Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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John Hayls (1600 - 1679) was an English Baroque era painter. He is mentioned in the diary of Samuel Pepys where he is referred to as "Hales".
Extract from Pepys diary, 17 March 1666:
- ...at noon, home to dinner, and presently with my wife out to Hales's, where I am still infinitely pleased with my wife's picture. I paid him 14l for it, and 25s for the frame, and I think it is not a whit too dear for so good a picture. It is not yet quite finished and dry, so as to be fit to bring home yet. This day I begin to sit, and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture. He promises it shall be as good as my wife's, and I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by.
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Annotations
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There are 2 people referred to as “Mr. Hales” (or “Hales”) in this diary: all references from February 14, 1666 on to “Hales” or “Mr. Hales” are to the painter John Hayls.
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Pardon the self-follow-up:
Samuel paid 14 pounds for each portrait by *Hayls*, compared to 30 pounds for the miniature of his wife by Cooper.
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Not too high an opinion of Hayls
“Among his [artist Peter Lely’s] contemporaries there are four who deserve particular attention, [John] Hayls, [Gerard] Soest, [Joseph] Wright, and [Jacob] Huysmans. …
“Probably the oldest of these, and certainly the least important, is Hayls. He only comes alive to us in the pages of Pepys’s *Diary,* and the portrait of ‘Pepys’ in the National Portrait Gallery [London] is certainly a version of one he was painting in 1666.” Two portraits of the younger children of Montague Bertie, second Earl of Lindsey (Charles and Bridget), are attributed to him. They were painted around 1653. “[T]here is some likelihood, from a source in one of Richard Symonds’s notebooks, that Hayls was in Rome in 1651. Other early attributions to Hayls remain puzzling.”
— Ellis Waterhouse, “Painting in Britain 1530-1790,” 4th edition, 1978, pp. 100-101 (The Pelican History of Art series)
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{Not too high an opinion of Hayls}
Pepys agrees with that estimation of Hales’s relative merits as a painter, in the diary entry of March 25, 1667:
“Called at Mr. Lilly’s, who was working; and indeed his pictures are without doubt much beyond Mr. Hales’s… .”
“Mr. Lilly” is the portrait-painter we know as Peter Lely.
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Gaunt and bills of mortality and the art of beggar ing.http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Graunt/3.html
Of Particular Casualties.
1. MY first Observation is, That few are starved. This appears, for that of the 229250 which have died, we find not above fifty one to have been starved, excepting helpless Infants at Nurse, which being caused rather by carelessness, ignorance, and infirmity of the Milch-women, is not properly an effect, or sign of want of food in the Countrey, or of means to get it.
2. The Observation, which I shall add hereunto, is, That the vast numbers of Beggars, swarming up and down this City, do all live, and seem to be most of them healthy and strong; whereupon I make this Question, Whether, since they do all live by Begging, that is, without any kind of labour; it were not better for the State to keep them, even although they earned nothing; that so they might live regularly, and not in that Debauchery, as many Beggars do; and that they might be cured of their bodily Impotencies, or taught to work, &c. each according to his condition, and capacity; or by being employed in some work (not better undone) might be accustomed, and fitted for labour. -
John Graunt is here: http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/2630.php
References in the diary
None