Hendrick ter Brugghen(The Hague 1588 – 1629 Utrecht)

How to cite
Bakker, Piet. “Hendrick ter Brugghen” (2017). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 2nd ed. Edited by Arthur
K. Wheelock Jr. New York, 2017–20. https://theleidencollection.com/artists/hendrick-ter-brugghen/ (archivedJune 2020).
A PDF of every version of this biography is available in this Online Catalogue's Archive, and the Archive ismanaged by a permanent URL. New versions are added only when a substantive change to the narrativeoccurs.

Hendrick ter Brugghen was born probably in The Hague in 1588.[1] His father, Jan ter Brugghen (1561–1626),
was the first bailiff of the States of Holland.[2] Hendrick’s grandfather, who came from a distinguished family
from the provinces of Utrecht 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’sdaughter, took place in a Dutch Reformed church. Moreover, four of the couple’s eight children were baptizedin Reformed churches. Unlike his brother and sister, however, Ter Brugghen never became a Protestant. Hiswidow, though, did join the Reformed Church, but not until shortly after his death.
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 in Utrecht 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 apprenticeshipwith 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 he served in the army of the Frisianstadholder Ernst Casimir I (1573–1632). According to his son Richard ter Brugghen (1616–1710), whopublished a Notificatie (Notice) with a biographical sketch of his father in 1707, Ter Brugghen worked inNaples 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 bring about 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]© 2020 The Leiden Collection

Hendrick ter Brugghen
Page 2 of 6Sandrart (1606–88) dedicated just a few lines to 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 thisby describing it as “unangenehm” (unpleasant), suggesting that this was related to Ter Brugghen’s“tiefsinnige, jedoch schwermütige Gedanken” (profound, but melancholy thoughts), a judgment that was laterinterpreted 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 otherUtrecht 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 wasnow financially independent, married Jacomijna Verbeeck. The couple took up residence in the artist’s homeon the Korte Lauwerstraat. Little work from 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 toRome, which would have been between the summer of 1619 and the summer of 1621.[9] He appears regularlyin the Utrecht archives from 1622 on.
Ter Brugghen’s early work shows the influence of Northern Italian masters such as Orazio Gentileschi(1563–1639) and Carlo Saraceni (1579–1620), especially in his use of color and choice of subject. In theseyears Ter Brugghen painted exclusively history pieces. An entirely new phase in his career dawned whenDirck van Baburen (ca. 1595–1624) and Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) returned from their Italian travels in1620. 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 Fife Players—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 joint workshop.[11] Such anarrangement 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 theSnippevlucht, a narrow 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 not strange that Rubens chose to stay at Jan’s inn
when he spent a few days in Utrecht in the summer of 1627. Sandrart, who was Rubens’s guide in Utrecht,
later explicitly reported visits by Rubens to Van Honthorst, Bloemaert, and Cornelis van Poelenburch(1594/1595–1667), but did not mention Ter Brugghen. According to Arnold Houbraken, who derived hisinformation on Ter Brugghen from the above-mentioned pamphlet about the artist, Rubens is said to havedeclared that he “traveled throughout the Netherlands in search of a painter, and had found only one, goingby the name of Henrik Ter Brugghen.”[13] Whether Rubens really said this is impossible to determine, but thetwo artists do appear to have met. Ter Brugghen must have been one of the other Utrecht painters whomRubens 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 a series of Twelve Roman Emperors by various artists.[15] This commission may have
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Hendrick ter Brugghen
Page 3 of 6

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 a painting of his depicting a viola da gamba player, while
his sister Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), the widow of the “Winter King,” 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, for instance, thefamous 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 thatwas raging in Utrecht in that year. He was buried in the Buurkerk. He left behind his wife, who was expecting
their eighth child—a daughter, 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 theartist is widely regarded as the most gifted of the Dutch Caravaggists.

- Piet Bakker, 2017

© 2020 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 andKobayashi, however, have shown that this is probably not true because Ter Brugghen’sparents are recorded as already living in Utrecht in 1581, where Jan ter Brugghen owned ahouse. This house was sold on 19 April 1589. Nine days later Jan bought a house in TheHague. Since there is mention of a “Ter Brug deurwaerder” (Ter Brugghen bailiff) in a Hague
tax register of 1585, it may be reasonably assumed that Hendrick was born in The Hague.
MartenJ.

BokandYorikoKobayashi,“NewDataon

Hendrick

terBrugghen,” Hoogsteder-Naumann Mercury, no. 1 (1985): 7–34; Marten J. Bok, “HendrickJansz ter Brugghen,” in Nieuw Licht op de Gouden Eeuw: Hendrick ter Brugghen entijdgenoten, ed. Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes (Exh. cat. Utrecht, Centraal Museum;
Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum) (Utrecht, 1986), 65. Unless otherwise noted, allbiographical information on Hendrick ter Brugghen is taken from Marten J. Bok, “HendrickJansz 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 ter Brugghen 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 onHendrick 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 terBrugghen en tijdgenoten, ed. Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes (Exh. cat. Utrecht, CentraalMuseum; Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum) (Utrecht, 1986), 67; Leonard J.
Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1626): Catalogue
Raisonné (Amsterdam, 2007), 1–6. The text of the Notificatie is known only from having beenreworked into a biographical sketch in Cornelis de Bie, Den spiegel van den verdrayde
werelt (Antwerp, 1708), 271–77.
7. Joachim von Sandrart, Joachim von Sandrarts Academie der Bau-, Bild- und MahlereyKu?nste von 1675: Lebem der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. Arthur R.
© 2020 The Leiden Collection

Hendrick ter Brugghen
Page 5 of 6Peltzer (Nuremberg, 1675–79; reprint, Munich, 1925), 178.
8. The Adoration of the Magi, signed and dated 1619 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam); Leonard J.
Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1626): Catalogue
Raisonné (Amsterdam, 2007), 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 theperiod in which he may have made this second journey, see Marten J. Bok, “Hendrick Janszter 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), 66.
10. The Flute and Fife Players, 1621 (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel); Leonard J. Slatkes
and Wayne Franits, 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):
Catalogue Raisonné (Amsterdam, 2007), 19–22.
12. An important indication of his prosperity is the substantial sum of 18 guilders in huisgeld (realestate tax) he had to pay in 1629, suggesting that he lived in a large house. This is further
supported by the professions practiced by his father-in-law, a lawyer, and his own father, whobecame 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 name Henrik Ter Brugghen te hebben gevonden.” This quote is taken from Arnold
Houbraken’s first edition of his De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en
schilderessen (Amsterdam, 1718), 1: 273–74. In the second edition from 1753 he dedicatesless 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 deSchilderkonstoeffenaars te bezoeken, in gezelschap van hun alle, zyne Konst byuitnementheid roemde” (When Rubens went to Utrecht to visit artists, he [Ter Brugghen] washonored when Rubens praised his excellence in the company of others); ArnoldHoubraken. De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen(Amsterdam, 1718–21; rev. ed., The Hague, 1753; reprint, Amsterdam, 1980), 1: 134. Thisquote, like the first, is based on the Notificatie by Richard ter Brugghen. See also Benedict
Nicolson, Hendrick Terbrugghen (The Hague, 1958), 31n7.
14. Joachim von Sandrart, Joachim von Sandrarts Academie der Bau-, Bild- und MahlereyKu?nste 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 andRichard’s interpretation of it, see note 6.
15. The Roman Emperor Claudius, 162(?) (Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin© 2020 The Leiden CollectionPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Hendrick ter Brugghen
Page 6 of 6

Brandenburg, Jagdschloss Grunewald, Berlin). Leonard J. Slatkes and Wayne Franits, The
Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1626): Catalogue Raisonné (Amsterdam, 2007),140–41,no.

A42.

For

questionssurrounding

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

Literature
De Bie, Cornelis. Het gulden cabinet van de edele vry schilder-const. Antwerp, 1661, 132.
De Bie, Cornelis. Den spiegel van den verdrayde werelt. Antwerp, 1708, 271–77.
Houbraken,Arnold.

De

grooteschouburgh

derNederlantsche

konstschilders

enschilderessen. Amsterdam, 1718–21; revised edition published in The Hague, 1753; reprinted
in Amsterdam, 1980, 133–35.
Von Sandrart, Joachim. Joachim von Sandrarts Academie der Bau-, Bild- und MahlereyKünste von 1675: Lebem der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister. Edited by Arthur
R. Peltzer, 178. 4 vols. Nuremburg. 1675–79; reprinted in Munich, 1925.
Nicolson, Benedict. Hendrick Terbrugghen. The Hague, 1958.
Bok,Marten

J.

andYoriko

Kobayashi.

“NewDataonHendrick

terBrugghen.” Hoogsteder-Naumann Mercury, no. 1 (1985): 7–34.
Schuckman, Christiaan. “Did Hendrick ter Brugghen Revisit Italy? Notes from an Unknown
Manuscript by Cornelis de Bie.” Hoogsteder-Naumann Mercury, no. 4 (1986): 7–22.
Bok, Marten J. “Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen.” In Nieuw Licht op de Gouden Eeuw: Hendrick
ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten. Edited by Albert Blankert and Leonard Slatkes, 63–75. Exh. cat.
Utrecht, Centraal Museum; Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum. Utrecht, 1986.
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Catalogue Raisonné. Amsterdam, 2007.

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