's work, he mentions Hals again - only now he spells his first name as if it were German, with a z:
No artist, however objective, is able to eliminate his personality from his portraits - be he Franz Hals, who swaggers, or Goya, who is nervous, irritable, and unbalanced.
(The Prado, 1903, p. 140)
Another comparison with Veronese's work was made by Ricketts in a paragraph about Titian's 'facility of holding the spectator [...] by a more gradual process of appeal underlying the fine outer aspect of the work':
Some painters we have no occasion to look at more than once, for their work repeats one thing only; this is true of most pictures by Veronese and Franz Hals; their works fail to hold more than one impression. This is not due to their summary and emphatic workmanship alone; their minds were of the same pattern.
(The Prado, 1903, p. 144)
Ricketts missed a degree of depth in Hals's work that he did find in the paintings of the artist he admired most (and about whom he wrote a separate book), Titian.
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| Frans Hals, 'Portrait of a Man' (c.1650-52) Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
In August 1903, Ricketts made an art trip on his own. In Vienna, he visited the Liechtenstein family's private museum (a 'sunny Rococo' palace 'with a garden entrance') where he admired a portrait by Frans Hals from c.1650-52. It hung in a room full of masterpieces:
In one room hung with 21 pictures there are 11 fine Van Dyck portraits, the magnificent full length Hals, and 2 sketches by Rubens.
(Letter to Charles Shannon, 27 August 1903: BL Add MS 58085, f. 30)
In February 1912, Ricketts and Shannon travelled to the Netherlands and saw some Hals paintings:
We liked what we saw of Holland, that is, The Hague and Amsterdam, the country was invisible owing to fog. At Haarlem we saw nothing save the Frans Hals pictures, the town was invisible, merely white mist.
[...]
I was enchanted with Ver Meer and one has to go to Holland to see Frans Hals. I hear with consternation that they intend cleaning his Haarlem pictures; that would be a national disaster as many of the pictures in Holland have been overcleaned. It would be more, – it would be a world-disaster!
(Letter to Richard Roland Holst, mid to late February 1912: Typed transcription, BL Add MS 61715, f. 137-8)
In November 1916, he mentioned the importance of the Haarlem collection to D.S. MacCall.
Have you noticed that realistic artists seem always a little inferior as men, – Hals, Courbet, and Monet?
(Letter to Richard Roland Holst, Summer 1921: Typed transcription, BL Add MS 61719, ff. 100-2)
In 1924, Ricketts discussed Hals's position with painter/critic Jacques-Émile Blanche:
Your estimate of Frans Hals is true only if you compare him to the greatest masters. I demur over the value you set on his last works. Fromentin has analysed this question (in relation to Manet) in a way that I consider final.
(Letter to Jacques-Émile Blanche, Christmas 1924: Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France: MS 7055, f. 7)
About the later work of Frans Hals, Blanche had written:
Hals, except in the paintings of his old age (Haarlem Museum), enveloped in an atmosphere of poetry and mystery, was a simple master of the brush; his drawing was that of a calligrapher, with a lively, witty style and a fairly restrained realism.
Hals, si ce n'est dans les toiles de sa vieillesse (musée de Haarlem) envelopées d'une atmosphère de poésie et de mystère, fut un simple maître de la brosse; son dessin avait été celui d'un calligraphe, de style alerte, spirituel, d'un reealisme assez court.
(Jacques-Émile Blanche, Manet. Paris: F. Rieder & Cie, éditeurs, 1924, p. 40)
Ricketts, apparently, did not agree with the 'poetry and mystery' qualification.
The next time Ricketts mentioned the painter Hals was in a letter to Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery in Ontario, who was then in London to purchase paintings. Ricketts was his adviser. A Hals was for sale at Agnew's and Ricketts wrote:
I do not care hugely for the Franz Hals it is a powerful pot boiler done late in his earlier manner i.e. it was intended to show he was still valid &, I think, vulgar.
(Letter to Eric Brown, 17 May 1925: National Gallery of Canada)
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The Van Horne mansion in Montreal, c.1890 |
In 1927, Ricketts travelled to the museum in Ontario and to other places in Canada and the USA. In Montreal, he was shown the private collection of Sir William Van Horne (who had died in 1915). To Shannon he wrote about the Dutch paintings:
He has 4 good Rembrandts, 3 Franz Hals good & unusual.
(Letter to Charles Shannon, 23 October 1927: BL Add MS 58085, f. 89)
Two days later, in a letter to Mary Davis, he wrote that there were four Frans Hals paintings.
Van Horn possessed a 'Portrait of a Dutch Gentleman', a 'Portrait of a Dutch Lady', both dated 1637 (current owner: The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp), and the 'Portrait of Samuel Ampzing', c.1630 (current owner: the Leiden Collection of T.S. and D.R. Kaplan). He also had a portrait called 'The Jolly Toper' (attributed to Frans Hals). These were all hanging in the Reception Room (cf. Mary Eggermont-Molenaar, The William Van Horne Collection. A Dutch Treat. 2015, p. 402).
During the same trip, in Toronto, Ricketts visited the house of Frank Porter Wood, who owned two Frans Hals paintings:
(Letter to Charles Shannon, 1-2 November 1927: BL Add MS 58085, f. 102)
These paintings were later bequeathed to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto: 'Portrait of Isaak Abrahamsz. Massa' (1626) and 'Portrait of Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne' (c.1655).
The same month, in New York, Ricketts visited the Metropolitan Museum, where:
The Veronese Mars & Venus hangs between two marvellous F Hals.
(Letter to Charles Shannon, 13 November 1927: BL Add MS 58085, f. 111)
The museum owns eleven Hals paintings. Later, in the Frick Collection, he admired another Frans Hals, 'Portrait of a Man', c.1660:
the Spencer Hals, man with cuffs
(Letter to Charles Shannon, 18 November 1927: BL Add MS 58085, f. 113)
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| Frans Hals, 'Portrait of a Man', c.1660 [The Frick Collection, New York] |
In the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, he expressed the qualities of Frans Hals in general (we don't know which painting he saw):
very good Hals – he is always good
(Letter to Charles Shannon, 23 November 1927: BL Add MS 58085, f. 116)
Summarizing his view of the Canadian and American collections, he wrote:
(Letter to Richard Roland Holst, 7 December 1927: Typed transcription, BL Add MS 61720, ff. 151-5)
He repeated his remark about the richness of these private collections in a letter to Marie Sturge Moore, comparing the houses he visited with Shannon's and his own Townshend House:
The quality of the private treasure is unimaginable, in houses very inferior in type to Townshend House you will find famous Rembrandts, Titians & Franz Hals, & some of the best Goyas & Grecos are there, the Rembrandts being unimaginable.
(Letter to Marie Sturge Moore, 8 December 1927: BL Add MS 58086, ff. 171-2)
Finally, on a journey to Germany, he mentioned Hals in a letter to Francis Ernest Jackson after visiting the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, were he probably saw the portrait of Willem Croes, 1660-62. This painting (47,1 x 34,4 cm) was acquired in 1906:
An admirable small Franz Hals
(Letter Francis Ernest Jackson, 10 April 1930: Oregon University Library)
Whereas Ricketts was initially hesitant about the art of Frans Hals and detested his later work, over the years, as he became acquainted with the painter's masterpieces, he forgave him those more superficial paintings and even concluded that his work was 'always good'.
(John Aplin provided all transcriptions of letters and diary notes.)
