Theodoor Rombouts (Antwerp 1597-1637)

This picture of a musical trio by Theodor Rombouts serves as an important example of Caravaggist painting in seventeenth-century Flanders, for which the artist was so well known. Musicians held many associations in Netherlandish art at this time, ranging from harmony, to vanity, to the sense of hearing. Here, the rough-hewn features of the men, as well as the unadorned background and compressed space, are reminiscent of Caravaggio's low-life scenes of musicians, cardplayers and fortune tellers. The vivid, flamboyant costumes of the figures also evoke the works of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, such as Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, who often employed colorful palettes in their musical scenes.
Rombouts regularly used stock figures in his pictures, and a similar guitar-player can be seen in The Musicians in the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, which also includes a lute lying on the ground, an element he employed repeatedly. In addition to reusing motifs, Rombouts also made multiple versions of the same compositions. According to Benedict Nicolson, the prime version of the present work now belongs to the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, while others can be found in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rheims (op. cit.).