A Young Soldier
Signature and inscription
signed and dated, lower left: ‘THEODOOR / ROMBOUTS. F. 1624’
Provenance
with Adam Williams, New York
with Marco Voena
Luigi Koelliker Collection, Milan
Exhibitions
Ghent, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Theodoor Rombouts: Virtuoso of Flemish Caravaggism, 21 January–23 April 2023
Bibliography
Geert van Eeckhout, Het Belang van de Beginjaren van Theodoor Rombouts (1597–1637), Leuven, 2007, PhD diss., pp. 70–73, no. 4., reproduced fig. 40.
Christopher Wright, French, Dutch, and Flemish Caravaggesque Paintings from the Koelliker Collection, London, 2007, pp. 58–59.
Christopher Wright, In Pursuit of Caravaggio, London, 2016, exh. cat., pp. 62–63.
Frederica van Dam, ed., Theodoor Rombouts: Virtuoso of Flemish Caravaggism, Ghent, 2023, exh. cat., pp. 163–67, reproduced cat. 23.
Essay
Theodoor Rombouts was one of the leading and most original Flemish painters of the Caravaggesque movement. After a period of training in his native Antwerp with Abraham Janssens, Rombouts traveled to Rome in 1616 and remained there until 1625. The present painting depicts a young soldier with a mop of brown curls and rosy cheeks wearing a metal gorget over a brown leather jerkin. His single visible hand, a ring encircling the pinkie finger, is poised upon the hilt of his sword. Caravaggesque painters frequently painted bravos, or soldiers of fortune, typically including them in scenes of drinking, gambling, and trickery. It has, however, been suggested that the figure here, with his arched neck, upturned gaze, and facial expression perhaps suggestive of awe, might depict a martial saint, such as Martin, George, or Florian. Most recently, though, it has been suggested that single-figure compositions like the present canvas were not intended to represent any specific subject, saint or sinner, but were instead tronies or head studies upon which the artist could draw when composing larger, multi-figure scenes depicting both secular and sacred subjects. Indeed, similar figures of soldiers appear in other works by Rombouts, for example, the Backgammon Players of 1634 in the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (fig. 1) and the Denial of Saint Peter dated to the second half of the 1620s and now in the Liechtenstein Collections in Vienna (fig. 2).
As it is signed and dated 1624, this is almost certainly a finished work intended to be sold to a collector on the market in Rome. The play of light across the metal elements, the delicate rendering of the face and hand, the smooth handling of the figure’s jerkin with its slashed sleeves, and the warm light pervading the work, presage the more refined direction Rombouts’s style took in the years following his return from Rome to Antwerp, drawing influence from the works of Peter Paul Rubens, which he would have encountered in both cities. In the Netherlands, Rombouts continued to paint scenes of musicmaking, game-playing, drinking, smoking, and general merry-making, subjects favored by the Roman Caravaggists. As a young, unknown artist in Rome, he would have sold his work through dealers or in shops, but the fact that this example is both signed and dated indicates that it was painted for resale but by an artist whose reputation had already been made.❖
Virginia Brilliant