Light and Sight in ter Brugghen’s Man Writing by Candlelight

Hendrick ter Brugghen,  Man Writing by Candlelight,  ca. 1627–29,  Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art

Ter Brugghen’s Man Writing by Candlelight is commonly seen as a vanitas tronie of an old man with a flickering candle. Reconsideration of the figure’s age and activity raises another possibility, for the image’s pointed connection between light and sight and the fact that the figure has just signed the artist’s signature and is now completing the date suggests that ter Brugghen—like others who elevated the role of the artist in his period—was more interested in conveying the enduring aliveness of the artistic process and its outcome than in reminding the viewer about the transience of life.

DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.1.4

Acknowledgements

Written in tribute to Walter Liedtke’s love of Dutch art and uncanny ability to articulate how paintings convey mood and meaning. And with thanks to the anonymous reader for his or her helpful suggestions.

Hendrick ter Brugghen,  Man Writing by Candlelight,  ca. 1627–29,  Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art
Fig. 1 Hendrick ter Brugghen, Man Writing by Candlelight, ca. 1627–29, oil on canvas, 65.7 x 52.7 cm. Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art, inv. SC1957:10 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Hendrick ter Brugghen,  Detail of figure 1: hands and inscription, Man W,  ca. 1627–29,  Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art
Fig. 2 Detail of figure 1: hands and inscription [side-by-side viewer]
Lucas van Leyden, Saint Mark Writing His Gospel, 1518, London, British Museum
Fig. 3 Lucas van Leyden, Saint Mark Writing His Gospel, 1518, engraving, 9.8 x 7.3 cm. London, British Museum, inv. D,5.21 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Aertgen van Leyden,  Saint Jerome in His Study by Candlelight,  ca. 1520,  Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Fig. 4 Aertgen van Leyden, Saint Jerome in His Study by Candlelight, ca. 1520, oil on panel, 48 x 37.7 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. S-A-3903 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Jacques de Gheyn II, Young Man Writing His Name (Jacques de Gheyn III?), ca. 1625, Boston, Peck Collection
Fig. 5 Jacques de Gheyn II, Young Man Writing His Name (Jacques de Gheyn III?), ca. 1625, black chalk drawing, 16.5 x 14.1 cm. Boston, Peck Collection (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Samuel van Hoogstraten,  Self-Portrait, frontispiece to Inleyding tot d, 1678,
Fig. 6 Samuel van Hoogstraten, Self-Portrait, frontispiece to Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (Rotterdam: François van Hoogstraten, 1678) [side-by-side viewer]
Cornelis Bloemaert,  What Use Are Candles and Spectacles If the Owl R, ca. 1622–24,  Boston, Museum of Fine Arts
Fig. 7 Cornelis Bloemaert, What Use Are Candles and Spectacles If the Owl Refuses to See? ca. 1622–24, engraving, 22.2 x 18.4 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 55.934 (http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/the-wise-owl-161215) (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
  1. 1. Walter Liedtke explored the acquisition of Dutch art by American collectors and public museums in “Great Dutch Paintings in America: The Collectors and Their Ideals,” in Great Dutch Paintings from America, exh. cat. (Detroit Institute of Arts and the Maurithuis, The Hague, 1990), 14–59; also in this catalogue is a parallel essay, Susan D. Kuretsky, “Dutch Art in Academia: Observations on College and University Collecting,” 79–103. See also George S. Keyes, “Collecting Utrecht Paintings in the United States,” in Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age, exh. cat. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery; and London, National Gallery/New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 121–26.

  2. 2. Dennis Weller, Sinners and Saints, Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His Dutch and Flemish Followers, exh. cat. (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1998), 102. Benedict Nicolson related the work primarily to early sixteenth-century occupational portraiture by Quentin Metsys: Hendrick Terbrugghen (London: Percy Lund, Humphries, 1958), 86.

  3. 3. Leonard J. Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen: Catalogue Raisonné (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007), 164–65 and note 2. Left uncompleted at the time of Slatkes’s death, this book was heroically brought to completion by his former student Wayne Franits. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  4. 4. Slatkes and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, 165 and note 4. J. R. Judson, “Review of Benedict Nicolson, Hendrick Terbrugghen,” Art Bulletin 43 (1961): 342, 347–48, related this painting to Lucas van Leyden’s chalk drawing in the British Museum of a frontal seated man with spectacles but did not mention the engraving. The van Leyden drawing may have directly inspired the Jacques de Gheyn II drawing of a young man (probably his son) seated at a table and inscribing the signature IDGheyn III in (see note 28 below and fig. 5). http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  5. 5. By the sixteenth century earlier rivet glasses (two lenses riveted together, with frames of wood, horn, or bone) had evolved into the more comfortable “bow” spectacleswith flexible metal frames seen here. See note 8.

  6. 6. Van Eyck’s use of the eyeglass lens is discussed in Stephen Hanley’s “Optical Symbolism as Optical Description: A Case Study of Canon van der Paele’s Spectacles,” Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 1, no. 1,(2009).http://dx.doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2009.1.1.2

  7. 7. See, for example, Quentin Metsys, Portrait of a Scholar, ca. 1525–30, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, and Hendrick Bloemaert, Saint Jerome Reading, dated 1624, Bayerishen Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich.

  8. 8. The history of eyeglasses, with extensive bibliography, is recounted in Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision: From Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), 4–26, figs. 66–68.

  9. 9. Illustrations of such professional craftsmen appear with short poems in books of trades by Joost Amman, Das Ständebuch (1558), as “Der Brillenmacher,” and by Jan Luyken, Het Mensekyk Bedryf (1694), as “De Brillemaaker.”

  10. 10. This wide circulation is illustrated in a 1591 print engraved by Jan Collaert after Johannes Stradanus, titled CONSPICILLA(keeping in sight), which displays the many fine craftsmen who depend on eyeglass sellers. See also Adriaen van Ostade’s etching of a door-to-door spectacles seller and Jan Steen’s painting of the same subject in the National Gallery, London.

  11. 11. Herman Saftleven’s 1647 etching of an itinerant glasses seller hawking his wares is labeled “Bedrieger” (deceiver), while a painting by Jan Cornelisz. van Oostsanen in the Groninger Museum, Caterijneconvent, Utrecht, shows a provocative young woman “selling spectacles” to an old man; see Jelte Dikstra, Paul P. W. M. Dirkse, and Anneloes E. A. M. Smits, De Schilderijen van Museum Catharijnecovent (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002), 42.

  12. 12. Slatke and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, A34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  13. 13. Slatke and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, A21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  14. 14. Natasha Seaman has convincingly interpreted ter Brugghen’s paintings of Thomas and Matthew as reflections of the artist’s Protestant perspective on faith as expressed in Christ’s words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29). Natasha T. Seaman, The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen: Reinventing Christian Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012), 124–29, 140, in which the author also considers artists’ varied uses and interpretations of eyeglasses in relation to ter Brugghen’s paintings.

  15. 15. Slatke and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, A51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  16. 16. Alison G. Stewart, Unequal Lovers A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art(New York: Abaris Books, 1978).

  17. 17. Peter Sutton, Prized Possessions: European Paintings from Private Collections of Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts/New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 130.

  18. 18. Wayne Franits’s discussions of attitudes toward age in Dutch art appear in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004)74–75; and in Slatkes and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, 56.

  19. 19. See also Jan Massys’s melancholic Saint Jerome Meditating by Candlelight, dated 1537, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Aertgen van Leyden’s Jerome also bears close comparison to ter Brugghen’s Magdalen, alternatively titled Melancholia, (ca. 1627–29, private collection, on loan to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). This is the closest of ter Brugghen’s works to Man Writing by Candlelight in format and in the complexity of its candlelight effects and associations.

  20. 20. Justus Müller Hofstede, “Artificial Light in Honthorst and ter Brugghen: Form and Iconography,” in Hendrick ter Brugghen und die Nachfolger Caravaggios in Holland, ed. Rüdiger Klessmann, proceedings of a symposium accompanying the exhibition Höllandische Malerei in neuem Licht: Hendrick ter Brugghen und seine Zeitgenossen(Braunschweig: Anton Ulrich-Museum, 1987), 19–21. This discussion continued in his “Vita Mortalium Vigilia: Die Nachtwache der Eremiten und Gelehrten” in Leselust: Niederländischen Malerei von Rembrandt bis Vermeer (Stuttgart Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1993), 35–46.

  21. 21. Stephen Orgel, introduction to Otto van Veen, Horatii Emblemata, Antwerp, 1612 (repr., New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979), 40–41, 52–53.

  22. 22. Pliny, Natural History, 35.43. See Victor Stoichita, A Short History of Shadow(London: Reaktion, 1997), 11–20.

  23. 23. Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, citing Renaissance and Baroque drawings, prints, and paintings, discusses depictions of diligent artists working at night as illustrations of “lucubration,” a term meaning intense study or meditation, that derives from the Latin word lucubratio (nocturnal study by oil lamp or candlelight). Imago Noctis: Die Nacht in der Kunst des Abendlands; vom Alten Orient bis ins Zeitalter des Barock (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003), 363–82. Extensive discussion of candlelight in artistic training, especially in Leiden, is found in Mirjam Neumeister, Das Nachtstück mit Kunstlicht in der niederländischen Malerei und Graphik des. 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Petersberg; M. Nijhoff, 2003), 315–27.

  24. 24. Self-portraits of Schalcken emerge repeatedly among his frequent candlelight scenes. See Thierry Beherman, Godfried Schalcken (Paris: Maeght, 1988), cats. 54–57; and Wayne Franits et al., Schalcken: Gemalte Verführung, exh. cat. (Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz Museum/Stuttgart: Belser Verlag, 2015).

  25. 25. Man Writing by Candlelight was in conservation at the Mauritshuis in 1957 and the following year was examined in the laboratory of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, by W. J. Young. His report (Smith College Museum files) notes no damage to this area, indicating that no numbers were ever there. Benedict Nicolson, “Terbrugghen’s Old Man Writing,” Bulletin of the Smith College Museum of Art 38 (1958): 52–53, note 1.

  26. 26. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 1975.1.2487. A second version is in London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. P.159.1910.

  27. 27. See, for example, Rembrandt’s etched Self-Portrait with Saskia of 1636 (B. 19). The most celebrated artist signature is van Eyck’s Johannes de Eyck fuit hic in the Arnolfini portrait in London, but the wittiest belongs to Jan van Kessel, the naturalist painter, whose name is acted out by caterpillars and insects in his Europa (Alte-Pinakothek, Munich). Van Kessel’s painting of the signature alone was recently auctioned at Sotheby’s, New York, December 3, 2014, lot. 36.

  28. 28. I. Q. van Regteren-Altena, Jacques de GheynThree Generations (The Hague and : M. Nijhoff, 1983), 2:107–8, cat. 774. This drawing was recently sold in Part II of the sale of van Regerten Altena’s collection (Christie’s, Amsterdam, December 2014). A similar father/son conceit appears in Frederick Vroom’s painted self-portrait in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, in which the young artist (son of the famous marine painter Hendrick Vroom) fills the canvas on his easel with his own name above the words HENDRIKS zoon (RKD photo).

  29. 29. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst(Rotterdam, 1678), illustration 2. See also Hoogstraten’s self-portrait drawing (either signing or drawing) in the Fondation Custodia, Paris, and Nicolas Maes’s similar pen and brush self portrait in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. C.f. Ben Broos, “The Young Samuel van Hoogstraten Corrected by Rembrandt,” in The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678): Painter, Writer and Courtier, ed. Thijs Weststeijn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), figs. 21 and 23.

  30. 30. Nicolson, “Terbrugghen’s Old Man Writing,” 85.

  31. 31. Müller Hofstede, “Vita Mortalium Vigilia,” 45.

  32. 32. The only known portrait of ter Brugghen is an eighteenth-century engraving by Pieter Bodart, which shows him as a young man, and there is no reason to believe that it is an accurate likeness. See figure 1 in Slatkes and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick Ter Brugghen, 415.

  33. 33. This adage is discussed in Colin Eisler, “Every Artist Paints Himself: Art History as Biography and Autobiography,” Social Research 54, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 73–89; and in Frank Zöllner, “‘Ogni pittore dipinge sè’: Leonado da Vinci and ‘Automimesis,’” in Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk: Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca HertzianaRome, 1989, ed. Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VCH, 1992), 137–60.

  34. 34. In Gerard Dou’s daylight Self-Portrait of 1647 at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, the artist (academic beret on head and pen in hand) is accompanied by a globe, books, musical instruments, sculptures, and a candle. H. Perry Chapman discusses this painting among others in “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer,” in Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism,ed. Michael Cole and Mary Pardo (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,2005), 108–46, 201–7, fig. 4.16.

  35. 35. Parallels of light and sight appear in images of Visus, such as the magnificent engraving, ca. 1600, by Jan Saenredam after Goltzius, in which an artist wearing spectacles and surrounded by other allusions to Sight, works at an easel by the visible light rays of the sun; see Eric Jan Sluijter, Seductress of Sight: Studies in the Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2000), 87–100, fig. 66.

  36. 36. This process is vividly illustrated in Rembrandt’s small etching of a boy drawing a cast by candlelight. (B. 130) and in Crispijn van de Passe’s “Night School” from ‘t Licht der Teken en Schilderkonst(Amsterdam, 1643). See note 39.

  37. 37. See, for example, Jan van de Velde, Spieghel der Schrijfkonste, 1605;discussed in B. P. J. Broos, “The ‘O’ of Rembrandt,” Simiolus 4 (1970): 150–84; and Michael Roth, ed., Schrift als Bild: Schriftkunst und Kunstschrift vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit (Petersberg: Imhof, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3780321

  38. 38. Ann Jensen Adams, “Rembrandt f[ecit]: The Italic Signature and the Commodification of Artistic Identity,” in Künstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange: Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin 1992, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 581–94.

  39. 39. Important analyses of light were published in the seventeenth century by both Dutch artists and scientists: Crispijn van de Passe, ‘t Licht der Teken en Schilderkonst, Amsterdam, 1643 (repr. with an introduction by Jaap Bolten, Soest, 1973) and Constantijn Huygens, Traité de la Lumière, Paris, 1690 (English translation: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14725/14725-h/14725-h.htm).

  40. 40. Symbol of Athena/Minerva, goddess of wisdom in antiquity, the owl could also signify blindness or folly because the enlarged eyes of this nocturnal predator see well only in darkness—a dichotomy expressed by the two books in the print. The closed one on which the owl perches displays a paper inscribed “T’ is omt profit” (It’s all about profit), while the open Bible bears the radiant candle. See Marcel G. Roethlisberger, Abraham Bloemaert and His Sons: Paintings and Prints (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1993), 1:444.

Adams, Ann Jensen. “Rembrandt f[ecit]: The Italic Signature and the Commodification of Artistic Identity.” In Künstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange: Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin 1992, edited by Thomas W. Gaehtgens 581–94.Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993.

Beherman, Thierry. Godfried Schalcken. Paris: Maeght, 1988.

Borchhardt-Birbaumer, Brigitte. Imago Noctis: Die Nacht in der Kunst des Abendlands; vom Alten Orient bis ins Zeitalter des Barock. Vienna: Böhlau, 2003.

Broos, Ben. “The Young Samuel van Hoogstraten Corrected by Rembrandt.” In The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678): Painter, Writer and Courtier, edited by Thijs Weststeijn, 77–95. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.

Broos, B. P. J. “The ‘O’ of Rembrandt.” Simiolus 4 (1970): 150–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3780321

Chapman, H. Perry. “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer.” In Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, 108–46. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Dikstra, Jelte, Paul P. W. M. Dirkse, and Anneloes E. A. M. Smits. De Schilderijen van Museum Catharijnecovent. Zwolle: Waanders, 2002.

Eisler, Colin. “Every Artist Paints Himself: Art History as Biography and Autobiography.” Social Research54, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 73–100.

Franits, Wayne. Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.

Franits, Wayne, et al. Schalcken: Gemalte Verführung. Exh. cat. Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz Museum/Stuttgart: Belser Verlag, 2015.

Hanley, Stephen. “Optical Symbolism as Optical Description: A Case Study of Canon van der Paele’s Spectacles.” Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 1, no. 1 (2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2009.1.1.2

Ilardi, Vincent. Renaissance Vision: From Spectacles to Telescopes. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007.

Judson, J. R. “Review of Benedict Nicolson, Hendrick Terbrugghen,” Art Bulletin 43 (1961): 341–48.

Müller Hofstede, Justus. “Artificial Light in Honthorst and Terbrugghen: Form and Iconography.” In Hendrick ter Brugghen und die Nachfolger Caravaggios in Holland, edited by Rüdiger Klessmann, 13–43. Proceedings of a symposium accompanying the exhibition Höllandische Malerei in neuem Licht: Hendrick ter Brugghen und seine Zeitgenossen. Braunschweig: Anton Ulrich-Museum, 1987.

Müller Hofstede, Justus. “Vita Mortalium Vigilia: Die Nachtwache der Eremiten und Gelehrten.” In Leselust: Niederländischen Malerei von Rembrandt bis Vermeer, 35-46. Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1993.

Neumeister, Mirjam. Das Nachtstück mit Kunstlicht in der niederländischen Malerei und Graphik des. 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Petersberg: M. Imhof, 2003.

Nicolson, Benedict. Hendrik Terbrugghen. London: Percy Lund, Humphries, 1958.

Nicolson, Benedict. “Terbrugghen’s Old Man Writing.” Bulletin of the Smith College Museum of Art 38 (1958): 52–53.

Regteren-Altena, I. Q. van. Jacques de GheynThree Generations. 3 vols. The Hague and Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1983.

Roth, Michael, ed. Schrift als Bild: Schriftkunst und Kunstschrift vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit. Petersberg: Imhof, 2010.

Roethlisberger, Marcel G. Abraham Bloemaert and His Sons: Paintings and Prints. 2 vols. Doornspijk: Davaco, 1993.

Rzepinska, M. “Tenebrism in Baroque Painting and its Ideological Background.” Artibus et Historiae 7, no. 13 (1986): 91–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1483250

Seaman, Natasha T. The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen: Reinventing Christian Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht. Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012.

Slatkes, Leonard, and Wayne Franits. The Paintings of Hendrick Ter Brugghen: Catalogue Raisonné.Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

Sluijter, Eric Jan. Seductress of Sight: Studies in the Art of the Golden Age. Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2000.

Stewart, Alison G. Unequal Lovers A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art. New York: Abaris Books, 1978.

Stoichita, Victor. A Short History of Shadow. London: Reaktion, 1997.

Sutton, Peter. Prized Possessions: European Paintings from Private Collections of Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts. Exh. cat. Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1992.

Weller, Dennis. Sinners and Saints, Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His Dutch and Flemish Followers. Exh. cat.Raleigh:North Carolina Museum of Art, 1998.

Zöllner, Frank. “‘Ogni pittore dipinge sè’: Leonado da Vinci and ‘Automimesis.’” In Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk: Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca HertzianaRome, 1989, edited by Matthias Winner, 137–60. Weinheim: VCH, 1992.

List of Illustrations

Hendrick ter Brugghen,  Man Writing by Candlelight,  ca. 1627–29,  Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art
Fig. 1 Hendrick ter Brugghen, Man Writing by Candlelight, ca. 1627–29, oil on canvas, 65.7 x 52.7 cm. Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art, inv. SC1957:10 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Hendrick ter Brugghen,  Detail of figure 1: hands and inscription, Man W,  ca. 1627–29,  Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art
Fig. 2 Detail of figure 1: hands and inscription [side-by-side viewer]
Lucas van Leyden, Saint Mark Writing His Gospel, 1518, London, British Museum
Fig. 3 Lucas van Leyden, Saint Mark Writing His Gospel, 1518, engraving, 9.8 x 7.3 cm. London, British Museum, inv. D,5.21 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Aertgen van Leyden,  Saint Jerome in His Study by Candlelight,  ca. 1520,  Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Fig. 4 Aertgen van Leyden, Saint Jerome in His Study by Candlelight, ca. 1520, oil on panel, 48 x 37.7 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. S-A-3903 (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Jacques de Gheyn II, Young Man Writing His Name (Jacques de Gheyn III?), ca. 1625, Boston, Peck Collection
Fig. 5 Jacques de Gheyn II, Young Man Writing His Name (Jacques de Gheyn III?), ca. 1625, black chalk drawing, 16.5 x 14.1 cm. Boston, Peck Collection (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]
Samuel van Hoogstraten,  Self-Portrait, frontispiece to Inleyding tot d, 1678,
Fig. 6 Samuel van Hoogstraten, Self-Portrait, frontispiece to Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (Rotterdam: François van Hoogstraten, 1678) [side-by-side viewer]
Cornelis Bloemaert,  What Use Are Candles and Spectacles If the Owl R, ca. 1622–24,  Boston, Museum of Fine Arts
Fig. 7 Cornelis Bloemaert, What Use Are Candles and Spectacles If the Owl Refuses to See? ca. 1622–24, engraving, 22.2 x 18.4 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. 55.934 (http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/the-wise-owl-161215) (artwork in the public domain) [side-by-side viewer]

Footnotes

  1. 1. Walter Liedtke explored the acquisition of Dutch art by American collectors and public museums in “Great Dutch Paintings in America: The Collectors and Their Ideals,” in Great Dutch Paintings from America, exh. cat. (Detroit Institute of Arts and the Maurithuis, The Hague, 1990), 14–59; also in this catalogue is a parallel essay, Susan D. Kuretsky, “Dutch Art in Academia: Observations on College and University Collecting,” 79–103. See also George S. Keyes, “Collecting Utrecht Paintings in the United States,” in Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age, exh. cat. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery; and London, National Gallery/New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 121–26.

  2. 2. Dennis Weller, Sinners and Saints, Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His Dutch and Flemish Followers, exh. cat. (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1998), 102. Benedict Nicolson related the work primarily to early sixteenth-century occupational portraiture by Quentin Metsys: Hendrick Terbrugghen (London: Percy Lund, Humphries, 1958), 86.

  3. 3. Leonard J. Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen: Catalogue Raisonné (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007), 164–65 and note 2. Left uncompleted at the time of Slatkes’s death, this book was heroically brought to completion by his former student Wayne Franits. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  4. 4. Slatkes and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, 165 and note 4. J. R. Judson, “Review of Benedict Nicolson, Hendrick Terbrugghen,” Art Bulletin 43 (1961): 342, 347–48, related this painting to Lucas van Leyden’s chalk drawing in the British Museum of a frontal seated man with spectacles but did not mention the engraving. The van Leyden drawing may have directly inspired the Jacques de Gheyn II drawing of a young man (probably his son) seated at a table and inscribing the signature IDGheyn III in (see note 28 below and fig. 5). http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  5. 5. By the sixteenth century earlier rivet glasses (two lenses riveted together, with frames of wood, horn, or bone) had evolved into the more comfortable “bow” spectacleswith flexible metal frames seen here. See note 8.

  6. 6. Van Eyck’s use of the eyeglass lens is discussed in Stephen Hanley’s “Optical Symbolism as Optical Description: A Case Study of Canon van der Paele’s Spectacles,” Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 1, no. 1,(2009).http://dx.doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2009.1.1.2

  7. 7. See, for example, Quentin Metsys, Portrait of a Scholar, ca. 1525–30, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, and Hendrick Bloemaert, Saint Jerome Reading, dated 1624, Bayerishen Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich.

  8. 8. The history of eyeglasses, with extensive bibliography, is recounted in Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision: From Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), 4–26, figs. 66–68.

  9. 9. Illustrations of such professional craftsmen appear with short poems in books of trades by Joost Amman, Das Ständebuch (1558), as “Der Brillenmacher,” and by Jan Luyken, Het Mensekyk Bedryf (1694), as “De Brillemaaker.”

  10. 10. This wide circulation is illustrated in a 1591 print engraved by Jan Collaert after Johannes Stradanus, titled CONSPICILLA(keeping in sight), which displays the many fine craftsmen who depend on eyeglass sellers. See also Adriaen van Ostade’s etching of a door-to-door spectacles seller and Jan Steen’s painting of the same subject in the National Gallery, London.

  11. 11. Herman Saftleven’s 1647 etching of an itinerant glasses seller hawking his wares is labeled “Bedrieger” (deceiver), while a painting by Jan Cornelisz. van Oostsanen in the Groninger Museum, Caterijneconvent, Utrecht, shows a provocative young woman “selling spectacles” to an old man; see Jelte Dikstra, Paul P. W. M. Dirkse, and Anneloes E. A. M. Smits, De Schilderijen van Museum Catharijnecovent (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002), 42.

  12. 12. Slatke and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, A34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  13. 13. Slatke and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, A21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  14. 14. Natasha Seaman has convincingly interpreted ter Brugghen’s paintings of Thomas and Matthew as reflections of the artist’s Protestant perspective on faith as expressed in Christ’s words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29). Natasha T. Seaman, The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen: Reinventing Christian Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012), 124–29, 140, in which the author also considers artists’ varied uses and interpretations of eyeglasses in relation to ter Brugghen’s paintings.

  15. 15. Slatke and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, A51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/oculi.10

  16. 16. Alison G. Stewart, Unequal Lovers A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art(New York: Abaris Books, 1978).

  17. 17. Peter Sutton, Prized Possessions: European Paintings from Private Collections of Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts/New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 130.

  18. 18. Wayne Franits’s discussions of attitudes toward age in Dutch art appear in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004)74–75; and in Slatkes and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen, 56.

  19. 19. See also Jan Massys’s melancholic Saint Jerome Meditating by Candlelight, dated 1537, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Aertgen van Leyden’s Jerome also bears close comparison to ter Brugghen’s Magdalen, alternatively titled Melancholia, (ca. 1627–29, private collection, on loan to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). This is the closest of ter Brugghen’s works to Man Writing by Candlelight in format and in the complexity of its candlelight effects and associations.

  20. 20. Justus Müller Hofstede, “Artificial Light in Honthorst and ter Brugghen: Form and Iconography,” in Hendrick ter Brugghen und die Nachfolger Caravaggios in Holland, ed. Rüdiger Klessmann, proceedings of a symposium accompanying the exhibition Höllandische Malerei in neuem Licht: Hendrick ter Brugghen und seine Zeitgenossen(Braunschweig: Anton Ulrich-Museum, 1987), 19–21. This discussion continued in his “Vita Mortalium Vigilia: Die Nachtwache der Eremiten und Gelehrten” in Leselust: Niederländischen Malerei von Rembrandt bis Vermeer (Stuttgart Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1993), 35–46.

  21. 21. Stephen Orgel, introduction to Otto van Veen, Horatii Emblemata, Antwerp, 1612 (repr., New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979), 40–41, 52–53.

  22. 22. Pliny, Natural History, 35.43. See Victor Stoichita, A Short History of Shadow(London: Reaktion, 1997), 11–20.

  23. 23. Brigitte Borchhardt-Birbaumer, citing Renaissance and Baroque drawings, prints, and paintings, discusses depictions of diligent artists working at night as illustrations of “lucubration,” a term meaning intense study or meditation, that derives from the Latin word lucubratio (nocturnal study by oil lamp or candlelight). Imago Noctis: Die Nacht in der Kunst des Abendlands; vom Alten Orient bis ins Zeitalter des Barock (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003), 363–82. Extensive discussion of candlelight in artistic training, especially in Leiden, is found in Mirjam Neumeister, Das Nachtstück mit Kunstlicht in der niederländischen Malerei und Graphik des. 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Petersberg; M. Nijhoff, 2003), 315–27.

  24. 24. Self-portraits of Schalcken emerge repeatedly among his frequent candlelight scenes. See Thierry Beherman, Godfried Schalcken (Paris: Maeght, 1988), cats. 54–57; and Wayne Franits et al., Schalcken: Gemalte Verführung, exh. cat. (Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz Museum/Stuttgart: Belser Verlag, 2015).

  25. 25. Man Writing by Candlelight was in conservation at the Mauritshuis in 1957 and the following year was examined in the laboratory of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, by W. J. Young. His report (Smith College Museum files) notes no damage to this area, indicating that no numbers were ever there. Benedict Nicolson, “Terbrugghen’s Old Man Writing,” Bulletin of the Smith College Museum of Art 38 (1958): 52–53, note 1.

  26. 26. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 1975.1.2487. A second version is in London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. P.159.1910.

  27. 27. See, for example, Rembrandt’s etched Self-Portrait with Saskia of 1636 (B. 19). The most celebrated artist signature is van Eyck’s Johannes de Eyck fuit hic in the Arnolfini portrait in London, but the wittiest belongs to Jan van Kessel, the naturalist painter, whose name is acted out by caterpillars and insects in his Europa (Alte-Pinakothek, Munich). Van Kessel’s painting of the signature alone was recently auctioned at Sotheby’s, New York, December 3, 2014, lot. 36.

  28. 28. I. Q. van Regteren-Altena, Jacques de GheynThree Generations (The Hague and : M. Nijhoff, 1983), 2:107–8, cat. 774. This drawing was recently sold in Part II of the sale of van Regerten Altena’s collection (Christie’s, Amsterdam, December 2014). A similar father/son conceit appears in Frederick Vroom’s painted self-portrait in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, in which the young artist (son of the famous marine painter Hendrick Vroom) fills the canvas on his easel with his own name above the words HENDRIKS zoon (RKD photo).

  29. 29. Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst(Rotterdam, 1678), illustration 2. See also Hoogstraten’s self-portrait drawing (either signing or drawing) in the Fondation Custodia, Paris, and Nicolas Maes’s similar pen and brush self portrait in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. C.f. Ben Broos, “The Young Samuel van Hoogstraten Corrected by Rembrandt,” in The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678): Painter, Writer and Courtier, ed. Thijs Weststeijn (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), figs. 21 and 23.

  30. 30. Nicolson, “Terbrugghen’s Old Man Writing,” 85.

  31. 31. Müller Hofstede, “Vita Mortalium Vigilia,” 45.

  32. 32. The only known portrait of ter Brugghen is an eighteenth-century engraving by Pieter Bodart, which shows him as a young man, and there is no reason to believe that it is an accurate likeness. See figure 1 in Slatkes and Franits, Paintings of Hendrick Ter Brugghen, 415.

  33. 33. This adage is discussed in Colin Eisler, “Every Artist Paints Himself: Art History as Biography and Autobiography,” Social Research 54, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 73–89; and in Frank Zöllner, “‘Ogni pittore dipinge sè’: Leonado da Vinci and ‘Automimesis,’” in Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk: Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca HertzianaRome, 1989, ed. Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VCH, 1992), 137–60.

  34. 34. In Gerard Dou’s daylight Self-Portrait of 1647 at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, the artist (academic beret on head and pen in hand) is accompanied by a globe, books, musical instruments, sculptures, and a candle. H. Perry Chapman discusses this painting among others in “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer,” in Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism,ed. Michael Cole and Mary Pardo (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press,2005), 108–46, 201–7, fig. 4.16.

  35. 35. Parallels of light and sight appear in images of Visus, such as the magnificent engraving, ca. 1600, by Jan Saenredam after Goltzius, in which an artist wearing spectacles and surrounded by other allusions to Sight, works at an easel by the visible light rays of the sun; see Eric Jan Sluijter, Seductress of Sight: Studies in the Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2000), 87–100, fig. 66.

  36. 36. This process is vividly illustrated in Rembrandt’s small etching of a boy drawing a cast by candlelight. (B. 130) and in Crispijn van de Passe’s “Night School” from ‘t Licht der Teken en Schilderkonst(Amsterdam, 1643). See note 39.

  37. 37. See, for example, Jan van de Velde, Spieghel der Schrijfkonste, 1605;discussed in B. P. J. Broos, “The ‘O’ of Rembrandt,” Simiolus 4 (1970): 150–84; and Michael Roth, ed., Schrift als Bild: Schriftkunst und Kunstschrift vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit (Petersberg: Imhof, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3780321

  38. 38. Ann Jensen Adams, “Rembrandt f[ecit]: The Italic Signature and the Commodification of Artistic Identity,” in Künstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange: Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin 1992, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 581–94.

  39. 39. Important analyses of light were published in the seventeenth century by both Dutch artists and scientists: Crispijn van de Passe, ‘t Licht der Teken en Schilderkonst, Amsterdam, 1643 (repr. with an introduction by Jaap Bolten, Soest, 1973) and Constantijn Huygens, Traité de la Lumière, Paris, 1690 (English translation: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14725/14725-h/14725-h.htm).

  40. 40. Symbol of Athena/Minerva, goddess of wisdom in antiquity, the owl could also signify blindness or folly because the enlarged eyes of this nocturnal predator see well only in darkness—a dichotomy expressed by the two books in the print. The closed one on which the owl perches displays a paper inscribed “T’ is omt profit” (It’s all about profit), while the open Bible bears the radiant candle. See Marcel G. Roethlisberger, Abraham Bloemaert and His Sons: Paintings and Prints (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1993), 1:444.

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DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.1.4
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Susan Donahue Kuretsky, "Light and Sight in ter Brugghen’s Man Writing by Candlelight," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 9:1 (Winter 2017) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.1.4