Boy Playing the Violin (One of a pair of paintings) (Primary Title)
Frans Hals, Dutch, ca. 1581 - 1666 (Artist)
When Hals painted this delightful pair of paintings celebrating the joys of music, he had only recently begun experimenting with genre scenes for his repertoire. Hals had an adept hand with formal portraiture, and two of his children, Sara and Franz, probably served as the models for these thematically related pictures. Music was becoming a popular pastime in Haarlem in those years, and the majority of Hals’s genre scenes represented children playfully engaged in making music. While he shared common approaches to tone and light effects with other painters from the period, his works were more markedly expressive. This pair of paintings appeals immediately to the viewer’s sense memory of sights and sounds, as the girl is reading music and tapping her hand to the beat while the boy plays his violin by ear and sings along with her. The unusual format of these diamond lozenges suggests that they may have once been inlaid in a cabinet, perhaps one used to store musical notations and instruments.
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