Van Campen Family Portrait in a Landscape

Dutch painter Frans Hals is considered one of the greatest portraitists, revered for his mastery of compositional structure, his ability to capture a natural sense of vitality, and especially his bravura brushwork (see, for example, the glove held by the father or the crimson sleeve of the eldest daughter). This family portrait is a fragment of a larger composition that depicted the fashionably dressed cloth merchant Gijsbert Claesz. van Campen and his wife Maria Jorisdr. with their 13 children, all interacting affectionately through glance and gesture. Sometime before the end of the 18th century the canvas was cut apart vertically at the right. A surviving segment showing three children (and a partial fourth) is in the collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. A third fragment of the head of a boy belongs to a private collector.

A 14th child was born a few years after the painting’s completion. She was added at the lower left in 1628 by a different painter, Salomon de Bray (1597–1664), in a style noticeably different from that of Hals.