Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull is a name for an untitled figurative painting by Frans Hals in the permanent collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Hals was a male 17th-century Dutch master specialising in portraits and other pictures of people. He probably painted this early work at Haarlem in about 1610 to 1614, although the authoritative writers' views vary slightly concerning the date. The sitter has not been identified. VanHees,MissC.A.with Slive, Seymour: Frans Hals 1962. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, on the occasion of the centenary of that city's municipal museum, 1862–1962. Published by the Frans Hals Museum. See p. 25, Catalogue, item 1. (C.A. van Hees later published more research about Hals as C.A. de Goederen-van Hees.) Cornelis, Bart (and others), Frans Hals. Catalogue for the 2023–2024 Frans Hals exhibition at the National Gallery in London and the similar 2024 exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Published by National Gallery Global, London, in association with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. ISBN 9781857097122. See pp. 84ff (Portraiture into Art, by Bart Cornelis) and 212 (List of Exhibited Works, by Tamar van Riessen with Justine Rinnooy Kan).
The sitter wears a neat full beard and is dressed in black with a white ruff and white cuffs. The subject was 60 when Hals painted this picture of him. The skull in his cupped left hand is a memento mori, a reminder that we all must die. The painting is generally agreed to be one of a pair of pendant marriage portraits; Hals's matching portrait of this sitter's wife, who is also unidentified, hangs at Chatsworth House. The catalogue for a London exhibition that also travelled to Washington, D.C., and Haarlem in 1989–1990. See pp. 133–137.Reuniting 400-year-old marriage portraits. A 10-minute video published by the National Gallery, London, on 30 September 2023. It is in the "Behind the Scenes with Conservation" series on the National Gallery's website. Larry Keith (Head of Conservation and Keeper at the National Gallery), Alice Martin (Head of the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House), and Bart Cornelis (Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the National Gallery) discuss the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull and its pendant Portrait of a Woman Standing, and the cleaning and conservation work that was being done on them in preparation for the 2023–2024 Frans Hals Exhibition at the National Gallery. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/behind-the-scenes/behind-the-scenes-in-conservation-reuniting-400-year-old-marriage-portraits. Retrieved 2 December 2025. (Elsewhere on line, the video is published as What were Frans Hals' earliest paintings?)
Description The work depicts a man shown three-quarter length, his head and body turned three-quarters towards the right of the frame (that is, towards his left) while he looks straight at the artist—or at us. His look is stern but engaging. When Hals painted him, the subject was 60 (Latin "ætat suæ 60" in the legend below the miniature gonfalon in the top-right corner of the painting).
Conventionally, the companion portrait of his wife would hang to the right of the husband's portrait, and this man's stance relates to her presence there. We can see both his hands: in his left he holds a skull (which, like the sitter, would be "looking at us" if we imagine ourselves positioned in front of and between the two pendant portraits as they hang side by side); with his right hand he gestures towards the skull, and perhaps also towards the conspicuously heavy golden chain his wife wears at her waist.
Composition Our eye is drawn from the hands and skull along the straight diagonal line of the subject's left arm towards his head, which for emphasis stands a little proud of that line.
The man is posed well forward in his portrait, filling the panel from top to bottom and, in the lower part, almost from side to side. (Compare his wife, who is positioned a little further back in her portrait.) His straight-backed stance is quite formal in comparison with many of Hals's later works. Also, in later portraits Hals would often position the subject's head further from the top of the picture for a more approachable look. (Compare the other works, including the pendant pairs of portraits, illustrated in Wikipedia's List of paintings by Frans Hals.)
Materials; cradle; conservation The Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull is painted in oils on a panel that measures some 94x73cm (heightxwidth)—a convenient size for it to hang together with its similarly sized pendant in, for instance, the substantial canal house of a Dutch regent. The panel is made from a single, unusually broad plank of oak that is free of any joins. Its grain exactly mirrors that of the similarly sized panel on which Hals painted the pendant Portrait of a Woman Standing; husband and wife are on "bookmatched" his-and-hers panels from the same part of the same tree.
At some time probably in the 19th or early 20th century, the back of the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull was cradled to keep the painted surface flat (an irreversible practice now no longer favoured by conservators).
In 2023, Larry Keith cleaned and conserved both the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull and its pendant Portrait of a Woman Standing in London at the National Gallery, in preparation for the Frans Hals exhibition which opened there that year.
Background The background of the painting is a greyish brown; dark on the left, a little lighter to the right. It is featureless apart from the little gonfalon and some text adjacent to it. The angle at which the gonfalon hangs suggests that it is mounted on a receding wall. The heraldic badge on the gonfalon appears to represent the white Saxon Steed device in the arms and flag of the Twente region in the east of the Netherlands (but see the discussion of the sitter's identity, below). If the badge is indeed meant to show a Saxon Steed, Hals has eschewed the usual bright red field: perhaps the red would have been too distracting in the otherwise plain background. The text around the gonfalon includes not only the sitter's age, but also a dour Latin warning: "ita mori"—this is what becomes of us after we die (presumably referring to the skull).
Light and colour The quite bright light in the picture falls across the sitter's face as if from a tall window to the left of the frame, as is often the case in Hals's portraits. (Compare the illustrations in Wikipedia's List of paintings by Frans Hals.) The light picks out significant elements in the otherwise subdued whole: the head (with extra emphasis and separation from the body supplied by the ruff), the gesturing right hand, and the skull. For the rest, in this portrait as in many of his others, Hals deploys a nearly monochromatic, mostly dark, palette in which black and dark grey tones dominate. (This is the catalogue of the 2021 exhibition at the Wallace.)
Clothes and grooming The sitter wears a black doublet which has lustrous dark grey or black sleeves with a simple diagonal pattern resembling modern diamond plate, apparently in a damask weave. The doublet buttons are tightly spaced. Parallel to the buttons runs a row of little black beads, possibly of jet or glass. They catch the light, as do more such ornaments at the man's shoulder. The man wears a black belt with a silver buckle at his right hip and a simple silver coupling at the navel. His plain white batiste ruff is starched but relatively relaxed in form and size, as are his short wavy cuffs. (Compare, for example, the more elaborate clothes in Hals's 1625 portrait of Jacob Pieterszoon Olycan.) He wears his hair and his full beard short, and he wears no hat. The particular style of ruff and the trim of the beard were fashionable in the early 1610s; compare Rubens's group portrait of Jan Brueghel the Elder with his family from about 1613–1615.
When Hals painted the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull, black attire was popular among male merchants, professionals, ecclesiastics, and magistrates in the Dutch Republic (where commerce, the sciences, and the arts were beginning to flourish in the Twelve Years' Truce). Black was chic, evoking seriousness, religiosity, and restrained sobriety, and Hals would become famous for his masterly handling of black clothes. (This is the catalogue of the 2021 exhibition at the Wallace.) As Vincent van Gogh enthused 260 years later in a letter to his brother Theo: "Frans Hals heeft wel zeven en twintig zwarten" (Frans Hals must have twenty-seven shades of black). (At margin note 2r:5)
Identity of the subject Hals did not give his works titles, and there is no known record of this portrait from Hals's time. Nonetheless, the sitter might yet be identifiable by way of the arms on the portrait in combination with circumstantial evidence from civic or church records of marriages and the like. If the white horse in the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull is meant to be a Saxon Steed, it could point to a connection with Twente or with any of various places in Germany. Compare, for instance, the Wikipedia article on the Saxon Steed. There is also a heraldic badge in the pendant Portrait of a Woman Standing (which is however obscure and which, in the early 20th century, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot reported as having been repainted).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. For the Portrait of a Woman Standing, see page 110 (no. 382). (On line at archive.org, retrieved 7 December 2025: https://archive.org/details/catalogueraisonn03hofsuoft/page/110/) Note that Hofstede de Groot does not include the Portrait of a Man Holding a Skull in the Catalogue Raisonné and dates the Portrait of a Woman Standing to about 1630–1635.
Date; place in Hals's œuvre