The Story
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. 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.
Executed in Oil on canvas, measuring 86.5 × 70.7 cm (34 1/4 × 27 13/16 in.); Framed: 107 × 91.4 × 6.4 cm (42 1/8 × 36 × 2 1/2 in.), the surface rewards close looking. Frans Hals builds the composition through layered glazes and a tightly controlled palette, letting cool shadows recede so that the warm, lit passages step forward. The brushwork shifts from the precise to the almost dissolved — a hallmark of mature Baroque practice.
“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”
