Our eye is drawn from the hands and skull along the straight diagonal line of the subject’s left arm towards his head, which for emphasis protrudes a little from that line.
Our eye is drawn from the hands and skull along the straight diagonal line of the subject’s left arm towards his head, which for emphasis protrudes a little from that line.
The man stands well forward in his portrait, filling the [[Panel painting|panel]] from top to bottom and, in the lower part, from side to side. (Compare his wife, who stands a little further back from the surface of her portrait.) His straight-backed stance is quite formal in comparison to many of Hals’s later works. With his head so high in the frame, he might seem somewhat to be looking down on us.
The man stands well forward in his portrait, filling the [[Panel painting|panel]] from top to bottom and, in the lower part, from side to side. (Compare his wife, who stands a little further back from the surface of her portrait.) His straight-backed stance is quite formal in comparison to many of Hals’s later works. head high in the frame .
=== Materials; cradle ===
=== Materials; cradle ===
Painting by Frans Hals
| Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Artist | Frans Hals (lived from about 1582 to 26 August 1666) |
| Year | Probably about 1610 to 1614 |
| Medium | Oil colours on an oak panel |
| Subject | Head and upper body of a 60-year-old man dressed in black; in his left hand a skull |
| Dimensions | 92.8 cm × 71.2 cm (37 in × 28 in) |
| Location | Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, England |
| Accession | 38.6 |
The Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull is a figurative painting by Frans Hals, who was a male 17th-century Dutch master specialising in portraits and other pictures of people. It is in the permanent collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Hals probably painted it at Haarlem in about 1610 to 1614. We do not know who the sitter is.[1][2][3] He wears a neat full beard and is dressed in black with a white ruff and cuffs. The subject was 60 when Hals painted this portrait. The skull in his left hand is a memento mori, a reminder that we must all die. The painting is generally assumed to be one of a pair of pendant marriage portraits; Hals’s matching portrait of the subject’s wife, who is also unidentified, hangs at Chatsworth House.[1][4][5]
The work depicts a man shown three-quarter length, his head and body turned three-quarters towards the right of the frame (that is, towards his left) while he looks straight at the artist—or at us. His look is stern but engaging. When Hals painted him, the subject was 60 (Latin “ætat suæ 60” in the legend below the miniature gonfalon in the top-right corner of the painting). Conventionally, the companion portrait of his wife would be hung to the right of the husband’s portrait, and this man’s stance (or “body language”) relates to her presence there. We can see both the sitter’s hands: in his left he holds a skull (which, like the sitter, would be “looking at us” if we imagine ourselves positioned to observe the two pendant portraits hanging together side by side); with his right hand he gestures towards the skull, or perhaps towards the conspicuously heavy golden chain his wife wears at her waist.[5]
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Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull (Barber Institute, Birmingham)
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Its pendant Portrait of a Woman Standing (Devonshire collection, Chatsworth House)
Our eye is drawn from the hands and skull along the straight diagonal line of the subject’s left arm towards his head, which for emphasis protrudes a little from that line.
The man stands well forward in his portrait, filling the panel from top to bottom and, in the lower part, from side to side. (Compare his wife, who stands a little further back from the surface of her portrait.) His straight-backed stance is quite formal in comparison to many of Hals’s later works. The head high in the frame is a practice Hals later in life abandoned in favour of a more approachable look.
The Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull is painted in oils on a panel that measures some 93 x 71 cm (height x width)—a convenient size for it to hang together with its pendant in, for instance, a substantial Dutch merchant’s house. The panel is made from a single, unusually broad, plank of oak with no joins. Its grain exactly mirrors that of the similarly sized panel on which Hals painted the pendant Portrait of a Woman Standing; husband and wife are on matching “his and hers” panels from the same part of the same tree.[5]
At some time, probably in the 19th or early 20th century, the back of the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull was cradled to preserve the flatness of the painted surface (an irreversible practice now no longer favoured by restorers).[5]
The background of the painting is a greyish brown; dark on the left, a little lighter on the right. It is featureless apart from the gonfalon and some text adjacent to it. The heraldic badge on the gonfalon appears to represent the white Saxon Steed device in the arms and flag of the Twente region in the east of the Netherlands (but see the discussion of the sitter’s identity, below). If the badge is indeed meant to show a Saxon Steed, Hals has eschewed the usual bright red field: the red would have been a distraction in the otherwise plain background. The text around the gonfalon includes not only the sitter’s age, but also a stern Latin warning: “ita mori”—this is what becomes of us after we die (presumably referring to the skull).
The quite bright light in the picture falls across the sitter’s face as if from a tall window to the left of the frame, as is often the case in Hals’s portraits. (Compare the illustrations in Wikipedia’s list of paintings by Frans Hals.) The light picks out significant elements in the otherwise subdued whole: the head (with extra emphasis and separation from the body supplied by the ruff), the gesturing right hand, and the skull. For the rest, in this portrait as in many of his others, Hals deploys a nearly monochromatic, mostly dark, palette in which black and dark grey tones dominate.[6]
The sitter wears a black doublet which has lustrous dark grey or black sleeves with an unpretentious diagonal pattern of opposed boat shapes, apparently in a damask weave. The buttons are tightly spaced. Parallel to the buttons runs a row of small beads or pearls that catch the light, as do more such ornaments at the man’s shoulder. He wears a belt with a silver buckle at his right hip and a simple silver coupling at the navel. His plain linen ruff is relatively relaxed in form and size, as are his short wavy cuffs (compare, for example, Hals’s 1625 portrait of Jacob Pieterszoon Olycan). He wears no hat.
When Hals painted the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull, black attire was popular among male merchants, professionals, ecclesiastics, and magistrates in the Netherlands (where commerce, the sciences, and the arts were beginning to flourish in the Twelve Years’ Truce). Black was chic, evoking seriousness, religiosity, and restrained sobriety, and Hals would become famous for his masterly handling of black clothes.[7] As Vincent van Gogh enthused 260 years later in a letter to his brother Theo: “Frans Hals heeft wel zeven en twintig zwarten” (Frans Hals must have twenty-seven shades of black).[8][9]
Identity of the subject
[edit]
Hals did not give his works titles and there is no known record of this work from his time. Nonetheless, the sitter might yet be identifiable, for example, by way of the arms on this portrait or the arms on its supposed pendant Portrait of a Woman Standing (which are however obscure and which, in the early 20th century, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot reported as having been repainted)[10] in combination with circumstantial evidence from civic or church records of marriages and the like. If the white horse in the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull is meant to be a Saxon Steed, it could point to a connection with Twente or various places in Germany.
Style and technique
[edit]
Position in Hals’s œuvre
[edit]
Attribution and date; exhibitions; critical reception
[edit]
- ^ a b “Frans Hals—A Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull”. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. University of Birmingham. 2025. Retrieved 7 December 2025.
- ^ Baard, H. P. with Slive, Seymour: Frans Hals 1962. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, on the occasion of the centenary of that city’s municipal museum, 1862–1962. Published by the Frans Hals Museum. See p. 25, Catalogue, item 1.
- ^ Cornelis, Bart (and others), Frans Hals. Catalogue of the 2023–2024 Frans Hals exhibition at the National Gallery, published by National Gallery Global, London. ISBN 9781857097122. See pp. 84ff (Portraiture into Art, by Bart Cornelis) and 212 (List of Exhibited Works, by Tamar van Riessen with Justine Rinnooy Kan).
- ^ Slive, Seymour (1989). “Catalogue”. In Slive, Seymour (ed.). Frans Hals. Royal Academy of Arts, London. pp. 130–369. The catalogue for a London exhibition that also travelled to Washington, D.C., and Haarlem in 1989–1990. See pp. 133–137.
- ^ a b c d Reuniting 400-year-old marriage portraits. A 10-minute video published by the National Gallery, London, 30 September 2023, in the “Behind the Scenes with Conservation” series on the National Gallery’s website (and elsewhere on line as What were Frans Hals’ earliest paintings?). Larry Keith (Head of Conservation and Keeper at the National Gallery), Alice Martin (Head of the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House), and Bart Cornelis (Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the National Gallery) discuss the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull and its pendant Portrait of a Woman Standing and the cleaning and conservation work that was being done on them in preparation for the 2023–2024 Frans Hals Exhibition at the National Gallery. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/behind-the-scenes/behind-the-scenes-in-conservation-reuniting-400-year-old-marriage-portraits. Retrieved 2 December 2025
- ^ Packer, Lelia; Roy, Ashok (2021). Frans Hals – The Male Portrait. London: The Wallace Collection & Philip Wilson Publishers. pp. 93 to 114 (The chapter by Ashok Roy titled Frans Hals and Portraiture: Style and Painting Technique Interwoven). ISBN 978-1-78130-110-4. (This is the catalogue of the 2021 exhibition at the Wallace.) Cite error: Unknown parameter “0” in
<ref>tag; supported parameters are dir, follow, group, name (see the help page). - ^ Packer, Lelia; Roy, Ashok (2021). Frans Hals – The Male Portrait. London: The Wallace Collection & Philip Wilson Publishers. pp. 18 to 24 (The Men in Black section by Lelia Packer). ISBN 978-1-78130-110-4. (This is the catalogue of the 2021 exhibition at the Wallace.) Cite error: Unknown parameter “0” in
<ref>tag; supported parameters are dir, follow, group, name (see the help page). - ^ “[Letter] To Theo van Gogh. Nuenen, on or about Tuesday, 20 October 1885”. vangoghletters.org (in Dutch). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Retrieved 9 July 2022. (At margin note 2r:5)
- ^ Atkins, Christopher (2012). The Signature Style of Frans Hals. Amsterdam University Press. pp. 87 to 113 (Virtuosity). ISBN 978-90-8964-335-3.
- ^ Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis (with the assistance of Kurt Freise and Dr Kurt Erasmus); A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, based on the work of John Smith, Volume III; translated from the German and edited by Edward G. Hawke; Macmillan & Co., London; 1910; p. 110 (no. 382). (On line at archive.org, retrieved 7 December 2025: https://archive.org/details/catalogueraisonn03hofsuoft/page/110/) Note that Hofstede de Groot dates the Portrait of a Woman Standing to about 1630–1635.
-Category:Portraits by Frans Hals
-Category:Portraits of men
-Category:1610s paintings
-Category:Paintings in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts
