Frans Hals or Not Frans Hals : Connoisseurship, Technical Analyses and Digital Tools

Frans Hals is hailed as one of the three greatest painters of the Dutch seventeenth century along with Rembrandt and Vermeer. Of all seventeenth-century Dutch painters, Frans Hals is also the most controversial in as far as the exact scope of his oeuvre is concerned. Hals’s popularity, the lack of technical reference material as well as the differing views among experts as to the exact scope of his oeuvre make works in his style prone to doubts and misattributions. It has led to fierce debates and legal battles about the attribution of paintings done in his style.
In this Open Access book, experts from Ghent University, Leiden University, Amsterdam University, Delft University of Technology, the Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem), the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), the Gemäldegalerie (Berlin) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) give surprising new insights into some of Hals’s most well-known paintings as well as into some of the most fiercely contested pictures in his style. Their insights result from in-depth study of a wealth of reference material: seventeenth-century sources, advanced technical analyses and newly developed digital visualisation tools.

“Tummers and Erdmann have produced a work of ground-breaking new scholarship. They combine in-depth art historical study with new technical analyses and data visualisation tools in order to solve current issues in the attribution of paintings by Frans Hals. This book significantly sharpens our understanding of Hals’s virtuoso work process, his characteristic workshop practice, and his notion of authenticity. The rich data gathered for the case studies will be useful for a next generation of art historians and connoisseurs: digital tools enhance the human eye in matters of attribution.”
Prof. Thijs Weststeijn, Professor of Art History before 1800, Utrecht University

"Tummers bravely interrogates the history of connoisseurship and the seemingly never-ending search for attributions of paintings associated with Frans Hals. A series of well-chosen case studies of paintings rigorously subjected to the most current means of examination and scientific imaging by leading experts in the field extends our understanding of Hals, his manner of painting, and the possibilities for aligning traditional connoisseurship with technical studies and techniques. In the process, this book thoughtfully probes the merits, challenges, and potential of 21st-century digital tools alongside the role of visual analysis."
Christopher D.M. Atkins, Van Otterloo-Weatherbie Director of the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Prof. Dr. Anna Tummers is Professor of Early Modern Art History at Ghent University. Her research focuses on connoisseurship, forgeries, art theory, early modern cultural history, the technical analysis of paintings, and digital tools for art analysis.  She is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project ARTDETECT: A New Connoisseurship: Smart Ways to Detect Forgeries (ERC Consolidator Grant 101088056, 2024-2028).

Previously, she worked as a research assistant in the Print Room, The Royal Library at Windsor Castle, England (1999-2000), as an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (2000-2003), as an assistant professor in training and part-time lecturer at the University of Amsterdam (2003-2008), as a curator of Old Master paintings at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem (2008-2020), and as a lecturer in Early Modern Art and Art Theory at Leiden University (2020-2023). She has led and co-led two Dutch Research Council (NWO) projects on Frans Hals attribution issues, evaluating various technical research methods and data visualisation tools: Frans Hals or not Frans Hals (2016-2018) and 21st Century Connoisseurship (2018-2022, co-led with Prof. Robert Erdmann). She has published twelve books and more than 250 articles and catalogue entries.

Prof. dr. Robert G. Erdmann - Prior to earning his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2006, Robert Erdmann started a science and engineering software company and worked extensively on solidification and multiscale transport modeling at Sandia National Laboratories. He subsequently joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in the Program in Applied Mathematics and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor, where he worked on multiscale material process modeling and image processing for cultural heritage. In 2011 he was named University of Arizona Teacher of the Year and was named a Faculty Teaching Fellow. After a 2013 Resident Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, he moved permanently to Amsterdam in 2014 to focus full time on combining materials science, imaging science, and computer science to help the world access, understand, and preserve its cultural heritage. From 2014 to 2024 he was Senior Scientist at the Rijksmuseum. Since 2014 he has also been Full Professor of Conservation Science in the Faculties of Science and of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. He is a recipient of the Europa Nostra Award (Grand Prix), the highest prize for cultural heritage in the European Union for work on the Bosch Research and Conservation Project. He is the inventor of the “Curtain Viewer” visualization technique and has done extensive work applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to huge datasets in cultural heritage, including the creation of a 717 gigapixel image of Rembrandt’s Night Watch.

With Contributions by:

Andrei Anisimov

Silvia Centeno

Joris Dik

Nouchka De Keyser

Roger Groves

Babette Hartwieg

Erma Hermens

Katja Kleinert

Annelies van Loon

Dorothy Mahon

Claudia Laurenze-Landsberg

Vassilis Papadakis

Arie Wallert

Marie-Noelle Grison