St Matthew

Painting

The painting shows St. Matthew sitting at a desk reading with an angel at his elbow. This painting was documented in the 18th-century but was considered lost until the 1950s, when two tronies were discovered languishing in the storerooms of the Odessa 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 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 photo of Hals' Two singing boys with a lute and a music book to show that his theme of a main subject with a secondary witness was common to many of Hals' paintings of the 1620s and the models as secondary witness in these two paintings were clearly cousins.

Two singing boys and Matthew:

The four evangelists by Hals: