Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Musicians and the Engagement of the Viewer

Abstract

Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588-1629), a Dutch Baroque painter, is known as one of the more prominent artists among the Utrecht Caravaggisti, so-named for the city in which he worked and as a follower of Caravaggio. The Caravaggesque style swept through Northern Europe during the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and genre scenes of half-length figures could be found in every art fair and open market. The label of Utrecht Caravaggisti, however, is a limiting descriptor for ter Brugghen, who created works in response to the changing art market and tastes of a growing Dutch middle class, not motivated solely out of admiration for the Italian painter and his style. Hendrick ter Brugghen’s works featuring musicians at play are prime examples of how an artist in the competitive art market of the northern Netherlands engaged the viewer in a multitude of ways. With the rise of the middle-class merchants, professionals, and city officials, as well as the establishment of music and art academies, the subject of lower class musicians likely would have appealed to a range of buyers. Ter Brugghen’s use of half-length figures find their roots in earlier Dutch and Flemish artists, such as Hieronymus Bosch and Quentin Massys, who preceded Caravaggio in this type of composition by nearly a century, and certainly would have appealed to the market of a newly formed Dutch Republic seeking its own artistic lineage. Ter Brugghen employed allegorical themes and invoked a modern and vernacular variant of the pastoral mode in his string musicians, which would have been instantly recognizable to the learned buyer. In addition to engaging the viewer on a contemplative level, I shall argue that ter Brugghen’s musical compositions also enticed the viewer by activating his innate ideasthetic responses through visual cues and multisensory stimulation. By examining ter Brugghen’s musician paintings within the context and history of Dutch art production, we can more fully understand how his works engage the viewer so effectively and how they extend well beyond a dialogue with Caravaggio to assert his own inventiveness and modernity.