VISIT Ghent this year, and you have the opportunity to share in the celebrations of the MSK’s 225 years as a public gallery. The year also marks the 125th anniversary of the establishment of the Friends of the Museum. On the upper floor of the permanent collection, there are displays of works bought over more than a century by the Friends.
This far-sightedness does not include revamping entrances, extending foyer spaces, or providing new visitor facilities, or food halls. Rather, unlike our own National Gallery as it comes to celebrate its bicentenary, the emphasis is on painting and the collections that are housed here. As a world-class museum, the facilities at Ghent are more than adequate and provided more than coffee (Rombouts, naturally) before the press view, doubly welcome as snow fell outside. One loan from Italy had just made it through only that morning at eight o’clock.
Maybe if the Trustees of the National Gallery had put the money that they are expending on refurbishment towards buying paintings, we could have enhanced our own international collection.
Theodoor Rombouts is not well known outside his native Flanders. The short-lived artist, who died, aged 40, in the year 1637, while he is celebrated by his more widely acknowledged Flemish contemporaries, Rubens and Van Dyck, here receives due attention. Anthony Van Dyck painted portraits of him and of his wife, Anna van Thielen, and their daughter in 1632 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich).
This monographic exhibition brings together a couple of his works from his time in Italy, thought to be between 1616 and 1624/25, where he had encountered Caravaggism, and then his final years, when he returned to his native Antwerp and to marriage. He is shown moving away from Caravaggio’s models, and is most directly informed by Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582-1622).
The first room looks at two particular biblical themes: Christ driving the money-changers from the Temple, and the denial of St Peter. Manfredi’s composition (The Louvre) is the first that we see, and shows a zealous and furious Jesus raising a whip of cords in his right hand. The sellers and money-changers flee before him. One man reels backwards to the side of the canvas.
The work is thought to date to 1616 and 1617 and is almost copied in its composition by that of Rombouts, who was painting some ten or 12 years later. For the Rombouts, we have both a smaller oil sketch, measuring just 74 × 108cm, currently in Utrecht, as well as the full-scale work 168 × 237cm; they are more or less identical.
North Carolina Museum of Art, RaleighTheodoor Rombouts, The Backgammon Players (1634), oil on canvas
Where they differ from Manfredi, and where they evidence Rombouts’s own characteristic style, is in the somewhat surprising inclusion of a still-life in the foreground. On a counter are piled ledgers and bills of receipt, ready to fall as one of the luckless money-changers, vested in a doublet and yellow trousers, is about to be coshed over the head.
In the painting of the denial (Liechtenstein), Rombouts manages to stage an encounter between Peter and the maidservant beside a refectory table, recalling Caravaggio’s Calling of St Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi, in Rome (1600), from which the card players look up as they hear the unmistakable accent of the Galilean giving Peter away as one who had followed Christ. Although not as taut or as constrained as the compositions by Manfredi, nor as significantly lit with candlelight as both van Honthorst and Adam de Coster make the scene appear, it is, none the less, a powerful work.
In the next room, we concentrate on body and soul. Here, we find — perhaps the most unexpected painting in the exhibition — an altarpiece brought from the cathedral at Mdina, in Malta. It depicts St Sebastian, but not as we normally see him. Rombouts has given him a moustache and a blue loincloth. Whatever our devotions, we are transported to the world of Starsky and Hutch and Baywatch.
Rather more conventional and, in that sense, more successful, the scene of Irene and her maid tending St Sebastian after he has been shot with arrows (Karlsruhe) suggests a degree of piety which somehow eludes the Maltese altarpiece.
In Rome, Rombouts lived alongside the artists Dirck van Baburen and Nicolas Régnier in the parish of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, later demolished to provide for the Spanish Steps. Régnier’s version of Irene’s act of charity — shown here in a painting from Rouen, the mirror image of the more compelling work in the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull — references a recent discovery. The Barberini Faun had been unearthed in 1624 and seems to have informed the gestures of the saint’s arms, one upraised above the saint’s head, the other near lifeless at his side.
The 16th and 17th centuries had a particular passion for the history of the Titans and how their pride led to their fall. The Rombouts painting of Prometheus Bound is an ambitious and large-scale work that demands our attention. It is a cruel scene, painted in a world lacking in compassion, of being tormented by foresight.
There is no intention to provide any comfort for those who look at it; so, in this room, it is expressly helpful that we see, alongside, a reflection on the world in the ancient philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus. Using a restricted palette, Rombouts, in his version of the two philosophers and their response to the woes of the world, reflects humanely on the problems to the world.
Metropolitan Cathedral Museum, Mdina, MaltaTheodoor Rombouts, St Sebastian (c.1622-24), oil on canvas
When Rubens had painted the pair in 1603, he set the two philosophers either side of an enormous globe, as if they were grappling with it as the stumbling block to any real understanding of how to live life.
After he left Rome and some of the more licentious company of unmarried Flemish artists there, Rombouts went to Tuscany and, by such accounts as his paintings provide, since we have little testamentary evidence, undertook a single church commission for the medieval church (1243) of St Simon and St Jude in Florence, as part of its refurbishment programme (1623-30).
In it, two angels support St Francis as he swoons in ecstasy, while a third points to the vision of the Crucified, who appears like a seraph in a break in the clouds. The artist clearly was able to enjoy the Medici collection, as his later paintings of tooth-pullers show the influence of a celebrated work by Caravaggio owned by the family, included here.
Rombouts returned home for the last dozen years of his life and to marriage. His Backgammon Players of 1634 (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, US) shows an interested party around a backgammon board. Commentators have spotted that the central figure casting the dice is none other than the artist, while, at the further end of the table, his wife sits quietly holding on to their daughter.
If the identification is indeed correct, then it must be the case that the artist did not see games and entertainment as being particularly inappropriate for children to witness, as here there is no evidence of drinking or of riotous behaviour.
The central room is given over to the five senses. On one wall is The Allegory of the Five Senses which Rombouts painted in 1632 (MSK); but the first painting that we see on entering is again by Manfredi, in which two musicians perform together. It normally hangs in Dublin Castle, one of more than 60 Old Master paintings generously loaned from the Schorr Collection.
It is a theme picked up by other artists, and in this installation is brilliantly supported by including the musical instruments of the day: recorders, flutes, guitars, and lutes offer an aural background to what must be the masterpiece of Rombouts’s work, the version of The Lute Player which has been brought from Philadelphia.
A lutenist tunes his instrument while, in front of him, on a rich Turkey carpet, is laid out a songbook and, beside it, a tankard and the impedimenta of a pipe-smoker. The intensity of his gaze suggests that he has set drinking and smoking to one side to entertain and seduce us with music. Such musicians provided concerts and often offered background music to amorous adventures and in tavern scenes.
The Medici Caravaggio of the quack dentist (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) is the starting-point for two works by Rombouts, one an autograph work from the Prado, the other a workshop piece from the Ghent collection itself.
Much lighter than the Caravaggio, which is sometimes dismissed as a caricature, what faces us is a finely detailed naturalism. In both, the table is littered with accurately observed medical instruments. Rombouts brings to life a professional going about his gory business. One was owned by Antoon Triest, the Bishop of Ghent who also commissioned the 3.5m-high Descent from the Cross for St Bavo’s Cathedral, c.1628: a work that deliberately goes head to head with Rubens and his celebrated altarpieces in Antwerp. Rombouts was to die on Holy Cross Day, less than ten years later.
The exhibition is exemplary in providing a focus on a lesser-known artist viewed through the lens of a more widely registered contemporary diffusion of Caravaggism in Northern Europe. It is a more than fitting tribute to celebrate the museum’s anniversary year and draw together an impressive exhibition around the three works that the MSK owns.
“Theodoor Rombouts: Virtuoso of Flemish Caravaggism” is at the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK), Fernand Scribedreef 1, Ghent, Belgium, until 23 April. www.mskgent.be
