London Sales Preview: Sotheby's Old Masters

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Frans Hals, "Portrait of Willem van Heythuysen" (ca. 1630)

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Frans Hals
Portrait of Willem van Heythuysen, circa 1630
Estimate £3–5 million ($6–10 million)
Sotheby’s Old Masters

This superb small portrait by Frans Hals comes to auction with a fascinating history attached. For most of the 20th century, it was thought to be a copy of another version, in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, in Brussels. Owned by generations of the Rothschild family, by 1950 this painting had changed hands—but not because of Nazi looting, asserts Sotheby’s, which has done its due diligence. It then disappeared from public view until 2004, when it came up for sale at im Kinsky auctioneer, in Vienna, where it was attributed to the “studio of Frans Hals.” More than one informed pair of eyes spotted the portrait, and it sold for €440,000 ($573,000).

The present consignor brought the painting to Sotheby’s, which took it to Martin Bijl, the former chief conservator at the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam. He removed layers of varnish to reveal a number of pentimenti. Scientific analysis established that the materials used in the creation of this picture correspond with those employed by Hals and suggested that it could be dated to the mid-1630s. A full attribution was approved by several Netherlands-based Hals scholars, including Pieter Biesboer, of the Frans Hals Museum, in Haarlem.

Authenticated paintings by Hals are rare to the market. The record for one is £8.2 million ($12.8 million), paid by the Cleveland Museum of Art for the larger Portrait of Tieleman Roosterman, 1634, from the Nathaniel and Albert von Rothschild sale at Christie’s London in July 1999. More recently, the London Old Master dealer Johnny Van Haeften laid out £4.7 million ($9.3 million) for a smaller Hals, Portrait of Samuel Ampzig, at Sotheby’s (est. £800,000–1.2 million; $1.6–2.4 million). The rediscovered portrait is more relaxed and jovial than either and, some experts say, the better for it.

"London Sales Preview" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.