Page of Boy Playing a Recorder by TERBRUGGHEN, Hendrick in the Web Gallery of Art, a searchable image collection and database of European paintings and sculptures (1100-1850)

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Boy Playing a Recorder

1621
Oil on canvas
Staatliche Museen, Kassel

There are two related paintings by Terbrugghen in the Kassel Museum: Boy Playing a Fife, and Boy Playing a Recorder. These two paintings can be seen as an early and original appropriation of Caravaggio's realism, which had made such an impression on Terbrugghen when he spent some years in Rome. Back in Utrecht, he became the leading figure among the so-called Caravaggisti who came to dominate the artistic life of the northern Netherlands after 1620. These two paintings already demonstrate the artist's abilities, with the subtle tonal grading of bodies and dress giving the figures materiality and three-dimensionality.

Terbrugghen conceived of the two boys as a complementary pair, and although they play similar instruments, they embody opposites. The boy with the fife, in striped soldier's costume, represents the urban and military, while the other, in shepherd's dress, represents the rural and arcadian. The cool blue of the one painting confronts the warm hues of the other.

Terbrugghen's two half-length pictures of flute players at Kassel are outstanding examples of the breadth, force and beauty of his pictorial manner. They are also among earliest life-size, half-length Dutch paintings of musicians, a motif that quickly became a staple of Utrecht painters and soon entered the repertoire of other Dutch artists. Terbrugghen made more intricate pictures than the Kassel companion pieces, but he never surpassed their poetic Arcadian mood and delicacy. The effect o f the dark-shadowed flute player before a bright wall in the background is an anticipation of an essential pictorial theme of the Delft School.