Frans Hals Portraits: A Family Reunion

Frans Hals (1582/83 - 1666) is one of the foremost portrait painters of the Dutch Golden Age. This exhibition is the first devoted to his family group portraiture. The show and the catalogue will unite all of his four family portraits along with related w orks by the artist and will examine the topic of Hals's family portraiture as a whole, placing it in the context of his complete oeuvre. The exhibition was prompted by the Toledo Museum of Art's acquisition in 2011 of Frans Hals's Van Campen Family Portra it in a Landscape, as well as the recent conservation of Brussels' Three Children of the Van Campen Family. These two works originally formed one composition, separated for unknown reasons likely in the late 18th century or early 19th century. The catalogu e reunites the surviving sections of the Toledo/Brussels painting and proposes a reconstruction. It will discuss how the four compositions are constructed, what symbolic elements are included, and what we know about the sitters. It also presents new discov eries about the Van Campen family, placing them in Haarlem society of the early 1600s.