Malle Babbe
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| Malle Babbe |
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| Frans Hals , around 1633 to 1635 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 75 × 64 cm |
| Gemäldegalerie (Berlin) |
The Malle Babbe (German "Die verrückte Barbara") is a painting by the Dutch painter Frans Hals , which was created around 1633-1635. Today it hangs in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie and is owned by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation . It is also known under the names Hille Bobbe and Witch von Haarlem .
Image description
The 75 × 64 cm painting shows a portrait of an old, laughing woman sitting at the corner of a table. The woman is holding the handle of a beer mug with her right hand . The metal jug with an open lid is on the lower right corner of a wooden table. The viewer sees the front of the jug with a reflection that cannot be seen more precisely as well as the inside of the opened lid. On the woman's left shoulder there is an owl of a species that cannot be precisely determined, its line of sight pointing towards the viewer, while her body is rotated so that the right wing can be seen.
The painted woman wears a robe made of brown fabric without any noticeable decorations. This is tied off at the hips by a suggested white apron. It has a white cap on its head and its neck is covered by a wide, white, crumpled collar that extends to the base of the breast. These clothes correspond mainly to the fashion of the 1630s, which could also be found as everyday and work clothes in the following decades. The woman sits with the front of her body in a slight incline parallel to the table and is propped up on her right elbow. In this position her head is twisted so that she looks to the right edge of the picture or the lower left corner; what she is looking at remains hidden from the viewer. The entire face is twisted into a wide laugh with its mouth slightly open and narrowed eyes and frozen in this grimace.
The arrangement of the owl, the woman and the beer mug creates a very strict image diagonal from the upper right corner to the lower left corner. This is resolved by the direction of the old woman's line of sight, which results in a crossing diagonal. The lighting of the picture is shifted slightly to the left from the front and is emphasized mainly by the reflections on the jug and in the right half of the woman's face as well as by the shadows on the right half of the face, the side of the chest shaded by the jug and the woman's back. The predominant colors are dark browns and grays.
The painting acquired particular importance due to the style of painting, which is atypical for the works of the 17th century and whose stylistic execution is more reminiscent of the impressionists of the 19th century. The picture was painted with short, very strong brushstrokes and lacks the fine details typical of its time. Individual aspects, such as the bow of the apron, appear fleetingly and quickly with just a few brushstrokes, which makes the picture appear very dynamic and lively to the viewer.
Name question and identity of the portrayed
The naming of the painting varies in the literature between the now recognized name Malle Babbe and the name Hille Bobbe, which is to be regarded as invalid . The Malle Babbe was known and known as Hille Bobbe until the middle of the 19th century .
This was due to a mistaken copy of the name on part of the inner stretcher, which was introduced there in the 17th or early 18th century. This is labeled with Malle Babbe van Haerlem… Fr [a] ns Hals , but instead of Malle Babbe, Hille Bobbe was read and the picture was named with this name. Only through the publications of Théophile Thoré under the synonym Willem Bürger in 1868 and 1869 about Frans Hals and above all about the Malle Babbe was the error cleared up. It is unknown who the inscription came from, Frans Hals neither signed, inscribed nor dated the picture.
The crazy Babbe could be identified as a real woman with the name or nickname Malle Babbe , who was housed in the workhouse in Haarlem in 1653 and for whom the leprosy house contributed 65 guilders to the maintenance due to an archive find of the Gemeentearchief Haarlem . At that time it also served as a prison and a madhouse.
The son Pieter von Frans Hals was also housed in this institution around the same time. By decision of the mayor of Haarlem from 13 June 1642 Pieter was as weak-minded for the rest of his life in Arbeidshuis housed. The accommodation costs of 100 guilders a year were also paid in part by the Leprosenhaus, the rest was raised by the Elisabeth Hospital (Ste Elisabets Gasthuis) and the Haarlem Poor Fund. It can be assumed that Hals met the real Babbe earlier or that she was generally known in Haarlem. Pieter Hals died in 1667 and was buried on February 8th of that year in the Zuider Kerkhof , the southern cemetery in Haarlem. There are no other sources about Malle Babbe. Accordingly, nothing more is known than their existence.
Dating
The period in which the Malle Babbe was created is still discussed today, although the currently preferred version of Slive is based on an origin between 1633 and 1635. Frans Hals himself neither signed nor dated the picture, so the dating must be based on the painting style and other evidence. The Malle Babbe, for example, is the most recently dated genre painting Neck, while he then shifted his work to portraits and group portraits. The Malle Babbe's painting style is described as concise and steady and is intended to anticipate the later painting style.
Gustave Courbet added a signature by Frans Hals and the date 1645 to his copy of the Malle Babbe, but this is considered an invention and not the original state of the picture, as described by Théophile Thoré at the same time. He dated the picture in 1869 between 1630 and 1640, according to Carl von Lützow it was created in the 1640s and Wilhelm von Bode as well as W. Unger and C. Vosmaer represented a classification around 1650. The latter are due to the appearance of the document from 1653, with the the real Malle Babbe can be identified, confirmed.
Interpretation and iconography
The Malle Babbe was interpreted and interpreted in a variety of ways, with its facial expression with the broad smile as well as the owl and the beer mug as elements of the picture playing a major role.
The witch of Haarlem
To this day, she is often referred to and described as the Witch of Haarlem , with Seymour Slive showing in 1989 that one does not have to believe in witchcraft “to be convinced that her wild, animal-like movements and her demonic laughter do not result from how much she has consumed the contents of her gigantic jug, but that both are ruled by more powerful, more mysterious forces. ”He compares this effect with the works of the late Francisco de Goya , who is said to have conjured up the dark sides of man in a similar way. The interpretation as a witch or demon-possessed woman is now generally of secondary importance, especially when compared to other paintings by the artist.
Owl and pewter jug as a sign of alcoholism
The tin pitcher and the owl in the picture are seen as clear symbols of alcoholism. The face and behavior of the Malle Babbe in the picture are clearly influenced by the alcohol, and the enormous size of the drinking vessel puts it in the foreground. The owl, which Hals probably only added to the picture at a later date, is now mostly related to alcohol and drunkenness. The Dutch idiom: “zo beschonken als een uil” (“drunk like an owl”) is one of the main arguments. Although the owl as a nocturnal animal is traditionally viewed in folk and superstition as a symbol for sin and evil, this interpretation only plays a subordinate role in the image.
The New York Malle Babbe or its no longer known role model served Louis Bernhard Cocler as a template for his reversed etching after Malle Babbe . The following pair of rhymes appears on his picture below the picture:
“F neck pinx t LB Coclers sculp t
Babel van Haarlem
uw uil schijne u een valk, o Babel! 'k ben te vreen
Speel met een valsche pop, gij zijt net nit alleen ”
“Babel von Haarlem
Frans Hals pinxit (painted it), LB Coclers sculpsit (engraved it). Your owl is a falcon to you, O Babel! It should be
fine with me. Playing with an illusion, you are not alone in it "
- Bartolomaeus Maton : a fool with an owl
Bartolomaeus Maton : a fool with an owl
Laughing at society
- Laughter is a central element of the portraits by Frans Hals. “An't lachen kendmen den zoot” ( laughing is how you recognize the fool ).
The painter Vincent Van Gogh writes: "I thought about Heyerdahl's word:" Je n'aime pas qu'une figure soit trop corrompue "- said when drawing not a woman, but an old man with a bandage over his eye, and I didn't think it was true. There are such ruins of faces in which there is something, for example I find it very well expressed in the Hille Bobbe by Frans Hals or in some of the heads of Rembrandt. " ( Letter [264] to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, February 5, 1883 )
Influence on later works and copies
The Malle Babbe was reproduced in numerous copies and variants, especially shortly after its creation in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and at the beginning of Impressionism in the late 19th century.
The New York Malle Babbe
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has owned a portrait similar to the original since 1871, which is also listed as Malle Babbe and comes from the former Cornet Collection. The artist of this picture is unknown, but until about 1880 it was considered a painting by Frans Hals; the description in the museum records it today as "in the style of Frans Hals".
The 74.9 × 61 cm painting differs from the original primarily in that the composition is reversed and the owl is sitting on the right shoulder. The owl's legs are tied by a cord that is pulled down to the hands folded on the table, and the babbe is not holding a beer mug in her hands in this picture. The picture is signed "FH", which explains the earlier assignment to Frans Hals.
The New York Malle Babbe was also built in the 17th century and was probably a copy of the original or a version of the picture no longer known today. Slive also confirmed this assumption in 1989, assigning the unknown artist to Frans Hals' immediate environment. A color analysis showed that the chronological classification is realistic, as no colors were used that only came into use after the dating. An assumption that was also expressed that Frans Hals the Younger was the author of the picture is rejected by Seymour Slive , instead he assumes that the unknown artist can probably be attributed to two other paintings, also formerly attributed to Frans Hals, with the titles of fisher girls from Cologne and Cincinnati . Stukenbrock, on the other hand, considers this to be out of the question, since the New York Malle Babbe is to be classified significantly higher in quality than the fisher girls and, at least for the Cologne picture, it has been proven that it was painted only after the 17th century.
The New York Malle Babbe or its no longer known role model served Louis Bernhard Cocler as a template for the etching after Malle Babbe mentioned above .
Malle Babbe by Gustave Courbet
In 1869 Gustave Courbet made a copy of the Malle Babbe, which now hangs in the Hamburger Kunsthalle . He signed his Malle Babbe with both his own name and the signature Frans Hals' and also added the year 1645, so that the homage to Hals became clear. He had seen the painting in 1869 in Munich, where it was first publicly exhibited, and copied it there. According to Francis Jowell, Courbet probably added the date as an allusion to the endless debates among art historians about the exact date of a picture and thus as an ironic homage to Thoré, with whom he was friends and who died a few months before the exhibition.
According to a rumor, he is said to have exchanged the original picture in the exhibition for a copy for several days and thus deceived the public; this story is considered unlikely by Slive and others. Carl von Lützow dealt more intensively with the Malle Babbe in 1870 and also expressed himself critical of the Courbet copy. According to his information, the copy lacked the light tone and the colors were muted, which would reduce the impressive liveliness of the facial expression.
Copies by North American artists
General attention arose in America for the works of Frans Hals through the Munich School under Wilhelm Leibl and the attention Hals received at the time from the Realists and later from the Impressionists. William Merritt Chase as the main representative, many American artists of the time made a pilgrimage to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, and there was also a brisk trade in copies and reproductions in America.
The best-known American copy of the Malle Babbe comes from Frank Duveneck , who studied with Leibl in Munich from 1870 to 1873 and was one of the early exponents of American Impressionism . He made a copy of the New York Malle Babbe, believing that it was an original by Frans Hals. Its frame is smaller than the original and created with very broad brushstrokes. His painting is now in a private collection, the place of storage is unknown; It was last shown in 1967 in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum , the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor , entitled Triumph of Realism. An Exhibition of European and American Realist Paintings 1850–1910 , where it was made available by the ACA Heritage Gallery, New York.
Copies unrelated to Frans Hals
The Dresden Picture Gallery owns a painting with the title Hille Bobbe and the Smoker , which is often attributed to Frans Hals the Younger. It is a pastiche in the form of a picture mosaic from the New York Malle Babbe , the painting The Smoker by Joos van Craesbeeck (formerly assigned to Adriaen Brouwer ), and a still life of fish in the style of Abraham van Beijeren . As with the New York Malle Babbe, the authorship of Frans Hals the Younger has meanwhile been rejected, the real painter is unknown. Also unknown is the painter of the picture Malle Babbe and the Drinker , in which the Malle Babbe is depicted as a fish woman together with a drinker of no longer traceable origin. Slive puts forward the thesis that the drinker could have been taken from a picture by Frans Hals' apprentice and later son-in-law Pieter Roestraten or the Haarlem genre painter Petrus Staverenus .
Two other portraits, which were also attributed to Frans Hals in the 19th century, are regularly mentioned in connection with the Malle Babbe. It is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille located Crazy woman ( Seated Woman ) and the former York to New private collection of Jack Linsky located Crazy woman with jug ( Seated Woman holding a jug ). Both are now clearly not created by Frans Hals and are considered very weak compared to the real Malle Babbe and the New York version.
Hille Bobbe and the smoker
Malle Babbe and the Drinker
Crazy woman
Crazy woman with mug
Han van Meegeren
The Malle Babbe also played a role in the case of the art forger Han van Meegeren , who was best known for his forgeries of pictures by Jan Vermeer . At the beginning of his work he had created four paintings, including a portrait of a drinking woman based on the Malle Babbe by Frans Hals. His version depicts a laughing Malle Babbe without an owl who holds the beer mug raised in front of her. He signed the picture at the bottom right with the contracted monogram Frans Hals'.
He did not sell these early paintings as original works for reasons unknown. The portrait of a drinking woman was confiscated from his studio in 1945 and handed over to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for safekeeping in 1947 .
Provenance
The earliest history of the picture is unknown. A first documented sale, which probably concerns the Malle Babbe , is documented for October 1, 1778 in Amsterdam , where the picture went to a buyer named Altrogge for nine guilders. The next sale in Nijmegen on June 10, 1812 is also not certain. On May 12, 1834, the picture was sold for nine guilders by JF Sigault and JJ van Limbeek and subsequently became part of the collection of Stokbroo van Hoogwood en Aartwoud . On September 3, 1867, Bartholdt Suermondt , an industrialist and collector from Aachen , bought the picture at the Stockbroo auction in Hoorn for 1660 guilders. In 1869 he exhibited it publicly for the first time in Munich, where it was seen by Gustave Courbet among many others .
1873 was made an exhibition in Brussels and in 1874 sold Suermondt a large part of his collection, including Malle Babbe for about one million gold marks to the Royal Museums in Berlin, today's Gemäldegalerie in Berlin , which was then under the leadership of Julius Meyer and Wilhelm von Bode as its Assistant stood. The picture is still in the possession of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie and is shown in the permanent exhibition in the Kulturforum Berlin .
In addition to the permanent exhibition in Berlin, the Malle Babbe was shown in Brussels in 1873 , in Amsterdam in 1950 and in Haarlem in 1962 . In 1989 and 1990 the picture was part of the joint exhibition of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC , the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem.
literature
- Carl Grimm: Frans Hals. The complete work. Belser-Verlag, Zurich and Stuttgart 1989.
- Seymour Slive: Frans Hals. 3 volumes (text, plates, catalog). Phaidon Press, London 1974, ISBN 0-7148-1443-1 .
- Seymour Slive (Ed.): Frans Hals. Prestel-Verlag, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7913-1030-5 .
- Seymour Slive: On the Meaning of Frans Hals' 'Malle Babbe'. In: The Burlington Magazine , Vol. 105 (727), October 1963, pp. 432-436.
- Christiane Stukenbrock: Frans Hals: happy children, musicians and revelers: a study of selected groups of motifs and their reception history. European university publications. Series 28, Art History, Volume 16. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-631-45780-4
- Jutta von Zitzewitz: Frans Hals Malle Babbe. Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-7861-2383-7 .
Individual evidence
Most of the information in this article is taken from the sources given under literature; the following are also cited:
- ↑ Stukenbrock 1993, p. 155
- ↑ u. a. Slive 1989, p. 396
- ↑ Stukenbrock 1993, p. 155; Slive 1989, p. 395 f.
- ↑ Slive 1989, p. 395 f.
- ↑ Stukenbrock 1993, p. 153 f.
- ↑ Slive 1989, p. 236
- ↑ Slive 1989, p. 236
- ↑ Vincent van Gogh , quoted from: Van Gogh: Letters, Paintings, Drawings. All letters. New translation by Eva Schumann, edited by Fritz Erpel. 6 volumes. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1965, Volume 2, p. 188.
- ↑ a b Metropolitan Museum
- ↑ Slive 1989, p. 238
- ↑ Karin Groen 1989, cited in Stukenbrock 1993, p. 156
- ↑ Slive 1974, Volume 3, p. 141
- ↑ Slive 1974, Volume 3, pp. 140-141
- ↑ Stukenbrock 1993, p. 156
- ^ A b Francis S. Jowell: The rediscovery of Frans Hals in the 19th century. In Slive 1989, pp. 61-85, p. 71
- ↑ Triumph of Realism. An Exhibition of European and American Realist Paintings 1850–1910. The Brooklyn Museum 1967
- ^ Catalog des Collections des Musees de France. Joconde database
- ↑ Slive 1974, Volume 3, p. 141
- ↑ Slive 1989, p. 238
- ↑ Slive 1974, Volume 3, pp. 141-142
- ↑ Slive 1974, Volume 3, p. 142
- ^ Provenance from Slive 1974, Volume 3, p. 75, and Slive 1989, p. 241
- ^ Exhibitions based on Slive 1989, p. 241