Bacchante with an Ape

Hendrick ter Brugghen, the senior of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, painted this half-length bacchante in the last years of a career that had carried Caravaggio’s naturalism to the Protestant Netherlands. The canvas dates from 1627, when the Utrecht master was at the height of his powers: the young woman wears vine leaves in her hair and holds a bunch of grapes, her bared shoulder and frank gaze drawn from the Roman repertory of bacchanal imagery that ter Brugghen had absorbed during his years in Italy, while the monkey at her side — a traditional emblem of lust — tempers the celebration with a note of irony. The strong sidelight and the sculptural handling of the flesh show him translating the Italian tenebrism into the cooler, more sober idiom of the Dutch school. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.