The SØR Rusche Collection Online

The SØR Rusche Collection Online

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 253. DIRCK HALS | A MOTHER SEARCHING HER CHILDREN FOR NITS, A CHILD STOKING A FIRE TO THE LEFT.

DIRCK HALS | A MOTHER SEARCHING HER CHILDREN FOR NITS, A CHILD STOKING A FIRE TO THE LEFT

Lot Closed

May 10, 02:53 PM GMT

Estimate

10,000 - 15,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

Property from the SØR Rusche Collection

DIRCK HALS

Haarlem 1591 - 1656

A MOTHER SEARCHING HER CHILDREN FOR NITS, A CHILD STOKING A FIRE TO THE LEFT


oil on oak panel, circular

unframed: diameter: 38.1 cm.; 15 in.

framed: 53.5 x 53.5 cm.; 21 x 21 in.


Please see shipping calculator link: click here.

Adolf Wollenberg (1874–1950/51), Berlin, by 1925;

His sale, Berlin, R. Lepke, 17 March 1932, lot 197, for 3050 Reichsmark (as Jan Miense Molenaer);

Curt Bohnewand (b. 1888), Berlin and Rottach-Egern;

His postumous sale, Cologne, Lempertz, 28 March 1969, lot 3 (as Dirk Hals);

Carl Schünemann, Bremen, 1969;

From whom acquired in 1970.

Akademie der Künste, Gemälde alter Meister aus Berliner Besitz, exh. cat., Berlin 1925, p. 43, cat. no. 255 (as Jan Miense Molenaer);

B. Von Kurt Erasmus, Die Meister des Holländischen Interieurs, exh. cat., Berlin 1929, p. 17, cat. no. 30;

C. Bohnewand, Aus der sammlung Curt Bohnewand, Munich 1952, p. 25;

E. Plietzsch, Randbemerkungen zur holländischen Interieurmalerei am Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts, in Jahrbuch Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1956, p. 185, reproduced fig. 148;

E. Plietzsch, Holländische und Flämische Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 1958, p. 27, reproduced fig. 11;

F.F. Hofrichter, Judith Leyster. A woman painter in Holland's Golden Age, Doornspijk 1989, p. 53, under cat. no. 22, reproduced fig. 144;

S. Jäkel-Scheglmann, Zum Lobe der Frauen..., doctoral diss. thesis, Heidelberg 1994, p. 53, reproduced fig. 31;

H.-J. Raupp (ed.), Niederländische Malerei des. 17. Jahrhunderts der SØR Rusche-Sammlung, vol. 2, Genre, Münster/Hamburg/London 1996, pp. 110–13, cat. no. 25, reproduced in colour;

B. Nehlsen-Marten, Dirk Hals 1591–1656; Oeuvre und Entwicklung eines Haarlemer Genremalers, Weimar 2003, p. 317, cat. no. 387, reproduced p. 409, fig. 230;

W. Pijbes, M. Aarts, M. J. Bok et al., At Home in the Golden Age, exh. cat., Zwolle 2008, p. 74, cat. no. 57, reproduced in colour.

Berlin, Royal Akademie der Künste, Gemälde alter Meister aus Berliner Besitz, July – August 1925, no. 255 (as Jan Miense Molenaer);

Berlin, Galerie Schäffer, Die Meister des Holländischen Interieurs, April – May 1929, no. 30;

Rotterdam, Kunsthal, At Home in the Golden Age, 9 February – 18 May 2008, no. 57. 


The SØR Rusche Collection has been exhibited extensively over the last two decades. Please click here for further information.

The cleaning of a child's hair by its mother was a common subject, often employed as one of a series of genre scenes elucidating maternal virtue.


Dirck Hals was born and worked in Haarlem. He was the younger brother of Frans Hals, whose influence is visible in Dirck's painterly and colourful technique. In the late 1620s he worked with the architectural painter Dirck van Dalen, and is recorded in Leiden in the 1640s. Dirck popularised the 'merry company' scenes and his influence spread beyond Haarlem and reached Amsterdam painters including Pieter Codde and Willem Duyster. When exhibited in Berlin in 1929 this painting is recorded as having been signed and dated at the right: D. Hals/ 1631. Hofrichter (see Literature) dates this panel by Hals to circa 1633. 


This painting was in the collection of the great pre-war Berlin architect Adolf Wollenberg who left Berlin in 1933 (following the sale of much of his collection at Lepke in 1932, see Provenance), and went into exile in Paris, and later in London.