Bart: No no, because it is a crazy portrait.
Really, I mean, but I didn't want to put it like that. It's especially the sort of
monstrous figure and the skull that of course caught our attention, and we had to wonder what
could that possibly be? Larry: Well the picture kind of bumps up against our preconceived notions of what
a Hals should look like. He might have other ideas for us. We don't know yet! Bart: I'm Bart Cornelis,
the Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings at the National Gallery, and also curator of
this large monographic exhibition devoted to Frans Halls. Well, we included Isaac Massa in the
exhibition because it is, for starters, one of the best portraits by Frans Hals that we know, one
of the most striking ones. One of the things that we've often wondered about with this picture is
his pose, where he's got his arms across his chest, which is a very peculiar pose and it's often
been said that it sort of prefigures the way maybe 19th century artists would have painted
a person. So it was always seen as a peculiar pose to begin with. So we felt it was important
to include portraits of Isaac Massa partly because Isaac Massa clearly brought out the best in
Frans Hals. This very relaxed sort of attitude in these portraits. We decided that we would love
to have, you know, a whole wall if you want of portraits of Isaac Massa. The double portrait from
the Rijksmuseum, the one from Chatsworth in that very peculiar pose with his arms across his chest
and another one where he sits backwards on a chair, but which by the way is probably the first time
an artist ever painted someone sitting backwards on a chair. Also because Isaac Massa was clearly a
friend of Frans Hals. We know that because he he was a witness to the baptism of one of Hals'
children and that's something you would likely give to someone you knew fairly well.
That also might explain his very casual pose, which, if you know someone that well, you might
go to that length, to do that kind of thing, and take that liberty really. Larry: That in itself is
very interesting when you see the same artist painting somebody over time in different ways. Bart: While we were restoring the picture it turned out that the background -- you know, he sits in this
oval -- but the background to the portrait was actually over-painted. When the restorer
had this hunch that there was something underneath the paint, we used infrared reflectography
to go behind the painting, as it were. That's one way of looking through the upper layers
and see what is actually visible, what is there underneath the visible layers, and it turned out
that there were indeed all sorts of things going on over the shoulder of this figure.
It's any fascinating that you were able to sort of discern there was something underneath
there, before, you know, we even did any kind of technical photography. Paul: Yeah I mean there are
some bits of impasto which relate to the lion or gargoyle head. These little elements
here always kind of shone through. Those pale patches. So there was something, some evidence of
something being there. Bart: You can see that there's two heads over his left shoulder, as well as a
scroll coming down from his other shoulder, and a coat of arms. So that's the beauty of these techniques, that we could not only see those shapes, but we could even identify in some
cases which colours they would have been through XRF imaging. But it's especially the
sort of monstrous figure and the skull that of course caught our attention, and we had to
wonder, what could that possibly be? And it's interesting because it's bound up also with the
identity of the sitter. It was often thought it was Isaac Massa, but not everyone was equally certain
it was him. But these details actually helped us to identify him with certainty as Isaac Massa,
because what this is, this monstrous figure over his shoulder, she's clearly a personification
of Envy. Envy is traditionally snakes for hair, and not only that, she holds, as you can see in other
images, images that identify the pigment red, she holds a heart in front of her mouth. And
that's exactly what Envy does. It essentially still exists in the English language when we say 'eat
your heart out'. Envy, jealousy. And then next with a skeleton. Now what has that to do with Isaac Massa,
is the question. He's a very interesting person he was, you know, he was a grain merchant. A very
well-to-do grain merchant. He spent many years in Moscow. Larry: Yeah, he was a broker with the Imperial
Court, wasn't he, really? Bart: Yes, and grain then as now was one of the largest exports
from Russia. Larry: A lot of what we know about Russia at the time comes from him. Bart: It comes from him because he
talks in, he writes about the 'The Troubles' as the Russians refer to them in Russia. And so that
was Isaac Massa. Now there were quite a few other merchants active in Russia as
well, and when we looked into his biography it's quite clear that he had many detractors. People
who thought that this young upstart was doing too well, essentially, and in fact they went a
bit further, and they said that he was disingenuous, and that his mixture
of official business and trade was questionable. It's neither here nor there whether there's
any truth in that. The thing is that those noises were made. Isaac Massa was
obsessed with the idea that there were other people who were not happy with what he was doing in his sort of diplomatic role. Their jealousy is, as it were, personified in this portrait through
the image of Envy, and then there's a skull next to it, and then we had to look into that, because why
would there be a skull next to Envy? And the answer to that lies in an emblem book that shows how Envy
is being trampled by Death. Death in the shape of a skeleton. And the caption to that emblem,
which is exactly from the right period, and could have been known to Hals quite
easily, it explains that only Death overcomes or Envy, essentially. So that's the message that
Isaac Massa really wanted to send in this painting to his audience, that, you know, you
can slander me all you like, because that's how he viewed it, but death will in the end put an end to it. It's
a peculiar message to send in a portrait really, because on the one hand you say you can slander
me all you like, I don't care and yet on the other hand, you take the effort, you make the effort to
have all that portrayed in your portrait, all those elements there. You clearly do
care. It's also interesting to note that the figure of Envy is clearly after an engraving that would
have been available to Frans Hals. An engraving by Goltzius. If you flip the engraving so that
it's the other way around, you see a very clear connection with the figure of Envy, even including
the sort of wavy snake hair that comes from behind the skull. That's how the portrait would
originally have looked, it's a very, I don't know really any other examples of that
particular sort of very specific iconography where a sitter clearly requests, because this
wouldn't have been Frans Hals' own invention, this would have been something that the sitter [Isaac Massa] would
have requested, and it's very peculiar iconography for a portrait. It was probably painted out quite
early, on possibly after Isaac Massa's death in 1643, when his descendants may have thought,
'well, we don't particularly want to look at our father, or grandfather, in this particular
circumstances and we'd rather have just a portrait'. And it was overpainted early on so
there was also no question that we would remove it. The paint that's used for the over-paint is
indistinguishable really from any other 17th century paint, and there's no reason to think
that it wasn't applied early on. And so that's the the fascinating story
behind this portrait that we have and that we, through these elements that
we see in the background, can also be certain that we're looking at a portrait
of Isaac Massa, which had been doubted by some.
