Boy Playing the Violin

Around 1628 Frans Hals painted this little panel as one half of a pair, a boy with a violin beside a girl singing. Where the two spent their first centuries is not known for certain. Their history becomes firm in 1893, when they were with a London dealer and then with Charles Tyson Yerkes, the Chicago streetcar magnate. After his death they were sold together in New York in 1910, and they went on as a pair through private collections in North America, a family in Illinois for most of the 20th century, then collectors in Montreal, then Jordan and Thomas Saunders, who lent them to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. In 2025 they came up at Sotheby's in New York and were bought jointly by the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Mauritshuis in The Hague, which take turns showing them.