IN THE autumn of 2023, the British Museum purchased two drawings of young women holding candles by the artist Gerard or Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656) from a dealer in Rotterdam. I had hoped that they might feature there in the powerful exhibition “Early Netherlandish Drawings” (until 20 September), which opened without fanfare or press view, but with an exemplary catalogue.
Van Honthorst is too late, however, to be included in a survey from 1400 to 1600, even though some of the 170 works on show are by some exceptional artists who were still alive during Honthorst’s lifetime. Jacques de Gheynt II’s surreal view of a hell-mouth (in fact, a design for a grotto, with a saturnine-looking Neptune), dates to 1609, and his sensitive triple portrait of a Black turbaned man, possibly in service to a Spanish or Portuguese nobleman, holding a falcon, looking pensive, and making entries in a ledger, are remarkable as observations from the young Honthorst’s world.
The BM show is more than a response to the one at Compton Verney (Arts, 2 April). It opens with the only known surviving drawing of Rogier van der Weyden (Portrait of a Young Woman) which is a transcription, a freehand copy, of a lost portrait by Van Eyck (c.1390-1441), all of whose surviving portraits the National Gallery hopes to present later this year. With steady gaze and open face (c.1440), she is a compassionate and reserved woman, very much her own mistress.
Until recently, it was not thought that Honthorst had left many drawings, even though his apprentice master, Abraham Bloemaert, emphasised the need for drawings in all his pupils. Ten or 12 years ago, a cache of drawings was found in the attic of a house in The Hague, where the artist ended up working, which included many of his, some on show for the first time in this groundbreaking exhibition, but not the two earlier ones bought for the UK.
There are, I learned, just half a dozen sketches known from his time in Rome, where he worked in the aftermath of Caravaggio, who had briefly blazed in the firmament of public acclaim there until he fled the city (1606). Honthorst’s first known sketch (1616) is of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St Peter.
Before he returned home in 1618, he had received several commissions for major altarpieces that are still in situ. For the high altar of St Bonaventure in Albano Laziale, he depicted Princess Flaminia Colonna being presented by St Bonaventure before the throne of heavenly grace, a year after he completed the night scene of the beheading of St John the Baptist for Santa Maria della Scala, in Trastevere.
From his time in Rome comes a drawing, The Incredulity of St Thomas, intended for a painting that has not been identified. Thomas holds a candle towards the Risen Christ and places his hand in his side, but the candlelight only intensifies the dark world in which Thomas stands, in contrast to the radiance of the light on the other disciples who have seen the Risen Christ.
A long-retired priest once told me that, aged ten, he had played Thomas the Twin in a Sunday-school Passion play. The Lord Chamberlain still banned the representation onstage of the King of Kings, and he had to thrust his hand into a sudden spotlight that drenched the stage: “My Lord and my God.”
For Alan Harrison, that was the moment at which he knew he was called to be a priest; he did not need to see the Risen Lord with his own eyes to know the reality of the resurrection. Here, Honthorst sketches that moment when, with his back turned to us, Thomas is not yet illumined by the Risen Lord.
One altarpiece that is here, newly cleaned and conserved, was painted for St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, in 1633, for Bishop Antoon Triest’s recently built funerary chapel south of the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament which housed Van Eyck’s famed Mystic Lamb. The Lamentation over the Dead Christ emphasises the instruments of the Passion, over which four curly-headed putti weep copiously. Twenty years later, Bishop Triest founded a sodality of the wounds of Christ.
Private collection, United KingdomOld Woman Blocking a Candle with her Right Hand (c.1618-20) by Gerard van Honthorst
Unlike Rembrandt (1606-69) — and the subtext of the exhibition is to show how the one artist, in his own lifetime, was internationally known, and the other ended up dying in poverty — Honthorst was always willing to chase the market; the increased wealth across much of Holland in the newly established republic, the trade with the East Indies, and the market ballooning for the sale of tulip bulbs provided a bourgeois culture that had no domestic claim on aristocracy or monarchy.
We glimpse this in the foreground of Solon before Croesus (1624, Hamburg), where the slew of gold and silver, an urn filled with coins, a crystal vase, and a nautilus cup suggest as much. The rich textiles worn by the king indicate the value placed on material wealth. Tellingly, Croesus is the same model, and wears the same turban and coronet, as the subject of King David Playing the Harp, a painting in the Utrecht collection shown near by. They demonstrate the artist’s facility with oil and brush.
Two sketches comment on the tulip mania of the 1630s. In one, a gardener digs in bulbs in a parterre under the careful direction of the owner of a plot of land beside his house, while, in the other, we see the plantsman bringing cut tulips in a basket to a scholarly reader, no doubt the owner of the house.
Whereas Rembrandt stayed very much at home, moving only from Leiden to Amsterdam, Honthorst gained international attention and left his native Utrecht to further his artistic learning in the metropolis of Rome.
Celebrated for painting night scenes, so that in Italian he was nicknamed Gerardo delle Notte, he also painted genre scenes, with popular undisguised erotic overtones, as well as classical and pastoral scenes although his bread and butter increasingly came from ceremonial court portraiture.
Thanks to the assiduous attention and intelligent connoisseurship of Charles I’s favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Honthorst spent the summer of 1628 in London. For Whitehall Palace, he portrayed the king and queen as Apollo and Diana receiving the Duke of Buckingham, an allegorical painting currently on the Queen’s Staircase in Hampton Court. It brought Honthorst not only English citizenship and a pension for life of £200, but a down payment of 3000 guilders and a gold chain. I doubt that His Majesty’s Government could be persuaded nowadays to reward foreigners, or artists.
Honthorst portrayed Charles in a conversational pose, looking up from a letter with only a hint of exasperation at being interrupted while going through his red box; and the artist painted his patron George Villiers and his family equally informally. Charles I placed the painting in his own private rooms after the assassination of the Duke in August 1628 as a mark of devotion to his boon companion.
It is a slightly baffling composition as it would appear that the Duke was painted independently from the members of his own family; behind him, the background is left blank, whereas his wife and children stand in front of a rose bush. Even the paint surface seems different, as the duke almost walks out of the canvas, leaving his family behind.
Although Honthorst’s critics claim that he “had lost his brush” when he painted for the House of Orange, this carefully curated exhibition gives lie to that allegation. In the first room, a pair of portraits from the Rijksmuseum turn out to be a self-portrait and a painting of his wife, Sophia Coopmans (1655). They are quietly unassuming and modestly dressed as citizens of the new republic, and only the gold medallion presented to Honthorst by Queen Christina of Sweden securely identifies him.
The same attention to painterly detail is found in his last religious work, in which Susanna seeks to grab back her towel from the clutches of her would-be assailant. It drips with water, and its whiteness is in stark contrast to the richly coloured robes of the elders. It is a vivid and deeply personal observation that avoids becoming yet another opportunity for an artist to exploit the male gaze.
Honthorst died, aged 63, on 5 May 1656 and was buried in the Catherinakerk, no great distance from the museum, which is next to the Nikolaïkerk, where he had been baptised; sadly, when I went to pay my respects, I found it locked.
“Gerard van Honthorst: Different to Rembrandt” is at Centraal Museum, Agnietenstraat 1, Utrecht, in the Netherlands, until 13 September. centraalmuseum.nl