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Mail skickat från Holland - 2014-02-12

There is some confusion about the authenticity of Frans Hals’s portrait(s) of René Descartes in the literature. Slive (1974) considered the rather sketchy portrait in Copenhagen as Hals’s original and all others (including the painting in the Louvre and yours in Helsingborg) as copies. He did not exclude that an original by Hals may have existed of the same size and composition as the Louvre painting. Claus Grimm (1989) also dismissed the Copenhagen painting as an original Frans Hals, in my view most probably correctly. He suggested positively that there must indeed have been an original for the Louvre painting. That (lost) painting was probably also the model for the engraving by Suyderhoef.
I fully agree with both authors that the painting in Helsingborg is a copy and not an original. It may have been done after the Louvre painting, or perhaps after Hals’s (missing) original. The photo you have sent does not allow dating of your copy. I do not exclude that it is significantly later than the original, which must date from the (late) 1640s.

With best regards,

Fred Meijer
Fred G. Meijer
Conservator, Afd. Oude Nederlandse Schilderkunst/ Curator, Dpt.of Old Netherlandish Painting
Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie/ Netherlands Institute for Art History
Prins Willem Alexanderhof 5
POBox 90418
2509 LK Den Haag NL
tel. +31.70.3339724
fax. +31.70.3339789
e-mail: meijer.nl