Portrait of Friedrich Wilhelm (1620-88), Elector of Brandenburg, and his Wife Louise Henriette (1627-67), Countess of Orange-Nassau

Gerard van Honthorst (Utrecht 1592 - Utrecht 1656)

Gerard van Honthorst was born in Utrecht on 4 November 1592 into a family of artists. His father, Herman Gerritsz van Honthorst, was a decorative painter and probably his first teacher. According to Von Sandrart and Houbraken, Honthorst trained with Abraham Bloemaert. When exactly he went to Italy is not known; a drawn copy after Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St Peter in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is dated 1616,³ indicating that he was in Rome by that year. His first documented painting, The Beheading of St John the Baptist, was executed for the Church of Santa Maria della Scala in 1617-18.⁴ Such Caravaggesque night scenes, which often include artificial sources of illumination, garnered Honthorst the nickname ‘Gherardo delle Notti’ in Italy. Among his Roman patrons were the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, in whose house Honthorst lived, and Cardinal Scipione Borghese.

A few months after his return to Utrecht in 1620, Honthorst married Sophia Coopmans. He joined the Guild of St Luke there and set up his own workshop. Von Sandrart, one of his apprentices in the 1620s, informs us that Honthorst had as many as 25 pupils at a time, from each of whom he received the sizable tuition fee of 100 guilders a year. With the exception of 1627, Honthorst served as dean of the guild between 1625 and 1630. It was also in the mid-1620s that he received his first commission from the court of Frederik Hendrik in The Hague.⁵ A commission from the British ambassador in The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, for Lord Arundel came as early as 1620⁶ and eventually led to the invitation from Charles I to work on Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1628.⁷ Honthorst returned to the United Provinces the same year, but continued to work for the English court in the years to come. In 1630 he became court painter to the exiled King and Queen of Bohemia, Frederick V and Elizabeth, in The Hague. Honthorst also painted numerous portraits of the Stadholder and his wife, Amalia van Solms, and took part in the decoration of, among others, the palaces Honselaarsdijk, Huis ter Nieuburch (1636-39) and Huis ten Bosch (1649-50). In order to accommodate his work in The Hague, he set up a second workshop there in 1637 and joined the guild, serving as dean in 1640. Also in 1637, he became the principal artist to decorate the Banqueting Hall in Kronborg Castle for King Christian IV of Denmark. Honthorst was, perhaps, the most internationally successful Dutch artist of his time. Despite, or possibly as a result of this success, his late style was criticized as ‘stiff ’ and ‘slick’ (‘stijve gladdicheyt’) and he was esteemed a ‘much less great master than themselves’ (‘beaucoup moins grand maistre qu’eux’) by his fellow artists working on the Oranjezaal.⁸ He died on 27 April 1656 and was buried in the Catharijnekerk in Utrecht.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Mancini c. 1620, fol. 86 (Judson/Ekkart 1999, p. 47); Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 22, 102, 172-74; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 149-50; Braun 1966, pp. 7-59, 340-88 (documents); Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 276-79; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 382-83; Judson/Ekkart 1999, pp. XXXIII-XXXIV, 1-24