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Hendrick ter Brugghen was a highly original painter. He was probably born in Utrecht, where he was a pupil of the Mannerist history painter, Abraham Bloemaert. Having learnt the basic skills of his craft in Bloemaert's workshop, he set off for an extended stay in Italy, a practice which was quite usual among Dutch artists - and especially those from the Catholic city of Utrecht - in the early seventeenth century. Ter Brugghen seems to have been based in Rome. It was a time of hectic activity and experiment: the young painter from Utrecht studied the work of the Carracci, Domenichino and Guido Reni, but the artist who was to have the most profound effect on him was Caravaggio, who fled from Rome after killing a man in 1606 and died four years later at Porto Ercole.
Caravaggio's powerful, even shocking, naturalism and his dramatic use of bold highlights and deep shadows particularly excited the young ter Brugghen. After Caravaggio's death; his revolutionary style was adopted and developed in the direction of more decorative effects by a group of Italian followers, among them Orazio Gentileschi and Bartolomeo Manfredi. Ter Brugghen was arguably the leading member of a group of young Utrecht artists who were profoundly influenced by the work of Caravaggio and his Italian followers: they have been collectively christened the Dutch Caravaggisti. Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirk van Baburen followed the same route as ter Brugghen and had the same transforming experience. Together they fashioned a new type of history painting which was to change the course of large-scale narrative painting in the north and, in particular, affect Rembrandt's treatment of biblical subjects.
Ter Brugghen was the first of the Dutch Garavaggisti to return home and bring the gospel of Caravaggism to the Netherlands: he was back in Utrecht by 1615. He died young, in 1629, but in the years after his return from Italy he developed a striking and original manner of painting and range of subject-matter. Following the example of Gentileschi and Manfredi, he painted half-length figures of drinkers and musicians, of which the Bagpipe Player is an outstanding example. He also painted more ambitious multifigured secular subjects, such as The Concert (London, National Gallery) of about 1626, based on Italian Caravaggesque prototypes. In The Concert he brings to an existing format of half-length figures gathered together around a flickering candle, a striking fluency in modelling the soft edges of his forms and a remarkable subtlety of palette - which includes light blues, lemon, purple and cerise.
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