Bulletin du Musée National de Varsovie (37.1996)

regulations forbidding exactly such joint ventures. There is little doubt that
such rules existed and were sometimes even enforced.4 However, we should
also consider the fact that in 1625 the most important and best known joint
studio was formed by Rembrandt and Jan Lievens. Perhaps the two young
Leyden painters may even have taken their example from ter Brugghen and
Baburen since obviously both, but especially Lievens, were aware of what was
going on in Utrecht by that date.5 It is also necessary to clarify some aspects of
ter Brugghen’s character that may have been misinterpreted by Nicolson in his
monograph.6 Nicolson thought that ter Brugghen’s predilection for lost
profiles, averted eyes, and figures who seem to avoid contact with the viewer
- for example, the 1621 pendant Fluteplayers in Cassel7 - was a product of the
artist’s personality.8 When compared with Baburen’s more “extroverted”
Luteplayer of 1622, in Utrecht,9 one can understand what he was trying to
establish. However, one document of great significance for ter Brugghen
studies has been overlooked for what it tells us about the artist’s character. In
a legal deposition made in Utrecht on April 1, 1615, ter Brugghen and Thijman
van Galen filed charges against a third painter, a certain Michiel van der
Zande.10 All those involved had been part of a group of artists traveling
together through St. Gotthard’s Pass on their way from Italy back to The
Netherlands. Ter Brugghen and van Galen accused van der Zande of
mistreating his young servant, the future landscape painter Frans van
Knibbergen, to whose rescue ter Brugghen had come. This legal motion, filed
a year after the fact, and ter Brugghen’s actions in that alpine pass, are not
those associated with reticent individuals; quite the opposite, they are the
actions of a man used to asserting himself, and the deposition itself reveals
someone at ease with the legal bureaucracy. Thus the reticence that Nicolson
discerned in ter Brugghen pictures should be seen as a self-conscious artistic
device, not the subconscious product of his personality.

There is yet another side to this unusual event that may clarify another ter
Brugghen problem, one of potentially greater importance for our
understanding of his activity in Italy, or perhaps I should really say, helps to

4 See, for example, the 1634 document in which Isaack van Ruysdael (sic) was fined because Jan
van Goyen was working in his house as a painter, cited in the catalogue Masters of 17th-Century
Dutch Landscape Painting, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Philadelphia 1987, p.437.

5 See the article by R. Klessmann. “Jan Lievens und die Utrechter Caravaggisten,” in this issue of
the Bulletin.

6 Benedict Nicolson, Hendrick Terbrugghen, London 1958.

Ibid., cat. nos. A14 and A15, Plates 20, 21 and 24a. See also Utrecht/Braunschweig exh.1986/87.
cat. nos. 10 and 11.

8 Nicolson Hendrick Terbrugghen, op. cit., pp.13-15.

4 Leonard J. Slatkes, Dirck van Baburen (c. 1595-1624): A Dutch Painter in Utrecht and Rome,
Utrecht 1965, cat. A13. See also Utrecht/Braunschweig exh. 1986/87, cat. no. 36.

10 See M. E. Houck, “Mededelingen betreffende Gerhard Terborch... en Hendrick ter Brugghen”,
Verslagen en Mededelingeii der Vereeniging tot beoefening van Overijsselsch Rert en Geschiedenis
(1899), pp.355-358. The details of this Alpine episode are also repeated by Hofstede de Groot,
“Knibbergen,” Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildeiiden Künstler, 20, Leipzig 1927, pp.582-583.

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