Painting from Elizabeth Taylor estate declared a Frans Hals
Elizabeth Taylor had fabulous taste in jewelry, as Christieâs upcoming sales of material from her estate attests. A few of the paintings she owned were also gems â including a powerful Old Masters portrait of an intense-looking, seated man that she valued when few experts did.
The painting, âPortrait of a Man, Half-Length,â was for decades thought to be by an imitator or student of Frans Hals, the great Dutch painter often compared to Rembrandt for his vigorous, sometimes humorous depictions of the growing merchant class. Now Ben Hall, the head of Christieâs Old Masters department in New York, is making the case that Taylorâs painting was the handiwork of Hals himself. An expert in Halsâ work agrees.
With the change in attribution comes a change in projected value: a canvas that would have likely brought less than $100,000 could now bring $1 million in an Old Masters auction in January.
The re-attribution is an example of the importance of seeing a painting, long known through reproduction, in the flesh. In the 1970s, the painting appeared in scholar Seymour Sliveâs catalogue raisonnĂ© on Hals â the industry standard for what is and is not authentic â as âdoubtful and wrongly attributed.â But Slive only saw the work in a black-and-white reproduction.
Hall, on the other hand, saw the painting in person in July, when it arrived at Christieâs Rockefeller Center warehouse with other material from Taylorâs estate. He said it âpacked a real punch â making a tremendous impact from even 20 feet away.â
And on closer inspection, it had some classic Hals touches. âThe paint surface has jittery, almost schizophrenic brush strokes. Hals was an artist who loved using oil paint and painted in this loose, almost Impressionistic manner,â says Hall. âAnd there is tremendous sensitivity in the depiction of the sitterâs face. When you look at followers or imitators, they donât capture the sitter as well.â
Armed with that response, Hall and his team at Christieâs began to research the work. They also consulted one of the leading scholars on the artist: Pieter Biesboer, who had served as curator of the Netherlandsâ Frans Hals museum in Haarlem for 30 years before retiring in 2008.
When he examined the painting in August, Biesboer found resemblances to other Hals portraits from the 1630s, including works in the National Gallery in London and in the Frick Collection in New York. âMost spectacular,â he wrote in a report, is the âapplication of the highlights around the eyes and the nose and the final touches of the brush in deep âivory blackâ pigment in the pupils of the eyes and the separation of the lips, which is so characteristic for the work of Hals and which no other artist was able to imitate successfully.â
Biesboer concluded, âI can declare that the present âPortrait of an Unknown Manâ is a fully authentic work by Frans Hals himself.â Reached by telephone, Biesboer added he had âno doubtsâ about the attribution given his stylistic and technical knowledge of Halsâ paintings. He says he noticed âsome abrasion from cleaning and aging,â mainly in the area of the subjectâs lap. âBut the figure is completely preserved and in wonderful condition.â
At this point, not much is known about Taylorâs relationship to the work. Photographs show that it hung in a prime spot in her Bel Air house â in the living room above the fireplace. Her biographers report that she temporarily installed a Hals, presumably the same one, among other artworks in her hospital room in 1956 when she had a minor operation.
The back of the painting bears a label from the prestigious London art gallery Thomas Agnew and Sons. The New York gallery of Howard Young â where Taylorâs father, art dealer Francis Lenn Taylor, worked â acquired it from Agnewâs in the 1950s. It is not clear whether Taylorâs father bought it for her or simply brought it to her attention.
âThere was some suggestion it was a wedding present on her first marriage,â says Hall at Christieâs, who is still documenting the paintingâs history and is also trying to identify the sitter. âBut now we donât think that was the case.â
Re-attributions occur relatively frequently with Old Masters artists like Rembrandt and Hals. They were popular enough in their lifetime that artists imitated their style â and valuable enough that later collectors and dealers had financial incentive to pass off such imitations as the real thing. Biesboer says he has seen eight other Hals re-attributions in the last decade.
Yet scholars make re-attributions of artworks from other periods as well. And in one case, Taylorâs judgment might not hold up so well. A Modigliani or Modigliani look-alike that also graced the walls of her home is not appearing in a Christieâs sale because it has not been authenticated.
Marc Porter, chairman of Christieâs Americas, will not go so far as to call the painting a fake. The field of Modigliani attributions is hotly contested, he says, while a new catalogue raisonnĂ© is in the works. But selling Taylorâs painting is clearly a risk that Christieâs wasnât willing to take.
âSo many collectors of her generation have bought Modiglianis that in this time period canât be authenticated,â Porter says. âThere are dozens of Modiglianis waiting to be established.â
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