Dirck Hals and Dirck van Delen together executed this jovial scene, in which elegantly-attired men, women, and children make merry. Hals, who depicted the carousing figures, signed the work, while Van Delen, an acclaimed painter of architecture, rendered the ornate palace setting. The two artists worked in concert on only a handful of panels, making the present painting a rare example of their collaborative endeavors.

Frans Hals’ younger brother, Dirck Hals depicted the more than thirty people (and three dogs) who comprise the convivial party. Together they play games, converse, flirt, eat, and imbibe, while serenaded by a trio of musicians and quartet of singers at right. Unusually for Dutch painters at the time, Hals conceived the lively characters through the production of preparatory drawings. The seated violin player at right, for instance, derives from a study of a man smoking a pipe (fig. 1). Using both chalk studies and oil sketches enabled Hals to replicate, with subtle variation, figures across his compositions. The tric-trac players at far left, for instance, reappear in the ex-Rothschild Tric Trac Players in an Interior, in which they wear different costumes; the expressive treatment of their shimmering silks betrays the influence of the elder Hals on his brother.¹

The palatial Italianate interior was conceived and executed by Dirck van Delen, who specialized in depictions of domestic and church scenes. Van Delen drew inspiration from both contemporary architectural trends and historical architectural pattern books, including Sebastiano Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura, et prospetiva and Hans Vredeman de Vries’ Scenographiae, sive Perspectivae. Organized according to a perspectival framework, van Delen’s imagined interior is conceived almost like a stage set, a backdrop that highlights the actions of the scene’s dramatis personae.

Recent scholarship by Peter Sutton, Helmut Trnek, and Britta Nehlsen-Marten, among others, has shed significant light on Hals and van Delen’s mode of collaborative production. First Van Delen, working directly on the painting’s ground, laid in the architectural structures, leaving passages of reserve for Hals’ figures, which were then added. The two artists implemented this approach in the paintings they produced together in 1628—the present work, Banquet Scene in a Renaissance Hall (Vienna, Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, inv. no. 684), and Festive Company in a Renaissance Room (Private collection, sold Christie's, London, 8 July 2021, lot 22)—the three of which are considered the grandest and most successful of their jointly-painted panels.²

¹ Sold by J.E. Safra, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2011, lot 25.

² The former’s dimensions are identical with those of the present panel; the latter is slightly larger. On the two works, see Sutton 1984, pp. 205-206 and Trnek 1992, pp. 166-170. Hals and van Delen also collaborated on two paintings in 1629: one in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (inv. no. NGI.119) and another formerly in the collection of Sir Cecil Newman, Burloes Royston.