Family Reunited In Hals Painting In Toledo
Portraits of the Van Campen family, painted by Frans Hals in around 1623, will be reunited for the first time in centuries in an exhibition opening in the US, thanks to the efforts of conservators. The discovery of the figure of a small girl during the cleaning of a work at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels, led experts to determine that three portraits from different international collections once formed one large work. The travelling show Frans Hals Portraits: a Family Reunion, which has just opened at the Toledo Museum of Art (until 6 January 2019), brings together two works that have long been accepted as being parts of the same painting—the Ohio institution’s Van Campen Family Portrait in a Landscape (around 1623-25) and the recently restored and renamed Children of the Van Campen Family with a Goat-Cart from the Brussels museum—with the Head of a Boy, a much smaller portrait, now in a private collection.
