Malle Babbe

About this work

Artist

Frans Hals (1582–1666)

Year

c. 1633–1635

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

78.50 × 66.20 cm

Collection

Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Movement

Dutch Golden Age

A woman in a plain white cap sits at the corner of a table, gripping a pewter tankard with its lid thrown open, her head turned sharply to the left in a burst of laughter, and an owl perched on her shoulder. An inscription on the back, probably from the seventeenth century, names her as Malle Babbe van Haerlem, and archival research in Haarlem has identified her as Barbara Claes, a woman of the town who died in 1663 and spent years in the workhouse outside the walls. Hals painted her around 1633 to 1635 with the loose, slashing brushwork he reserved for such half-length figures, somewhere between a portrait and a genre picture; the owl recalls the Dutch saying about being as drunk as an owl. The picture was long mistitled the Witch of Haarlem. Courbet copied it in Munich in 1869. It belongs to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.