Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 108.8 cm × width 136.5 cm
Hendrick ter Brugghen
c. 1622
oil on canvas
support: height 108.8 cm × width 136.5 cm
The plain-weave canvas support has been lined. There is cusping on all four sides. The first layer of the double ground has a deep red colour and consists primarily of red ochres. A good deal of quartz and clay materials were also detected. The second, brick-red ground layer contains chalk and red ochre mixed with rather coarse lumps of lead white. Coarse particles of charcoal black are detectable on top of this layer. The paint layers were built up with numerous thin applications. The yellow robe of the old bespectacled apostle on the right was done in two layers with a yellow lake pigment (schietgeel, or fugitive yellow). The green mantle of the hooded apostle on the left was made with green earth (celadonite) and a little bit of verdigris. The flesh tones were painted with mixtures of lead white and organic red lake pigments. The paint was generally applied thinly, the highlights being somewhat thicker. While Thomas’s hand was reserved, his pointing index finger was not. A pentimento is visible in the hands of the praying apostle.
Fair. Blanching is noticeable, especially in the green mantle of the hooded apostle, which is also discoloured.
...; ? sale, Abraham Peronneau, Amsterdam, 13 May 1687 (‘4 voet 4 duim bij 4 voet’ [123.4 x 113.1 cm]);1...; ? sale, Sir George Pauncefote, London (John White), 20 (24) January 1809 sqq., no. 40, as Honthorst (‘The Unbelief of St. Thomas’);...; ? sale, John Plura (†), Bath (Christie’s), 24 (25) June 1833 sqq., no. 72, as Honthorst (‘The Incredulity of St. Thomas’), £ 1 18s, to Fassell;...; collection Samuel Jackson, London;2 his brother, Brockville, Canada, early 1880s;3 his daughter, Geneva Jackson (1865-1951), Berlin (Kitchener), Canada, 1922-51; on loan from her estate to The National Gallery of Art, Ottawa, The Art Gallery of Toronto, and the Laing Gallery, Toronto, consecutively;4 $ (Canadian) 2,000, to P. & D. Colnaghi Company, London, through the mediation of her nephew, A.Y. Jackson, and G. Blair Laing, 1956;5 from whom, fl. 19,186, to the museum as a gift from the Fotocommissie, 1956
Object number: SK-A-3908
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum
Copyright: Public domain
Hendrick ter Brugghen (? The Hague c. 1588 – Utrecht 1629)
Hendrick ter Brugghen was probably born in 1588 in The Hague, where his father was bailiff of the States of Holland. According to 17th- and 18th-century sources, he studied with Abraham Bloemaert in Utrecht. The possibility exists that Ter Brugghen was a soldier when a young man. From his own testimony it is known that he spent several years in Italy. Although the earliest sources give the year 1604, there is no consensus in the more recent literature as to when his Italian sojourn began. It is known, however, that he returned to the United Provinces in the autumn of 1614. No paintings have been identified from his Italian period. The notion that he made a second trip to Italy has been rejected by most recent scholars. Ter Brugghen joined the painters’ guild in Utrecht in 1616. His first dated painting is the Rijksmuseum’s Adoration of the Magi from 1619 (SK-A-4188). Ter Brugghen’s extant oeuvre consists of approximately 80 history and genre paintings with life-size figures. The artist’s choice of religious subjects has led some scholars to believe he was a Catholic. While there are no documents to support this notion, nor are there any that conclusively show that Ter Brugghen was a Protestant. The fact that he married in the Reformed Church (15 October 1616) and that his four youngest children were baptized in the Reformed Church, may only reflect the religious persuasion of his wife, Jacoba Verbeeck. It seems significant in this context that it was only after Ter Brugghen’s death that Jacoba Verbeeck became an official member of the Reformed Church.
Caravaggio’s influence is already noticeable in Ter Brugghen’s earliest known works, but became more pronounced after the return to Utrecht from Italy of Honthorst and Van Baburen in 1620 and 1621. Ter Brugghen possibly shared a studio with the latter. His only known pupil was Sebastiaen van Hattingh (dates unknown), whose extant oeuvre consists of only a pair of pendant portraits. Ter Brugghen died on 1 November 1629 and was buried in the Buurkerk in Utrecht. Cornelis de Bie called him one of the most renowned artists of his time (‘vermaerste ende gheruchtbaerste Schilders van sijnen tijdt’), while Von Sandrart referred to his capable but unpleasant following of nature (‘die Natur und derselben unfreundliche Mängel sehr wol, aber unangenehm gefolgt...’).
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
De Bie 1661, p. 132; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 178; De Bie 1708, pp. 274-75; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 133-35; Bok/Kobayashi 1985 (documents); Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 65-75; Blankert in Saur XIV, 1996, pp. 504-05; Slatkes 1996, pp. 199-201; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 379-80
The obvious source for Ter Brugghen’s painting is Caravaggio’s Incredulity of St Thomas (fig. a), which was most likely in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani during the time of the Utrecht artist’s Roman sojourn. As in his two depictions of The Calling of St Matthew,6 which were also derived from Caravaggio, Ter Brugghen reversed the composition in the present painting. While retaining the three-quarter length figures, neutral background, colour scheme and dramatic lighting of his model, he has eschewed the closed diamond composition by adding a fourth apostle. In much the same way as the Utrecht Calling of St Matthew, Ter Brugghen appears to have altered Caravaggio’s composition in order to add more gestures and to emphasize them. In addition to Thomas’s ‘doubting’ hand and Christ’s ‘determined’ hand, already present in Caravaggio’s painting, we here have what Nicolson has called the ‘apprehensive hands’ of the elderly apostle and the ‘supplicating hands’ of John the Evangelist.7
As has often been pointed out in the literature, the elderly apostle with his spectacles and gnarled hands is a 16th-century Netherlandish figure type, most likely derived from Marinus van Reymerswaele. It is tempting to speculate whether Ter Brugghen knew the Flemish artist, Theodor van Loon’s variation on Caravaggio’s Incredulity.8 Van Loon’s painting is much closer to the prototype than Ter Brugghen’s, but is of particular interest in that Caravaggio’s old apostle has also been given spectacles. This motif in Van Loon’s painting might, perhaps, be at the root of Ter Brugghen’s decision to add the elderly apostle. Equally intriguing is the relationship between the present painting and Bernardo Strozzi’s Incredulity in Ponce.9 Both works reverse Caravaggio’s composition and include a fourth apostle.10 While Strozzi’s painting is dated to the 1620s, making it unlikely that Ter Brugghen would have known it, this aspect of their compositions was, perhaps, inspired by a common source.
There has been some discussion about the dating of the present painting. Nicolson first favoured a date around 1621, given the similarities in conception and style with the Utrecht Calling of St Matthew and the argument that Ter Brugghen was never earlier, nor later than c. 1623, so Caravaggesque and Northern at the same time.11 He later opted to date the painting around 1623-25, arguing that it is similar in style to the 1623 Gamblers12 and that the head of Christ is extremely close to that in the Metropolitan Museum Crucifixion.13 Van Thiel favoured a date in the mid-1620s,14 but Slatkes has argued for pushing this back a few years, to 1622, 1623 at the latest.15 This dating does, indeed, seem the most appropriate. While on the surface, Ter Brugghen appears with this work to be moving towards the more simplified compositions of such mid-1620s paintings as the St Sebastian,16 in reality he has made a very simple composition more complex. Like the Utrecht Calling of 1621, the artist’s primary concern is with gestures. The fluid handling of the elderly apostle is very similar to that of the elderly soldier with spectacles in the 1621 Calling, for which Ter Brugghen used the same model. Moreover, the nervous highlights of the wrinkles and furrows in the Incredulity is a feature in the earlier paintings, disappearing from Ter Brugghen’s dated oeuvre after 1621.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 37.
Nicolson 1958, pp. 44-45, no. A 2; Slatkes in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 143-45, no. 5, with selected earlier literature; Silver 2000, pp. 187-88
1960, pp. 62-63, no. 656 A 3; 1976, p. 155, no. A 3908; 2007, no. 37
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Hendrick ter Brugghen, The Incredulity of St Thomas, c. 1622', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8089
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