''St. Luke'' is an oil-on-canvas painting by the
Dutch Golden Age painter
Dutch Golden Age painting is the painting of the Dutch Golden Age, a period in Dutch history roughly spanning the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) for Dutch independence.
The new Dutch Repub ...
Frans Hals
Frans Hals the Elder (, , ; – 26 August 1666) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, chiefly of individual and group portraits and of genre works, who lived and worked in Haarlem.
Hals played an important role in the evolution of 17th-century group ...
, painted in 1625 and now in the
Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art.
Painting
The painting shows St. Luke sitting at a desk reading with an ox at his elbow.
[De evangelist Lucas]
in record for this painting in the RKD
The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD (Dutch: RKD-Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis), previously Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), is located in The Hague and is home to the largest art history center i ...
This painting was documented in the 18th century but was considered lost until the 1950s, when two
tronies
A tronie is a type of work common in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression. These works were not intended as portraits but as studies of expression, type, physiognom ...
were discovered languishing in the storerooms of the Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art in 1958 by art historian Irina Linnik. At the time they were considered to be by unknown 19th-century painters, but Linnik recognized them as the work of a 17th-century master and eventually traced their history back to the 17th century, identifying them as two of four lost paintings by Hals of the evangelists, namely Luke and Matthew. After her work was published in 1959, the two paintings were included in the 1962 Frans Hals exhibition in the
Frans Hals Museum
The Frans Hals Museum is a museum located in Haarlem, the Netherlands.
The museum was established in 1862. In 1950, the museum was split in two locations when the collection of modern art was moved to the '' Museum De Hallen'' (since 2018 called ...
. The international attention helped to spur art detectives and eventually the other two of John and Mark were also rediscovered.
In his 1989 catalog of the international Frans Hals exhibition, Slive included a detail of Hals' ''
'' with the head of
Johan Damius to show that he was the probable model for St. Luke, though with a bit less hair.
[ ''Frans Hals'', by ]Seymour Slive
Seymour Slive (September 15, 1920 – June 14, 2014) was an American art historian, who served as director of the Harvard Art Museums from 1975 to 1984. Slive was a scholar of Dutch art, specifically of the artists Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Ja ...
as editor, with contributions by Pieter Biesboer
Pieter Biesboer (born 1944), is a Dutch art historian and prolific writer on 17th-century Dutch art. His specialty is art from Haarlem.
Career
Biesboer was a curator at Stedelijk Museum het Prinsenhof in Delft during the years 1973-1976. Bie ...
, Martin Bijl, Karin Groen and Ella Hendriks, Michael Hoyle, Frances S. Jowell, Koos Levy-van Halm and Liesbeth Abraham, Bianca M. Du Mortier, Irene van Thiel-Stroman, page 195, Prestel-Verlag, Munich & Mercatorfonds, Antwerp, 1989,
Damius and Luke:
File:Frans Hals - detail of St. Luke.jpg, ''St. Luke''
File:Frans Hals - Banquet of the Officers of the St Hadrian Civic Guard Company - WGA11092 detail 01.jpg, Johan Damius
The four evangelists by Hals:
File:Frans Hals 086 WGA version.jpg, ''St. Luke''
File:Frans Hals - St Matthew - Museum of Western European and Oriental Art, Odessa.jpg, ''St. Matthew
Matthew the Apostle,, shortened to ''Matti'' (whence ar, مَتَّى, Mattā), meaning "Gift of YHWH"; arc, , Mattai; grc-koi, Μαθθαῖος, ''Maththaîos'' or , ''Matthaîos''; cop, ⲙⲁⲧⲑⲉⲟⲥ, Mattheos; la, Matthaeus a ...
''
Frans Hals 085.jpg, '' St. Mark''
File:Frans Hals 087.jpg, '' St. John''
See also
*
List of paintings by Frans Hals
The following is an incomplete list of paintings by Frans Hals that are generally accepted as autograph by the Frans Hals Museum and other sources. The list is more or less in order of creation, starting from around 1610 when Frans Hals began pai ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Saint Luke (Hals)
Paintings by Frans Hals
Ukrainian art
1625 paintings
Paintings in Ukraine
Hals
Books in art
Cattle in art