摘要：The Portrait of Frans Hals at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a storied history. Part of the bequest of Michael Friedsam in 1931, it entered the collection as a self-portrait, in keeping with a series of publications by Wilhelm Valentiner from the 1920s. It was dethroned as the principaal , however, by none other than Valentiner himself upon his discovery of a version purchased by Dr. G. H. A. Clowes of Indianapolis in 1935. Since Seymour Slive’s monograph of 1970–74, however, the Clowes panel has suffered a similar fate, having been declared the best surviving version after a lost original. This article reviews the successive attributions of these two panels, examining them as a means of contextualizing practices in connoisseurship, knowledge of Hals’s workshop, and the functions of the self-portrait across the twentieth century. Furthermore, it incorporates Walter Liedtke’s treatment of the Met’s painting in the 2007 collection catalogue, in which he presented new observations on the group that offer future directions for research. This essay aims not only to explore the fascinating historiography of a lesser-known painting in the Metropolitan’s collection as a study in the vicissitudes of connoisseurship but also to expand the discourse surrounding self-portraits beyond Rembrandt to include the other chief portraitist of seventeenth-century Holland, Frans Hals
