Girl Singing is a figurative painting by Frans Hals, who was a male 17th-century Dutch master. Its subject is a girl or young woman singing. More particularly, it is her expressive face as she focuses intently on singing from her music book, and the apparent spontaneity of the moment in which the artist 'captures' her. Girl Singing is one of a pair of pictures Hals painted at Haarlem in about 1628; its pendant is the Boy Playing the Violin. Both paintings have a musical theme. The catalogue for an exhibition which, because of the COVID-19 restrictions, had to be cancelled Both show casually dressed young people, presumably at home. They are the same quite small size and each is in square lozenge format, in oil colours on a wooden panel. It has been suggested the models were two of Hals's own children.
Description Seymour Slive remarked that Girl Singing exhibits the same sparkling technique and blond tonality seen in the commissioned portraits on the same small scale that Hals painted in the second half of the 1620s. The catalogue for a London exhibition that also travelled to Washington DC and Haarlem in 1989–1990. pp. 202, 203.
Girl Singing depicts the head, part of the upper body, and hands of a girl or young woman singing from a book. As is the case in most of Hals's work, the light falls from the subject's right (our left). To the right, in an otherwise plain background in warm shades of light brown, is a patch of shade (the young woman's shadow) in which Hals has put his usual FH monogram signature. The painting is not dated; the conjectured date of "about 1628" relies on comparison with other works by Hals.
The lines of the Girl's brow, mouth, shoulders, finger tips, and the page from which she sings almost rhyme with two sides of the painting's lozenge shape; her nose and her one visible ear nearly (but not quite) echo the other two sides—all of which brings unity to the painting's composition while supporting the impression that the subject is in motion within its compositional frame.
The Girl's face is depicted as cheerful, animated, and open. Her lips part as she sings. She is concentrating on the music in her book and absorbed in her singing. She keeps rhythm with her right hand. She turns her face a little to her left and down towards her book, which she holds in her left hand at the lower right-hand edge of the painting. Because the artist looks up from a position slightly lower than the youngster's face, we can see her eyes. The page she is singing from flitters above the other pages. It does not lie flat. The artist's low viewpoint together with the girl's turning gesture and downward look focus the viewer’s attention on the relationship between her and her music.
Overall, Hals's painting convincingly evokes a young person's energy and joy in a passing moment. See the chapter titled A Liveliness Uniquely His (passim).
The girl or young woman in Girl Singing wears no lace, embroidery, or other finery to signal elevated social class. That would have suggested she was dressed up to have her portrait painted, compromising the intended illusion of spontaneity. (Compare, for example, the seven daughters in Hals's group portrait of Gijsbert Claeszoon van Campen's family, who are all dressed to the nines.)
Discussing the artist's several pictures of young singers, Ernst Wilhelm Moes commented that Hals does not just paint 'figures singing': the natural play of their facial expression shows us that his youngsters really are singing to us—and we can all but hear their voices. (p. 35). Presumably De Boschère's translation into French is from Moes's Dutch, but this is not stated.
The Catholic Herald discerns something in the countenance of the Girl Singing that could have been angelic, had she not been painted for a Protestant market. Studio International imagines Girl Singing as a panel in an altar.
Girl Singing is a cabinet picture in the sense that it was painted small enough (about 26.5x26.5 cm or 10½x10½ inches from side to side or top to bottom, without frame) to hang in an ordinary Dutch home. It is (unusually for Hals) square (each side is about 18.5cm or 7½inches) and (also unusually for Hals) in lozenge format A chapter in the catalogue for the 2024 exhibition in Berlin, translated from the Dutch into German by Susanne H. Karau & Kordelia Nitsch. p. 26. (that is to say, it hangs as if from one of its corners). The panel on which Girl Singing is painted is bookmatched with the Boy Playing the Violin's panel: in the case of Girl Singing the grain can be seen to slope from the lower left-hand side of the painting towards the upper right, mirroring the grain in Boy Playing the Violin (which is the same size and shape). The catalogue for a London exhibition that also travelled to Washington D.C. and Haarlem in 1989–1990. p. 111. The panels are probably Baltic oak.Campbell, Lorne. National Gallery Catalogues (new series): The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 1998, ; page 126. Also, see the pertinent Panel painting Wikipedia article. Girl Singing is quite tightly cropped.Cropped in the sense that the subject fills much of the composition, not that the panel has been cut down from a larger size since the painting was made. Both paintings are currently (2025) in elaborate perpendicular tortoise-shell frames — "delightful carapace" in "uncompromising good taste". Includes an image of Girl Singing in its tortoise-shell frame.
The panels on which Girl Singing and Boy Playing the Violin are painted are both cradled at the back.
Clothes and hair: social conventions The young woman is dressed casually in an everyday green bodice over a white linen chemise, reminiscent of Hals's similarly attired, similarly posed, lusty Bohémienne (known in the past as "The Gypsy Girl"), which is also from about 1628. (For these reasons, the Girl Singing and La Bohémienne have adjacent entries in Cornelis Hofstede de Groot's 1910 Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century.)Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis (with the assistance of Kurt Freise and Dr Kurt Erasmus); A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, based on the work of John Smith, Volume III; translated from the German and edited by Edward G. Hawke; Macmillan & Co., London; 1910; pp. 32, 33. (On line at archive.org, retrieved 23 June 2024: https://archive.org/details/catalogueraisonn03hofsuoft/page/32/mode/2up?view=theater)
The conventions applying to girls' and women's clothes, hairstyles, and headwear were stern in the Dutch Republic in Hals's time—and particularly so in Haarlem, where Mennonite and Reformed influences were strong. A low neckline, unbound hair, or even too skimpy headwear might attract a chiding or worse. (In this context, Isabella Coymans' fashionable marriage-portrait attire would have been seen as forward in Haarlem.) The catalogue for a London exhibition that also travelled to Washington D.C. and Haarlem in 1989–1990. p. 52.
The art market also expected strict propriety. For instance, the model for Hals's Smiling Fishergirl wears a chemise closed tight up to the throat and a big black bonnet concealing nearly all her hair. This contrasts with the model for Girl Singing, who is bare-headed. The Girl Singing model has her hair tied back loosely in what the early 21st century would call a 'low messy bun'. It seems on the point of coming undone, with strands spilling out in almost every direction. Her chemise comes apart a little at the placket below her collar. That was not the fashion of the time in Haarlem, nor are her loose hair and loose chemise wiles to attract attention—she is just busy singing. But they suggest an enthusiastic singer in action, and they may suggest a domestic, rather than a public, setting: in 1628 a respectable young woman might have preferred not to be seen out and about in Haarlem in such disarray.
Titles and models Hals did not give his paintings titles. The names by which we now know them do not always identify them uniquely, nor do all authors necessarily use the same name for a particular painting. Hofstede de Groot's Catalogue Raisonné lists Girl Singing as "A Girl Singing from a Book". Slive has it as "Singing Girl".
There are reasons to think the models for Girl Singing and Boy Playing the Violin were two of Frans Hals's own children: He had many children, and a Haarlem resident who claimed to have known most of them told Arnold Houbraken they were all keen musicians. Moreover, Hals seldom painted square pictures—but "two square likenesses [specifically conterfeytsels in the original Dutch] of the children of Hals done in Haarlem by [Hals himself]" are recorded in a 1644 inventory. Jaap van der Veen suggests they may well have been the Girl Singing and the Boy Playing the Violin. A chapter in the London and Amsterdam catalogue for an exhibition shown in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin. pp. 38, 40. It has been conjectured that the artist's daughter Sara Hals (baptised 21 February 1617) could have been the model for Girl Singing. If the picture was indeed painted in about 1628, she would have been some 10 or 11 years old at the time. Sara was to prove something of a handfull to manage: after she had twice given birth to a child out of wedlock, her parents had her committed to the same "dolhuys" (a workhouse doubling as an asylum) at which Malle Babbe was an inmate. The catalogue for an exhibition with the same title, at Toledo and in Brussels
The Dutch language of Hals's time conventionally distinguished various categories of painting that featured people. For example, there were commissioned group portraits of "regents", that is: governors of charitable institutions, volunteer officers of city guards, and the like. There were also individual likenesses or portraits (conterfeytsels in the Dutch of the 17th century), which showed a specific person (or sometimes a couple or family) and were typically painted to order for a paying client. See the chapter titled Painting for the Market (passim). See the chapter titled Conterfeytsels en tronies (passim). Unless Hals meant it to be kept in the family (which we do not know), we could think of the Girl Singing as more like a tronie, the term for another category, in which the subject is an expressive, characteristic, or funny generic face (so, not an individual person). Tronies and other genre paintings were intended to be offered on the open art market. A tronie is thus distinct from a likeness (or portrait) in the Dutch analysis and terminology of the time. If money changed hands between the artist and the sitter for a tronie, it was the artist who paid the model. Normally, we cannot tell who the individuals were who modelled for tronies. Often we put names to the relatively wealthy people who sat, and paid, for portraits by Hals. Hals's work includes several examples in each of these three categories (and others).
Style and technique