Democritus

Hendrick ter Brugghen was the most Italianate of the Utrecht Caravaggisti. He trained with Abraham Bloemaert and then spent some ten years in Italy, where he absorbed the half-length figure, the raking light and the practice of painting directly from life that Caravaggio had made current; back in Utrecht, and acknowledged as the leader of the school, he painted with a personal gravity and a feeling for colour that set him apart from his companions Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen. The museum describes this canvas and its companion, a weeping Heraclitus, as a pair carrying a moralising message: the two Greek philosophers were understood as opposites, one meeting the folly of the world with laughter and the other with tears, and together they show that the world remains incurably foolish either way. Painted in the year before his early death, the pair is the best known of his late works. The painting is held in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.