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| Theodoor Rombouts Card Players ca. 1620-30 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Theodoor Rombouts The Quack Dentist ca. 1620-25 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Expulsion of the Money Changers before 1637 oil on canvas Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp |
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| 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)
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| Theodoor Rombouts Meeting of David and Abigail before 1637 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
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| attributed to Theodoor Rombouts Fight over Cards ca. 1620-30 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Card Players before 1637 oil on canvas Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Card Players ca. 1635 oil on canvas National Museum, Warsaw |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Card Players ca. 1620-30 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Backgammon Players 1634 oil on canvas North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Card Players ca. 1620-30 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Theodoor Rombouts Card Players before 1637 oil on canvas Residenzgalerie, Salzburg |
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| 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
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| Theodoor Rombouts Young Soldier 1624 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Paulus Pontius Portrait of Theodoor Rombouts ca. 1635 engraving Teylers Museum, Haarlem |