Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Theodoor Rombouts (1597-1637) - Antwerp and Rome

Theodoor Rombouts
Card Players
ca. 1620-30
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Theodoor Rombouts
The Quack Dentist
ca. 1620-25
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Theodoor Rombouts
Expulsion of the Money Changers
before 1637
oil on canvas
Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp

Theodoor Rombouts
Denial of Peter
before 1637
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

"Born in Antwerp in 1597, Theodoor Rombouts is documented in Rome from 1616 to about 1621, where he seems to have belonged to the circle of Bartolomeo Manfredi, and would presumably have had close personal connections with artists such as Dirck van Baburen, Gerrit van Honthorst and Wouter Crabeth.  . . .  Except for a few rather unimportant religious pictures from his late period, he concentrated entirely on genre painting in which he improvised in a quite original manner on the themes typical in the circle of Manfredi: drinking scenes, musicians and gamblers.  Typical of his work is the widely extended horizontal format within which he is able to present the individual figures with a great facility for melodramatic characterization, but with less ability in the composition.  He employed the same format for religious histories, for example, an Expulsion of the Money Changers in the Museum in Antwerp and a Denial of Peter in the Liechtenstein Gallery in Vienna.  These reveal a very lively external naturalism, but little concern for the finer psychological nuances of the action.  He tends toward exaggerated gesture and physiognomic types; his predilection for scenes depicting dubious social types and overly unpleasant actions, such as dentists pulling teeth, can be grating on sensitive nerves.  In respect to technique and color, he is thoroughly Flemish.  In contrast to the deep, pasty colors of the Italians or the tonal warmth of Honthorst (which later tended to become dry and dull), Rombouts, with his smooth, succulent brushwork and the bright gaiety of his colors, is entirely representative of the painterly manner of his native Flanders."

– Hermann Voss, from Baroque Painting in Rome (1925), revised and translated by Thomas Pelzel (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1997)

Theodoor Rombouts
Meeting of David and Abigail
before 1637
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

attributed to Theodoor Rombouts
Fight over Cards
ca. 1620-30
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Theodoor Rombouts
Card Players
before 1637
oil on canvas
Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp

Theodoor Rombouts
Card Players
ca. 1635
oil on canvas
National Museum, Warsaw

Theodoor Rombouts
Card Players
ca. 1620-30
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Theodoor Rombouts
Backgammon Players
1634
oil on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Theodoor Rombouts
Card Players
ca. 1620-30
oil on canvas
private collection

Theodoor Rombouts
Card Players
before 1637
oil on canvas
Residenzgalerie, Salzburg

Theodoor Rombouts
Lute Player
ca. 1620
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Lute players were often ridiculed for the inordinate amount of time they devoted to tuning their instruments.  The intense look of this street musician seems to underscore the difficulty of the task and suggest that perhaps more than musical harmony is at stake.  Showing a musical instrument being tuned was a veiled reference to striving for harmony in love.  Stringed instruments could also symbolize temperance, especially when shown in the company of a tankard and a pipe, as here."

– curator's notes from Philadelphia Museum of Art

Theodoor Rombouts
Young Soldier
1624
oil on canvas
private collection

Paulus Pontius
Portrait of Theodoor Rombouts
ca. 1635
engraving
Teylers Museum, Haarlem