 Hi everybody, welcome to Barton's Takeout. I'm Robin Creran, Collections Research Coordinator at the Bartons Foundation. Today I'm going to talk to you about this portrait right here that's on the east wall of Room 5. It's by Franz Halls, who was a Dutch painter of the 17th century. He was born around 1582 in Antwerp, but he actually moved with his family to Harlem in the northern Netherlands, not too soon after. And that's where he lived and worked until his death in 1666. He studied under the artist Carl van Mander, and he joined the Harlem Painters Guild, which was kind of the sign of like the beginning of his career in 1610, and married soon thereafter. So the sitter of this painting or portrait was unknown for a long period of time. It's rather austere, simple nature made it a bit hard to identify who it might be. So if you look at the dress of this man, he's wearing really dark colors, which make it even hard to kind of differentiate the different parts of his clothing. So he's actually wearing a cape or straps over his right shoulder, and then it's being held almost in place underneath his right arm by his left hand. And if we take a really close look here, if we kind of, if we squint our eyes, we can see that there are some buttons on this vest or coat. And then he has this really simple white collar here. His mustache and beard are rather luxuriant, not necessarily particularly common for the time period. So that could be something that's helping to identify him. And then he has this dark cap or hat on his head. One thing that does kind of pop out though is this watch right here. So it's something that we'll talk about in a moment. But first, let's talk about his dress. So the dark colors and the simple dress of him suggests that he could be a Mennonite. At the time period, Mennonites, they dressed in very restrained colors, dark browns, blacks, grays. And they did not wear the kind of common white cuffs that you would see on sleeves of the more wealthy individuals of Harlem at the time. And so those things all kind of together suggest that he could be Mennonite. And like I said, Mennonites, they wore very reserved dress. They practiced really reserve and restraint in their conduct in dress. So if we think about that, then this watch then seems a bit oddly placed. But if we kind of zoom in a little closer to the watch, it's not particularly complicated. It's a rather simple type. It has a pierced cover. And the chaptering and the caseband, they may have been applied silver, although they look somewhat gold in color. But even that is somewhat simple. But because it's in this painting that is rather dark, and like I said, his dress kind of suggests that he's a Mennonite, it could be that this is an attribute of the sitter. Franz Hals as an artist didn't use attributes very much. He didn't use them rather sparingly in his portraits. An attribute is something like an object or an animal that helps to identify an individual. They're often used in like religious paintings to identify a saint, but they could be used in a portrait to help identify the sitter. So if we think that Franz Hals is using these attributes rather sparingly, and this man is dressed in this rather restrained manner, then this watch really does seem that much more important to identifying the individual. So how do we use this watch and the fact that the sitter is Mennonite to identify him? Well, if we look back at the first known owner of this painting, who was Isabella von Liwaden, she died in 1773. And at the time of her death, her belongings were put up for sale or auctioned. And when we look back at her as an individual, she had converted to Ruhmannstrand, a different religion in 1736. But she had previously been Mennonite, and her ancestors had been Mennonites. And if we look a bit more deeply at her ancestors, we actually see that she came from a family of prominent watchmakers, Mennonite watchmakers, in Harlem. So this scholar, Franz Heizerhout, he looked through her ancestors, and he used a little bit more information, which we can see on the painting. Right here, if we zoom in a little bit, we see that it says 57. So the age of the individual was 57. He was 57 when this was painted in 1643. So when he looked back at the ancestors of Isabella, he found that there was only one person who fit that description. And that was her great-grandfather who was Matthias Jan Buchels. He was a prominent Mennonite watchmaker in Harlem, along with his brother Iaan. So, and then when we actually look at another painting, this painting was part of a set, a pair of portraits, the other one being a woman. When we look at that painting, we also see a similar inscription, which says that she was 52, and then again it was painted in 1643. So when we look at hers, that helps us to see that she was the wife of Matthias, and her name was Maria, and she was around 52 in 1643. Her portrait is similarly somewhat simple. She's wearing darker clothing. She does have some fur on her dress, which does imply that they did have some more wealth, but it is in a bit more of a restrained manner. So the two individuals, her portrait, kind of faces him. So she's actually facing the opposite of him, and they're kind of, they may have been hung together side by side, and then they were like facing one another. So the two paintings were always sold together when we look at the ownership history or the provenance of the painting. They were always displayed, they're always sold with one another, until Barnes purchased it in 1928, and that brought it across the ocean to Philadelphia. The other painting now is in the National Museum in Stockholm. So when it entered the collection, it's possible that when it left, when it kind of separated from its pair, that that's when the identity of the sitters became a bit more obscured. But it's very likely that we now know who this sitter is, which is an interesting and exciting thing to know about the painting. So I hope that you enjoyed digging a little bit deeper into this beautiful portrait by Franz Halls. I encourage you to take a closer look at it when you come to the Barnes Foundation the next time. Take a look at this really interesting watch, which really does seem like this really important part of the painting. So that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. And if you enjoy listening to this and would like to hear more, please subscribe to our channel. I'm Tom Collins, new Bauer family executive director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. 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