St Matthew (Hals)

St. Matthew is a painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals, painted in 1625 and now in the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa.

St. Matthew, c.1625 Oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm
ArtistFrans Hals
Year1625 (1625)
CatalogueSeymour Slive, Catalog 1974: #44
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions70 cm × 55 cm (28 in × 22 in)
LocationOdessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa
Accession180

Painting

The painting shows St. Matthew sitting at a desk reading with an angel at his elbow.[1] This painting was documented in the 18th-century but was considered lost until the 1950s, when two tronies were discovered languishing in the storerooms of the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art in 1958 by art historian Irina Linnik. At the time they were considered to be by unknown 19th-century painters, but Linnik recognized them as the work of a 17th-century master and eventually traced their history back to the 17th century, identifying them as two of four lost paintings by Hals of the evangelists, namely Luke and Matthew.[2][3] After her work was published in 1959, the two paintings were included in the 1962 Frans Hals exhibition in the Frans Hals Museum. The international attention helped to spur art detectives and eventually the other two of John and Mark were also rediscovered.

In his 1989 catalog of the international Frans Hals exhibition, Slive included a photo of Hals' Two singing boys with a lute and a music book to show that his theme of a main subject with a secondary witness was common to many of Hals' paintings of the 1620s and the models as secondary witness in these two paintings were clearly cousins.[4]

Two singing boys and Matthew:

  • Two singing boys
  • St. Matthew

The four evangelists by Hals:

  • St. Luke
  • St. Matthew
  • St. Mark
  • St. John
gollark: Solar power is cooler however.
gollark: See, our world is not in fact this one.
gollark: But I AM ACTUALLY QUITE WORRIED what happens if you eat conjured pasta.
gollark: Well, something something externalities.
gollark: That CANNOT be healthy.

References
  1. De evangelist Matteüs in record for this painting in the RKD
  2. Article from the Pushkin Museum of Art, published in Courant 11, Codart, 2006
  3. Seymour Slive and C.A. van Hees, Frans Hals Exhibition catalog, 1962, #77 & #78, St. Luke & St. Matthew, Addendum
  4. Frans Hals, by Seymour Slive as editor, with contributions by Pieter Biesboer, Martin Bijl, Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks, Michael Hoyle, Frances S. Jowell, Koos Levy-van Halm and Liesbeth Abraham, Bianca M. Du Mortier, Irene van Thiel-Stroman, page 195, Prestel-Verlag, Munich & Mercatorfonds, Antwerp, 1989, ISBN 3791310321
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