Hendrick ter Brugghen(The Hague 1588 – 1629 Utrecht)

How to cite
Bakker, Piet. “Hendrick ter Brugghen” (2017). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 3rd ed. Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock
Jr. and Lara Yeager-Crasselt. New York, 2020–23. https://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/ (archived December2023).
A PDF of every version of this biography is available in this Online Catalogue's Archive, and the Archive is managed bya permanent URL. New versions are added only when a substantive change to the narrative occurs.

Hendrick ter Brugghen was born probably in The Hague in 1588.[1] His father, Jan ter Brugghen (1561–1626), was the firstbailiff of the States of Holland.[2] Hendrick’s grandfather, who came from a distinguished family from the provinces ofUtrecht and Overijssel, was a Catholic priest and as such not allowed to marry. Hendrick’s father was therefore
illegitimate. Because of this background, it was long assumed that Hendrick too was a Catholic, but his marriage on 15
October 1616 to Jacomijna Verbeeck (d. 1634), a lawyer’s daughter, took place in a Dutch Reformed church. Moreover,four of the couple’s eight children were baptized in Reformed churches. Unlike his brother and sister, however, Ter
Brugghen never became a Protestant. His widow, though, did join the Reformed Church, but not until shortly after hisdeath.
Ter Brugghen probably spent his childhood in The Hague. Between 1602, the last mention of him in The Hague, and 1613,
the first record of him in Utrecht, the Ter Brugghen family is recorded only in Abcoude.[3] Yet Jan must have settled inUtrecht before 1613, because his son trained as a painter under Abraham Bloemaert (1566–1651), who lived in Utrecht
continuously from 1593 until his death.[4] After his apprenticeship with Bloemaert, Ter Brugghen traveled to Italy where,
in his own words, he “executed art for innumerable years.”[5] He must have left after April 1607, because in that month heserved in the army of the Frisian stadholder Ernst Casimir I (1573–1632). According to his son Richard ter Brugghen(1616–1710), who published a Notificatie (Notice) with a biographical sketch of his father in 1707, Ter Brugghen workedin Naples and Rome, where he is said to have met Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who lived there until 1608. The
veracity of these facts is difficult to determine. Richard’s Notice was a somewhat propagandist pamphlet intended to bringabout a reevaluation of his father’s work.[6] In his son’s eyes, Ter Brugghen’s reputation had suffered greatly from Joachim
von Sandrart’s negative assessment of his work in his Teutschen Academy.[7] Sandrart (1606–88) dedicated just a few linesto Ter Brugghen in which he hinted that he was not a great admirer of the artist. Sandrart appreciated the way Ter
Brugghen followed “natuur” (nature), but qualified this by describing it as “unangenehm” (unpleasant), suggesting that this© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Hendrick ter Brugghen
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was related to Ter Brugghen’s “tiefsinnige, jedoch schwermütige Gedanken” (profound, but melancholy thoughts), a
judgment that was later interpreted to mean that Ter Brugghen suffered from melancholia.
Ter Brugghen spent the summer of 1614 in Milan. After a few months, and in the company of three other Utrecht
painters, he embarked on a journey along the Gotthard Pass, arriving in Utrecht at the end of the year. In 1616 he enrolled
as a master painter in the Guild of Saint Luke in Utrecht and, presumably because he was now financially independent,married Jacomijna Verbeeck. The couple took up residence in the artist’s home on the Korte Lauwerstraat. Little workfrom Ter Brugghen’s early years is known; the first painting that can be attributed to him with certainty dates from 1619.[8]There are also indications that he made a second journey to Rome, which would have been between the summer of 1619
and the summer of 1621.[9] He appears regularly in the Utrecht archives from 1622 on.
Ter Brugghen’s early work shows the influence of Northern Italian masters such as Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) andCarlo Saraceni (1579–1620), especially in his use of color and choice of subject. In these years Ter Brugghen painted
exclusively history pieces. An entirely new phase in his career dawned when Dirck van Baburen (ca. 1595–1624) and
Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) returned from their Italian travels in 1620. The work of both these artists revived Ter
Brugghen’s interest in the art of Caravaggio (1571–1610). In 1621 he painted his first genre pieces—The Flute and FifePlayers—which were followed by numerous scenes with musicians.[10] The Flute and Fife Players, as well as other works
painted shortly after in 1621, are so indebted to Van Baburen that it is entirely possible that the two artists operated a jointworkshop.[11] Such an arrangement would not have been for long, however, because Van Baburen died in 1624.
Ter Brugghen seems to have achieved considerable success by 1626. Around that time he moved to the Snippevlucht, anarrow street along Utrecht’s Oude Gracht, near the town hall. He rented a large house from Johan Wtewael, a solicitor
and burgomaster of Utrecht and brother of the painter Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638).[12] The Snippevlucht was very close
to the inn run by Ter Brugghen’s brother Jan, het Casteel van Antwerpen, one of the finest in Utrecht. It is therefore notstrange that Rubens chose to stay at Jan’s inn when he spent a few days in Utrecht in the summer of 1627. Sandrart, whowas Rubens’s guide in Utrecht, later explicitly reported visits by Rubens to Van Honthorst, Bloemaert, and Cornelis vanPoelenburch (1594/1595–1667), but did not mention Ter Brugghen. According to Arnold Houbraken, who derived his
information on Ter Brugghen from the above-mentioned pamphlet about the artist, Rubens is said to have declared that he“traveled throughout the Netherlands in search of a painter, and had found only one, going by the name of Henrik TerBrugghen.”[13] Whether Rubens really said this is impossible to determine, but the two artists do appear to have met. TerBrugghen must have been one of the other Utrecht painters whom Rubens purportedly wished to visit.[14]Regardless of Rubens’s opinion, Ter Brugghen did not suffer from a lack of appreciation in his own day. Between 1618
and 1625 the stadholder’s court commissioned him to paint a portrait of the Roman emperor Claudius, to be part of aseries of Twelve Roman Emperors by various artists.[15] This commission may have prompted the poet Constantijn
Huygens (1596–1687) to include Ter Brugghen in his summary of the greatest artists of the Dutch Republic.[16] Yet Ter
Brugghen’s excellent reputation is apparent in other ways as well. In the 1630s, Charles I of England (1600–49) owned apainting of his depicting a viola da gamba player, while his sister Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), the widow of the “WinterKing,” Frederick V of the Palatinate (1596–1632), in all probability commissioned Ter Brugghen to paint a mantelpiece.
The high regard in which he was held is also clear from the prices people were prepared to pay for his work. In 1644, forinstance, the famous Delft collector Boudewijn de Man owned a painting of Bacchus valued at 280 guilders.[17]Ter Brugghen died at the age of forty-two on 1 November 1629, probably as a result of a plague epidemic that was raging© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Hendrick ter Brugghen
Page 3 of 6in Utrecht in that year. He was buried in the Buurkerk. He left behind his wife, who was expecting their eighth child—adaughter, Henrickgen, born in March 1630. In 1708 Cornelis de Bie (1627– ca. 1714) described Ter Brugghen as one of
the “most celebrated and talked about painters of his time,” and today the artist is widely regarded as the most gifted of theDutch Caravaggists.

- Piet Bakker, 2017

© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Hendrick ter Brugghen
Page 4 of 6Endnotes
1. Hendrick ter Brugghen was long thought to have been born in Overijssel in 1588. Bok and Kobayashi,
however, have shown that this is probably not true because Ter Brugghen’s parents are recorded asalready living in Utrecht in 1581, where Jan ter Brugghen owned a house. This house was sold on 19April 1589. Nine days later Jan bought a house in The Hague. Since there is mention of a “Ter Brugdeurwaerder” (Ter Brugghen bailiff) in a Hague tax register of 1585, it may be reasonably assumed thatHendrick was born in The Hague. Marten J. Bok and Yoriko Kobayashi, “New Data on Hendrick terBrugghen,” Hoogsteder-Naumann Mercury, no. 1 (1985): 7–34; Marten J. Bok, “Hendrick Jansz terBrugghen,” in Nieuw Licht op de Gouden Eeuw: Hendrick ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten, ed. Albert Blankert
and Leonard Slatkes (Exh. cat. Utrecht, Centraal Museum; Braunschweig, Herzog Anton UlrichMuseum) (Utrecht, 1986), 65. Unless otherwise noted, all biographical information on Hendrick terBrugghen is taken from Marten J. Bok, “Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen,” in Nieuw Licht op de Gouden
Eeuw: Hendrick ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten, ed. Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes (Exh. cat. Utrecht,Centraal Museum; Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum) (Utrecht, 1986).
2. William of Orange (1650–1702) had earlier appointed him secretary to the Court of Utrecht in 1581.
Marten J. Bok, “Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen,” in Nieuw Licht op de Gouden Eeuw: Hendrick terBrugghen en tijdgenoten, ed. Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes (Exh. cat. Utrecht, Centraal Museum;
Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum) (Utrecht, 1986), 65.
3. Leonard J. Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1626): Catalogue
Raisonné (Amsterdam, 2007), 3.
4. See the biography of Abraham Bloemaert in this catalogue.
5. “[E]tterlicke jaeren conste geexerceerd.” Marten J. Bok and Yoriko Kobayashi, “New Data on Hendrick
ter Brugghen,” Hoogsteder-Naumann Mercury, no. 1 (1985): 25, doc. 17.
6. For the circumstances surrounding this pamphlet by Richard ter Brugghen, see Marten J. Bok,
“Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen,” in Nieuw Licht op de Gouden Eeuw: Hendrick ter Brugghen en
tijdgenoten, ed. Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes (Exh. cat. Utrecht, Centraal Museum;
Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum) (Utrecht, 1986), 67; Leonard J. Slatkes and WayneFranits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1626): Catalogue Raisonné (Amsterdam, 2007),
1–6. The text of the Notificatie is known only from having been reworked into a biographical sketch inCornelis de Bie, Den spiegel van den verdrayde werelt (Antwerp, 1708), 271–77.
7. Joachim von Sandrart, Joachim von Sandrarts Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675:
Lebem der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. Arthur R. Peltzer (Nuremberg, 1675–79;
reprint, Munich, 1925), 178.
8. The Adoration of the Magi, signed and dated 1619 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam); Leonard J. Slatkes andWayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1626): Catalogue Raisonné (Amsterdam,© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Hendrick ter Brugghen
Page 5 of 62007), 92–93, no. A10.
9. Christiaan Schuckman, “Did Hendrick ter Brugghen Revisit Italy? Notes from an Unknown Manuscript
by Cornelis de Bie,” Hoogsteder-Naumann Mercury, no. 4 (1986): 7–22. For the period in which he may
have made this second journey, see Marten J. Bok, “Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen,” in Nieuw Licht op deGouden Eeuw: Hendrick ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten, ed. Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes (Exh. cat.
Utrecht, Centraal Museum; Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum) (Utrecht, 1986), 66.
10. The Flute and Fife Players, 1621 (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel); Leonard J. Slatkes and WayneFranits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1626): Catalogue Raisonné (Amsterdam, 2007),174–77, no. A61.
11. Leonard J. Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1626): CatalogueRaisonné (Amsterdam, 2007), 19–22.
12. An important indication of his prosperity is the substantial sum of 18 guilders in huisgeld (real estatetax) he had to pay in 1629, suggesting that he lived in a large house. This is further supported by theprofessions practiced by his father-in-law, a lawyer, and his own father, who became the first bailiff
after having been secretary to the Court of Utrecht; see note 2.
13. “… de Nederlanden nu te hebben dorreist, en een schilder te hebben gesocht, en maar een, met nameHenrik Ter Brugghen te hebben gevonden.” This quote is taken from Arnold Houbraken’s first editionof his De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (Amsterdam, 1718), 1:
273–74. In the second edition from 1753 he dedicates less space to Ter Brugghen and summarizes
Rubens’s meeting with Ter Brugghen as “Hy [Ter Brugghen] heeft d’eer gehad dat Rubbens, wanneer hy
tot Utrecht kwam om de Schilderkonstoeffenaars te bezoeken, in gezelschap van hun alle, zyne Konst byuitnementheid roemde” (When Rubens went to Utrecht to visit artists, he [Ter Brugghen] was honored
when Rubens praised his excellence in the company of others); Arnold Houbraken, De grooteschouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (Amsterdam, 1718–21; rev. ed., The Hague,1753; reprint, Amsterdam, 1980), 1: 134. This quote, like the first, is based on the Notificatie byRichard ter Brugghen. See also Benedict Nicolson, Hendrick Terbrugghen (The Hague, 1958), 31n7.
14. Joachim von Sandrart, Joachim von Sandrarts Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675:
Lebem der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. Arthur R. Peltzer (Nuremberg, 1675–79;reprint, Munich, 1925), 178. For Rubens’s visit to Utrecht and Richard’s interpretation of it, see note 6.
15. The Roman Emperor Claudius, 162(?) (Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg,Jagdschloss Grunewald, Berlin). Leonard J. Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick terBrugghen (1588–1626): Catalogue Raisonné (Amsterdam, 2007), 140–41, no. A42. For questions
surrounding this commission, see Benedict Nicolson, Hendrick Terbrugghen (The Hague, 1958), 49–50,
no. A9.
16. A.H. Kan, De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens door hemzelf beschreven (Rotterdam, 1994), 73. Also see
also the biography of Abraham Bloemaert in this catalogue.
17. Marten J. Bok, “Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen,” in Nieuw Licht op de Gouden Eeuw: Hendrick ter© 2024 The Leiden CollectionPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Hendrick ter Brugghen
Page 6 of 6Brugghen en tijdgenoten, ed. Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes (Exh. cat. Utrecht, Centraal Museum;
Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum) (Utrecht, 1986), 71.

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