HONTHORST, Gerrit van

Honthorst has posed two boisterous musicians in flamboyant attire behind a ledge. Looking out beyond the frame, the male violinist bows his instrument with great vigour while singing. His smiling female companion accompanies him on the lute. Directly behind this engaging couple, an adolescent boy lifts his roemer of wine on high, as if to toast their efforts. The setting of the scene can be identified as a brothel.

Honthorst was celebrated for his night scenes. A joyous sweetness suffuses this Nativity, presented in intimate close-up. As tradition decreed, Joseph is a shadowy figure in the background, the white linen foretells the shroud of the crucified Christ, and the straw beneath the babe presages the Eucharist.

This painting probably came from the Stadtholder’s collection and during the 18th century hung in the Carthusian church of St Barbara in Cologne. Honthorst was one of the Stadtholder’s court artists who had studied in Italy and worked in the Baroque style.

Using a single candle light in the centre of the picture is a characteristic feature of Honthorst’s paintings.

Honthorst, like Ter Brugghen, was a pupil of the history painter Abraham Bloemaert in Utrecht and also went to Rome. Unlike Ter Brugghen, however, he there achieved an international reputation, working for nobles and princes of the Church. The Italians called him Gherardo delle Notti, - Gerard of the Nocturnes - and this painting, made for the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani in whose palace Honthorst stayed, explains why. On his return north of the Alps Honthorst was so famous that he was invited to England by Charles I, for whom he painted mythological subjects and many portraits. He continued to receive commissions from royalty in Holland, executing portraits and allegorical decorations for Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange, and in 1635 he sent the first of a long series of historical and mythological narratives to Christian IV of Denmark. The exiled Queen of Bohemia, Elisabeth Stuart and her daughters were among his many pupils in The Hague.

Where Ter Brugghen in the Concert uses candlelight to create a scene of dreamlike enchantment, Honthorst employ it to lend veracity and dramatic tension to a biblical story (Matthew 26:57-64). After his capture on the night of the Agony in the Garden, Jesus is taken for interrogation and trial before the High Priest Caiaphas, where two false witnesses - the shifty-looking men behind Caiaphas - speak against him. Within the vast composition - in scale and format like an altarpiece but never intended for one - the visibility of the life-size figures depends entirely on that single candle flame. Its gleam unifies the whole, by giving the impression of illuminating the entire room with evenly decreasing intensity until its force is spent in the dark, and by justifying the reddish cast of all the colours. It allows the two principal characters to stand out more solidly in relief and in greater detail than the others. It focuses attention on their poses, gestures and expressions. It picks out the few significant accessories, notably the books of the Law and the rope by which Christ is tied, and it creates the solemn and threatening atmosphere of a night-time interrogation.

Through his mastery of the physical effects of illumination from a single source, Honthorst is also able to make symbolic points. Christ’s white robe, torn from his shoulder when he was made prisoner, reflects more light than the priest’s furred cloak - so that light seems to radiate from him. Though submissive, Christ is without question the main subject of the painting, the Light of the World and the Son of God.

Besides religious and mythological scenes Honthors painted in the 1620s in Utrecht at least one illusionistic ceiling, the Musical Group on a Balcony, which was done for his own house in Utrecht. The painting is the earliest existing Dutch illusionistic painted ceiling.

Equally innovative for Holland is his illusionistic Concert on a Balcony. The ‘trompe-l’oeil’ picture, which decorated the Palace of Nordeinde, shows, in steep perspective, life-size musicians and their companions in an architectural setting, but this one was intended as illusionistic wall not a ceiling. The prototype for Dutch illusionistic fields of walls and ceilings is found in decorative schemes executed for high-placed patrons in Italy. The unmistakable source for Honthorst’s illusionistic paintings is Orazio Gentileschi and Agostino Tassi’s life-size trompe-l’oeil frescoes, painted in 1611-12 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s garden ‘Casino of the Muses’, now part of the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi in Rome. Honthorst had ample opportunity to study them when he worked for the Cardinal.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 10 minutes):

Claudio Monteverdi: Charming Angioletta, madrigal

The painting represents Frederick Henry (Frederik Hendrik in Dutch) (1584-1647), Prince of Orange and Stadholder of Holland from 1625 to 1647. He was the youngest child of William the Silent, and was born at Delft about six months before his father’s assassination. Frederick Henry was married in 1625 to Amalia van Solms-Braunfels, and left one son, William II of Orange, and four daughters. In the centre of the painting is Amalia, at her side their youngest daughter Maria. On the right are their daughters Albertina Agnes and Henrietta.

This painting was commissioned by Stadholder Frederik Hendrik for his residence at Honselaerdijk as one of a series of paintings on pastoral themes.

Granida and Daifilo were lovers from the Dutch pastoral play Granida (1605) by Pieter Hooft. Granida, the daughter of an eastern king, betrothed to Prince Tisiphernes, lost her way while out hunting. She came upon a shepherd Daifilo and his mistress Dorilea who had just quarrelled. Daifilo fetched water for the princess to drink and fell in love with her. He followed her to court and, after several turns in the story, they fled to the woods together to live a pastoral life. Daifilo was taken prisoner by one of Granida’s several suitors. They were finally reunited after the intervention of Tisiphernes who yielded his claim to her. The play set a fashion for pastoral idyll in the Netherlands and long remained popular.

In Van Honthorst’s representation the lovers are depicted in a woodland setting, with the suitor and soldiers approaching to arrest Daifilo.

The social status of the painters in the Dutch Republic varied from day labourers through independent masters to well-rewarded court artists such as Michiel van Miereveld and Gerrit van Honthorst, who specialized in portraiture of high officials. In one such portrait, van Honthorst represented yet another type of painter: a well-to-do amateur who painted for pleasure. Several women became accomplished painters in this way. Most master was men, but more than a dozen women are recorded as having attained master’s status, most famously Judith Leyster (1609-1660).

Honthorst’s genre painting relates to the subject portrayed by his fellow Utrecht Caravaggisti. It depicts a provocative scene of a wanton student (the prodigal son?) in the company of two prostitutes and a procuress carrying an infant. The pages of an immense open folio on the table are brilliantly illuminated by candle-light as is the semi-nude torso of the theorbo-playing prostitute. One of the pages illustrates an older man and a nude child, most likely Cupid, beating a woman who holds a large book. The opposite page shows a Latin poem.

Honthorst was born in Utrecht; there he was Abraham Bloemaert’s pupil. He is said to have been in Rome as early as 1610-12, but he is not documented there until 1616. Nothing is known about his artistic activity until the last year of the decade, and not a work painted before he went to south has been discovered. He became the best-known Dutch follower of Caravaggio. A typical example of his religious paintings executed in Italy is the Christ before the High Priest (National Gallery, London).

Though Honthorst continued to depict scenes from the Scripture after his return to Utrecht in 1620, the religious pictures he made in Rome are from many points of view the climax of his work as a painter of biblical themes. During the 1620s he painted works in the arcadian mode which shows that he had looked at the Carracci as well as the Caravaggio while in Italy. Besides religious and mythological scenes he painted at least one illusionistic ceiling, Musical Group on a Balcony, which was done for his own house in Utrecht. The painting, only partially preserved, is the earliest existing Dutch illusionistic painted ceiling.

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Georg Muffat: Concerto grosso No. 9, VI Borea

Gerrit van Honthorst brought stylistic Caravaggism from Italy to Holland. This is one of his earliest genre subject depicting a single figure. Almost without exception, the figures in these works are illuminated by an artificial light source. Nocturnal scenes of this kind earned Van Honthors the nickname “Gherardo delle notti” (Gerard of the night scenes). The present apparently mundane scene can be construed as a rendering of the Avarice or Greed, as the pince-nez, the purse and the coin all are traditional attributes of Avarice. However, the scene can also be interpreted as representing Sight, one of the Five Senses.

In 1631, when this portrait was painted, Honthorst was an established court painter at several European courts. However, he made non-official likenesses, too, an excellent example being this portrait of an unidenfied gentleman, portrayed bust length, wearing a black coat, cloak and hat, and a white ruff.

The emergence of previously unknown Italian-period pictures by Gerrit van Honthorst, two representing the Mocking of Christ (Private collection and Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and a third, Christ Crowned with Thorns (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), has altered our view of the chronology of this Utrecht artist’s early Roman production. It is now possible to suggest that Samson and Delilah should be dated as c. 1615. These new works help us to account for the rapid growth of Honthorst’s reputation in Italy and his Italian nickname, ‘Gherardo delle Notti’. Although the composition might be his initial response to such works as Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, Honthorst rarely repeated such compact arrangements of figures either in Rome or after he returned to the North.

It is difficult to know exactly what encouraged or inspired Honthorst to specialise in the use of artificial light sources since the idea already appears fully developed in what must be one of his earliest pictures. Among the possible sources is Rubens’s c. 1609 nocturnal Samson and Delilah, in which an unusually sensitive investigation of artificial light is introduced into a popular Old Testament story (Judges 16: 19). Also new is Rubens’s moralising physiognomic contrast between Delilah and her accomplice, an old servant woman. Since Honthorst uses both elements, although set into a very different composition, he may have known Rubens’s picture through Jacob Matham’s c. 1613 engraving. In Rome, Honthorst must have been aware of candlelit works such as Adam Elsheimer’s Judith Beheading Holofernes. Indeed, it is likely that he was already acquainted with Elsheimer’s work since Hendrick Goudt had brought a number of them to Utrecht. It is also of some significance that Karel van Mander lavished praise upon a series of nocturnal passion scenes painted on slate by Jacopo Bassano that he had seen in Rome.

One of the most striking elements in Samson and Delilah is Honthorst’s utilisation of physiognomic contrasts. This device was popularised by Caravaggio in his Judith Beheading Holofernes, although without the moralising attitude which Rubens later added. For Caravaggio, the device was a way of accentuating Judith’s beauty. Honthorst later used a similar contrast in his Tavern Scene with a Lute Player (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), in which the old woman appears for the first time as a procuress.

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Camille Saint-Saens: Samson et Delila, Delila’s aria

Honthorst painted this painting two years after returning from Italy. The influence of Caravaggio can be seen in the strong chiaroscuro, and that of the more classicist-oriented Bolognese masters in the sharp contours and overall colourfulness of the work.

The subject is taken from the Greek author Herodotus. Croesus, king of Lydia, whose riches were proverbial, was said to have been visited by Solon the Athenian sage. The words of Solon - that the humble, when blessed with good fortune, were happier than Croesus with all his wealth - earned the king’s displeasure. Later the Persian king Cyrus conquered Lydia and built a pyre for his vanquished foe. About to be burned alive, Croesus remembered the wisdom of Solon and thrice called out his name, which so roused the curiosity of Cyrus that he spared his victim’s life.

The painting shows Croesus wearing a magnificent robe, seated on his throne. Standing opposite him is the sage SOlon in more modest attire, pointing at the viewer with his right hand. Precious vessels made of silver and bowls brimming with silver and gold are heaped in the foreground.

This painting is the work of a follower of Honthorst. It is typical of Honthorst’s style and probably based on a painting by him.

Because painters, with some famous exceptions, were considered craftsmen on the level of carpenters or masons, it was not normal for a prince in Holland to deal with them directly. However, Gerrit van Honthorst was able to work for all the courts and for several foreign ones as well. One advantage he had is that he was hired to paint portraits of the royals, giving them quality time with princes and princesses and a chance to charm them.

The pair of this painting, depicting Amalia van Solms, wife of Stadholder Frederik Hendrik (now in the Mus�e Jacquemart-Andr�, Paris) was painted by Rembrandt.

Honthorst’s genre pictures of light-hearted gatherings had a great impact in Utrecht. He made such pictures while he was still in Italy. His Supper Party, painted during his last months in Italy, set a precedent for similar scenes done in the 1620s at Utrecht where artists favoured the erotic as well as the ascetic side of Baroque art. This is already evident in Honthorst’s Supper Party where the person who covers the light has the effect of ‘repoussoir’: the large dark figure in the foreground causes, by contrast, the merrymakers behind him to recede in space, and thus enhances the illusion of depth. The second advantage is the vivid reflection of light thrown on the figures and, in particular, on their faces, which are painted in reddish-yellow colours. This helps Honthorst to overcome the harshness found in the work of other Caravaggio followers.

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Francesco da Milano: Tre fantasie for lute

This representation of a concert of music by the Flemish artist who was known in Italy as Gherardo delle Notti, has a moralizing message. Music, in fact, is a high and virtuous art, but also a fleeting one, leading to its association with vanity, symbolized by the old woman who, indicating her now toothless mouth, admonishes the young couple, singing to the accompaniment of a bass viol. There are further nuances to the significance of the image, if the work is to be identified with the painting entitled The Theft of the Amulet, owned by the painter’s family and then sold by auction in Amsterdam in 1770 before entering the Borghese collection. In this case the subject should be recognized as a deception of the young man who, intent on his singing, does not realize that the girl is stealing his earring with the complicity of the old woman, ready to slip it into her bag, and of the musician in the foreground.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 10 minutes):

Claudio Monteverdi: Charming Angioletta, madrigal

As compared with Italian painters taking up the same theme, in Honthorst’s painting the emphasis is shifted towards the dramatic potential of artificial light. The face of the maidservant who identifies Peter as one of the followers of Christ is sharply illuminated by the candle she holds. Its flame is hidden by the outstretched arm of another accuser, creating a complex pattern of superimposed bright and dark areas and enhancing the atmospheric effect of the glowing light.

This canvas was painted after the return of the artist from Italy to the Netherlands. It reveals a thorough adaptation of Caravaggesques prototypes as evidenced by the figural types, the clothing of the dentist and his assistant, the composition, and the bold chiaroscuro effects. However, here the light emanates from a candle, an artificial source generally absent in the work of Caravaggio.

Honthorst introduced the theme of the flea hunt into Netherlandish painting. As with so many of Honthorst’s genre scenes, an allusion to promiscuity and general playfulness is used, though here it is more directly referenced through the use of the flea hunt theme. From antiquity, the flea has been used as a symbol for sex owing to its proclivity to sucking blood from its targets.

This image has great expressive force, basically achieved through the characterization of the face with its unrefined features, and in the spontaneous gesture which suggests the effects of the wine. The subject of the drinker as well as the artist’s approach to this theme suggests the influence not so much of Caravaggio as of one of his followers, in particular Manfredi, who was an imitator of Caravaggio and seems to have invented the subjects of drinkers, taverns and soldiers.

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Otto Nicolai: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor), drinking song

A sense of Baroque drama is found in Honthorst’s Liberation of St Peter. So beloved for his nocturnes that Italians called him “Gherardo della Notte,” the Utrecht artist made Peter’s liberating angel into a light source, so illuminating the dark prison by a celestial blaze.

Van Honthorst was renowned during his lifetime for his chiaroscuro paintings but his oeuvre includes other images lacking in spectacular light effects. A striking example is his Merry Violinist. This painting is remarkable for its bold illusionism. The cheerful figure leans over a balustrade, protruding into the viewer’s space as his form punctures the picture plane. He sweeps aside the brilliant red carpet whose conspicuous tactility enhances the illusionistic qualities of the canvas.

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Arcangelo Corelli: Allemanda from Trio sonata

This painting is closely related to another work by Honthors, a horizontal version of the same theme in Los Angeles. Since some of the same expressive devices are found in both pictures - for example , the way in which the extended hand of the standing mocker holding a candle casts its shadow on his face - both were likely to have been executed relatively close in time.

This painting is closely related to another work by Honthors, a vertical version of the same theme in a private collection. Since some of the same expressive devices are found in both pictures - for example , the way in which the extended hand of the standing mocker holding a candle casts its shadow on his face - both were likely to have been executed relatively close in time.

The size of the canvas suggests that it was a public commisssion, perhaps for a church in or near Rome.

The procuress happily points to a the smart young man, a possible customer who quite visibly holds his purse in his left hand. With his other hand he gestures towards the girl’s lute, while the girl, too, her d�colletage roguishly displayed in the candlelight, points towards her instrument. The strong emphasis laid on the lute suggests that the instrument here has the more vulgar, and very common, significance of vagina. (The Dutch word ‘luit’ can mean either. Under an elegant veil, the painting thus illustrates - and by implication condemns - illicit love.

This painting is an excellent example of Van Honthorst’s familiar device: placing a silhouetted figure in the foreground.

Gerrit van Honthorst was one of the leading Utrecht followers of Caravaggio. The influence of the great Italian master is clear in the down-to-earth nature of the scene, in the half-figures shown close to, and in the powerful contrasts of light and shade. Honthorst spent some years in his youth in Italy where, for his love of the use of artificial light sources, he was known as Gerardo della Notte.

On returning from his sojourn in Italy, Gerrit van Honthorst 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.

This recently discovered canvas could be the pendant to one of Honthorst’s best known single figure musician pictures, the Woman Playing the Guitar, in the Louvre, Paris.