TERBRUGGHEN, Hendrick

The artist worked mainly in Utrecht, but spent about ten years in Rome from about 1604-1614 where, like several other Dutch painters, he became versed in the style and subject matter of Caravaggio and his followers. Ter Brugghen was, in fact, the first of the Dutch artists to return to the north where, together with Baburen and Honthorst, he helped to establish the tenebrist style. Although no doubt based on one of the itinerant musicians who travelled in the Netherlands at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the subject is most probably an allegory of the senses of Hearing (the bass viol) and Taste (the glass). It is also possible that the artist is illustrating the theme of vanitas whereby the brevity of song is equated with a short life-span. A number of paintings in ter Brugghen’s oeuvre explore such subjects, but only one other (known through a copy) includes a bass viol. On the other hand, the model, the vividly coloured costume and the cap are standard studio properties used by the artist during the 1620s. Benedict Nicolson noted the forced smile of the sitter, comparing it to ‘that thrown by the politician to his constituents’ in ‘a joyless wish to please’. The breadth of the handling of the paint contrasts with the drawing which is most fastidious. An important element, however, is the treatment of the light, which in its emotive power is decidedly Caravaggesque, but in its descriptive qualities anticipates later seventeenth-century Dutch painting.

The painting is signed upper left: HTBrugghen fecit 1625 [HTB in monogram]. Purchased by Charles I and sold after his execution, the picture was in the possession of Sir Peter Lely at the time of the Restoration and was returned to the Royal Collection. It was cleaned in 1989.

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Lodovico Viadana: La Bergamasca

Hendrick ter Brugghen was a highly original painter. He was probably born in Utrecht, where he was a pupil of the Mannerist history painter, Abraham Bloemaert. Having learnt the basic skills of his craft in Bloemaert’s workshop, he set off for an extended stay in Italy, a practice which was quite usual among Dutch artists - and especially those from the Catholic city of Utrecht - in the early seventeenth century. Ter Brugghen seems to have been based in Rome. It was a time of hectic activity and experiment: the young painter from Utrecht studied the work of the Carracci, Domenichino and Guido Reni, but the artist who was to have the most profound effect on him was Caravaggio, who fled from Rome after killing a man in 1606 and died four years later at Porto Ercole.

Caravaggio’s powerful, even shocking, naturalism and his dramatic use of bold highlights and deep shadows particularly excited the young ter Brugghen. After Caravaggio’s death; his revolutionary style was adopted and developed in the direction of more decorative effects by a group of Italian followers, among them Orazio Gentileschi and Bartolomeo Manfredi. Ter Brugghen was arguably the leading member of a group of young Utrecht artists who were profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio and his Italian followers: they have been collectively christened the Dutch Caravaggisti. Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirk van Baburen followed the same route as ter Brugghen and had the same transforming experience. Together they fashioned a new type of history painting which was to change the course of large-scale narrative painting in the north and, in particular, affect Rembrandt’s treatment of biblical subjects.

Ter Brugghen was the first of the Dutch Garavaggisti to return home and bring the gospel of Caravaggism to the Netherlands: he was back in Utrecht by 1615. He died young, in 1629, but in the years after his return from Italy he developed a striking and original manner of painting and range of subject-matter. Following the example of Gentileschi and Manfredi, he painted half-length figures of drinkers and musicians, of which the Bagpipe Player is an outstanding example. He also painted more ambitious multifigured secular subjects, such as The Concert (London, National Gallery) of about 1626, based on Italian Caravaggesque prototypes. In The Concert he brings to an existing format of half-length figures gathered together around a flickering candle, a striking fluency in modelling the soft edges of his forms and a remarkable subtlety of palette - which includes light blues, lemon, purple and cerise.

A pleasant-looking young soldier from the military barracks, sword on arm, is lighting his pipe from a candle which he has lifted out of the sconce in front of him. Two bright spheres of light are thrown over his face and shirt. The subject chosen by the artist is so simple, and at first sight so unambitious, that a contemporary viewer accustomed to formulas may well have sought for some abstruse meaning hidden beneath the apparent slightness of the theme. But the work demands no interpretation, only an appreciation of the episode depicted, and this simplicity is of pioneer significance in the development of genre painting. We learn from this picture that in Dutch genre it was not only everyday objects that came to be acceptable as subjects for paintings but also the unconscious and instinctive actions of men and women.

Terbrugghen was a Dutch follower of Caravaggio and this is manifested by this painting, too.

In his genre paintings, Terbrugghen, instead of using small figures in a spatious setting, as his contemporaries did, concentrated (following the style of Caravaggio) on one or only a few figures, mostly life-size, seen close to and strongly outlined against a plain background. What these pictures shared, however, with those of the contemporaries, was the moral content.

The actual meaning of the Flute Player is difficult to establish, it might be an illustration of Hearing, as one of the Five Senses.

There are two related paintings by Terbrugghen in the Kassel Museum: Boy Playing a Fife, and Boy Playing a Recorder. These two paintings can be seen as an early and original appropriation of Caravaggio’s realism, which had made such an impression on Terbrugghen when he spent some years in Rome. Back in Utrecht, he became the leading figure among the so-called Caravaggisti who came to dominate the artistic life of the northern Netherlands after 1620. These two paintings already demonstrate the artist’s abilities, with the subtle tonal grading of bodies and dress giving the figures materiality and three-dimensionality.

Terbrugghen conceived of the two boys as a complementary pair, and although they play similar instruments, they embody opposites. The boy with the fife, in striped soldier’s costume, represents the urban and military, while the other, in shepherd’s dress, represents the rural and arcadian. The cool blue of the one painting confronts the warm hues of the other.

Terbrugghen’s two half-length pictures of flute players at Kassel are outstanding examples of the breadth, force and beauty of his pictorial manner. They are also among earliest life-size, half-length Dutch paintings of musicians, a motif that quickly became a staple of Utrecht painters and soon entered the repertoire of other Dutch artists. Terbrugghen made more intricate pictures than the Kassel companion pieces, but he never surpassed their poetic Arcadian mood and delicacy. The effect o f the dark-shadowed flute player before a bright wall in the background is an anticipation of an essential pictorial theme of the Delft School.

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Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for recorder in A minor

Hendrick Terbrugghen spent his formative years in Rome where Caravaggio became the main influence. Upon his return he became the prime mover of a new school, the Utrecht Caravaggists, whose trademark style was an insistent naturalism combined with a high-contrast vein of painting known as chiaroscuro.

The Greek philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus were considered to be polar opposites. In contrast to the old, melancholy Heraclitus (the pendant of the painting), Democritus appears as a young, laughing hedonist. He points to the distance, as though that is where the folly of mankind is found. Together, the pair of paintings conveys a moralizing message: whether you laugh or cry, the world remains incurably foolish.

Engravings portraying young men playing lutes in the company of young women were created with various texts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As part of a series depicting the five senses, such couples may have referred to Hearing; they may also have symbolized sanguine temperament, or, in some cases, “earth” from among the four elements, or the age of twenty. In each case, however, the common factors are youth, earthiness and full-bloodedness; these have been depicted since the Middle Ages, and all had to do with love: “Learn to play the lute and the spinet, The strings can caress the heart!” advised the poet Jacob Westerbaen (Gedichte II, The Hague, 1672). The lute often appeared on the cover illustration of hymnbooks as an erotic symbol, or as the attribute of Voluptas or Luxuria.

It is thus very likely that the ornamental, double-stringed lute with its large rosette appears in Terbrugghen’s painting to express a similar idea.

In the painting of this Caravaggist artist from Utrecht the singing youths are characterized by exuberant gaiety, fully matured bodies and bright colours. The unusually colourful clothes, however, do not seem to be in accord with the fashions of the contemporary Dutch bourgeoisie. They resemble the dress of Burgundian actors from the previous century; thus they emphasize the “Bohemian” character of the two figures. The feathered beret, which was commonly used to indicate sensuality, bears special attention. The low-cut dress of the young woman is also a hint: an Amsterdam iconographic text from the sixteenth century prescribes a similar dress to express indecency. This must have been intended as a moralizing element in this otherwise rather tempting, happy scene, as these frivolous-looking paintings were always created with the aim of teaching a moral lesson.

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Francesco da Milano: Tre fantasie for lute

This Caravaggesque painting depicts the moment when Esau returns home tired and hungry after a day in the fields. There he finds his brother Jacob eating a stew. Through hunger and exhaustion he accepts Jacob’s proposal that he should sell him his birthright in exchange for the lentil stew. The two brothers are placed in the foreground on either side of the plate of stew, while behind them are their parents, Sarah and Isaac.

In addition to the paintings by Caravaggio, Terbrugghen was also inspired by Northern imagery from the sixteenth century and by the subject matter and figure style of his contemporary, Dirck van Baburen. The two artists probably shared a studio in Utrecht, and around 1620 both artists produced series of genre scenes with single figures - musicians, singers, smokers and drinkers. These genre scenes were often produced in pairs.

Terbrugghen’s figures have often been interpreted as allegories of the Five Senses. The present painting has been seen as interpreting Taste. It was only partly executed by Terbrugghen, the painting was completed by another, inferior hand in his workshop.

The Greek sage Heraclitus was known as the crying philosopher because he mourned the folly of mankind, while his opposite Democritus (the pendant of the painting) could only laugh at it. Here Heraclitus looks like a melancholy old man. Downcast, he leans on a terrestrial globe and gestures dismissively with his left hand, as if to say: ‘All is for nought, the world will come to nothing.’

The painting depicts the scene when Jacob accuses Laban of giving him to wife Leah instead of Rachel.

Terbrugghen’s ability to combine exquisite painterly effects with restrained emotion accounts for the power of his masterpiece, St Sebastian Tended by Irene and her Maid. The women tenderly and efficiently go about their business of trying to save the life of the saint, who has been pierced with arrows and left for dead. The large, full forms of the group have been knit together into a magnificent design, and what could have been hard and sculptural is remarkably softened by the cool silvery light which plays over Sebastian’s half-dead. olive-grey body as well as the reds, creamy whites, and plum colours worn by the women who tend the saint.

This painting was inspired by a composition of Jacopo Bassano.

The infant Christ sits on the lap of his mother, the Virgin Mary, while the three kings present him with gifts. It is striking that the figures are shown crowded together and in fairly stiff, static poses. Terbrugghen’s style was old-fashioned by the standards of his time: the bright palette recalls Mannerism. The realism, especially in the Child’s face, brings to mind the work of the Italian painter Caravaggio.

Later in 1629 Terbruggen painted another, larger version of this subject.

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Henri Dumont: Magnificat

Terbrugghen was the most important member of the Dutch Utrecht school. He spent ten years in Italy as a young man and he probably met there Caravaggio who exerted a great influence on him. His extant works were executed in Utrecht after returning from Italy. Sometimes he repeated the subjects of Caravaggio, like in the Calling of St. Matthew.

The relation to Caravaggio is unmistakable but it is not a slavish imitation. The life-size figures are half-length instead of full-length, and the large empty space in Caravaggio’s version at S. Luigi, where the drama of Christ calling the tax-collector to his vocation echoes in the shadows above the figures, has been eliminated. The composition has also been reversed; Christ and his follower appear to the left as dark figures in the foreground. The main accent is on the brightly illuminated group on the right. Terbrugghen’s original talent and old Netherlandish realism successfully merge here with Caravaggesque motifs and elements. The mercenary soldier pointing to the money on the table shows a profile which marks him as a descendant of types popularized by early sixteenth century Flemish artists, and the six gesticulating hands in the centre are also a survival of an older tradition.

Terbrugghen’s debt to Caravaggio is seen most clearly in the manner of illumination. The light enters in a broad beam, and as usual in Terbrugghen’s work, from the left. However, the quality of the light is original; it is lighter, richer, and more atmospheric than Caravaggio’s, which seldom has the brightness or softness of real daylight.

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Johann Sebastian Bach: St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 (excerpts)

This is an early version of the subject painted by the artist. The last version is in the Centraal Museum at Utrecht.

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Johann Sebastian Bach: St. Matthew Passion BWV 244 (excerpts)

Hendrick Terbrugghen made a long trip to Italy to study the region’s art and antiquities coming to light. He returned to Utrecht in 1614, inspired and strongly influenced by the work of Caravaggio, which he had seen in Rome and possibly in Naples. In the years that followed he emerged as the most gifted and original of the Dutch Caravaggists.

The present painting depicts the episode recounted by Luke (5:27-29). The composition, in reverse, is based directly on Caravaggio’s painting in the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.

Terbrugghen returned to this subject in 1621. In this version he moves the figures closer to the picture plane, presenting them not full but half-length, and reducing their number from eight to six.

This is one of the rare paintings of artist in which the scene is lit by artificial light.

The painting is signed and dated on the sheet music.

The Concert is one of the last and most important works of Terbrugghen, who died in 1629, the same year he executed this extraordinary masterpiece. The representation of concerts with two or more figures was common in the work of Terbrugghen and in the Dutch School of painting in general: these northerners enhanced their own tradition by drawing new iconography from the Roman Caravaggesque school. Whether subtly or explicitly, these scenes of musicians almost invariably convey erotic and sensual meaning, even when they purport to depict biblical subjects.

A key figure in the spread of the naturalistic style in Europe, Terbrugghen was active in Rome during the second decade of the seventeenth century. While there, he attached himself to the Caravaggesque style, experiencing it mostly through his own luminous and chromatic interpretations of the examples of Orazio Gentileschi and Carlo Saraceni. In the transparent and vibrant rapport between light and material, so characteristic to his style, we can recognize Terbrugghen as an important precedent for Jan Vermeer.

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Claudio Monteverdi: Charming Angioletta, madrigal

The Utrecht Caravaggisti borrowed the theme of a company making music from their Roman source of inspiration, but they then took it further and developed it into their own speciality.

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Thomas Weelkes: Madrigal (Springtime Song)

This painting was painted in Utrecht, most likely for a clandestine or “hidden” Catholic church. Its style recalls religious paintings and prints dating from the previous century, and has inspired comparisons with works by Albrecht D�rer, Matthias Gr�newald, and Utrecht’s own Jan van Scorel. In the painting older forms are combined with everyday figure types and passages of naturalistic description. Terbrugghen’s apparent goal in this scene was to recapture the expressive power of Late Gothic and Early Renaissance devotional images, which are often remarkable for their tragic character.

In the painting older forms are combined with everyday figure types and passages of naturalistic description. Terbrugghen’s apparent goal in this scene was to recapture the expressive power of Late Gothic and Early Renaissance devotional images, which are often remarkable for their tragic character.

Thomas simply could not believe that Christ had actually risen from the dead. His doubts were dispelled only when he had seen and touched the wounds in Christ’s side and hands himself. Emulating his great model Caravaggio, Terbrugghen portrayed Christ and his followers with craggy faces and wrinkled, rough hands.

This painting, which was altered by the artist and later cropped at the corners, depicts an almost claustrophobic interior, featuring a bare-chested prostitute clutching the fur garment of a man wearing a mask and pince-nez, both of which make him appear much older than he actually is. This churlish whore smiles at us knowingly, uncouthly exposing her discoloured teeth in the process.

On returning from his sojourn in Italy, Terbrugghen developed in Utrecht a light, colourful Caravaggism inclined to musical and gallant themes. The fanciful garb of the figures, framed in half-length, recalls the theatrical world.

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Franz Schubert: An die Laute (To the Lute) D 905