Frans Hals exhibition opens at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum

One of the main exhibition projects of this season has opened in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum: the monographic exhibition “Frans Hals” shows about 50 absolute masterpieces of the famous Dutchman. Talks about the exhibition and news around it Kira Dolinina.

Much of the Frans Hals (1582–1666) exhibition came to Amsterdam from London, where the National Gallery held an exhibition of the same name from October to January. The difference between the two exhibitions hides its own intrigue: for the first time in the last 150 years, “The Laughing Cavalier” (1624), a masterpiece from the Wallace collection, will come to the Netherlands as the main guest, and a special merit of the Amsterdam museum workers was the opportunity to bring from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem one of the largest, earliest (and practically never leaving the “home” walls) multi-figure portraits of the master – “Banquet of the officers of the rifle company of St. George” (1616), which will be placed at the exhibition next to a collective portrait of the same unit, but from 1627.

There is, of course, much less noise about the Hals exhibition than there was around the epoch-making Vermeer exhibition last year, but his very name and the incredible virtuosity of his brush are enough to make an absolute blockbuster. The magic of Hulse’s paintings is that they can easily stand next to any number of their own kind, and the openness of the painting techniques calls for a detailed, slow “reading” of them. At the same time, unlike his younger colleague Rembrandt, Hals is primarily a portrait painter and does not overload the viewer with passions. His main passion is canvas and paint, and this noble disease is easily transmitted to the beholder.

It is interesting that the first news regarding the exhibition appeared not in connection with the presence of something special at it, but in connection with the absence of something necessary. The general director of the Rijksmuseum, Taco Dibbits, called for the return of the Hals painting stolen in 2020 from the Hofje van Mevrou van Eerden museum in the Dutch city of Leerdam, since without this work the exhibition would be incomplete. We are talking about the wonderful painting “Two Laughing Boys with a Glass of Beer” (1626). “This is an amazing painting,” Dibbits said. “We would like to show it, and I really hope that this painting will be found again. It belongs to all of us.” The word “again” is important here – the fact is that this painting was stolen for the third time. In 1988, she was stolen along with the work of Jacob van Ruisdael and found three years later. In 2011, it was stolen again and found six months later. In August 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Laughing Boys (currently estimated at $17 million) disappeared again.

This crime was one of the “Covid” museum thefts – five months earlier, at the very beginning of quarantine, Van Gogh’s painting “Spring Garden” was stolen from the small Singer Laren museum near Amsterdam. Garden at the Vicarage in Nuenen” (1884, estimated at $3-6 million), and works by van Dyck, Salvator Rosa and Annibale Carracci were stolen from the Christ Church Art Gallery in Oxford (total value $12.3 million). According to the Interpol report, which analyzed data provided by 72 member states, a total of 854,742 cultural property items were stolen in 2020. Here, of course, everything is taken into account, from coins and the smallest fragments of archaeological artifacts, but the trend was indicative. The rapid descent of the black art market into the dark web has only intensified this. The use of museum-quality works in criminal transactions as a kind of currency, so reliably described in the novel “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, has become commonplace in this business. In such cases, passing from hand to hand, things may not surface for a very long time. But the return of stolen works can be used as an argument in favor of reducing the prison sentence, but we don’t know how often this happens; these transactions with justice are not particularly advertised.

Of the two Dutch “Covid” losses, one has returned – art detective Arthur Brand found Van Gogh’s “Spring Garden” in 2023. The kidnapper, who appears in the press under the pseudonym Nils M., was also arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison. Hulse’s “Laughing Boys” were stolen by him, but have not yet been found. The message from the director of the Rijksmuseum is unlikely to help here, but it reminds us of the loss. Alas, there are also losses that are mourned for decades. For example, the most famous things stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, which are being sought by official and private detectives around the world, have never returned home. Hals has not been “walking” for long – there is still hope.