Frans Hals Museum and Mauritshuis buy two children’s portraits from Frans Hals

At an auction in New York, the Frans Hals Museum and the
Mauritshuis together two paintings from Frans Hals purchased. The two museums announced this on Tuesday.

Work Violin boy and Singing girlwho were first in the hands of a foreign private individual, will be exhibited as a couple in both Haarlem and The Hague. The purchase was made with support from, among others, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). It is not known how expensive the paintings were; The auction house estimated the value of the couple at 6 to 8 million euros.

The paintings will be shown from mid-July in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and are part of the Hals-Rembrandt exhibition. In mid -October, the paintings made in or around 1628 will be shown for the first time in Mauritshuis in The Hague, in an exhibition about the development of genre painting in the early 17th century.

Minister Eppo Bruins (OCW, NSC) calls it « wonderful that these paintings can be home again » and will soon be « admired by everyone ».

Frans Hals is internationally known for its portraits and its genre pieces: performances of ordinary people in their daily activities. According to the museums, the purchased portraits of two music making children are special because the boy and the girl may be their own son and daughter of Frans Hals. The Frans Hals Museum has the largest collection of Hals paintings in the world, but genre pieces were still missing.

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