HONTHORST, GERARD van (GHERARDO delle NOTTI). — Painter, born in Utrecht on 4 November 1590, died there on 27 April 1656. He belonged to a family of artists: his grandfather, Gerrit Huyden, and his father Hermann were painters; of his brothers, one, Hermann, was a sculptor, the other, Willem, a painter. After studying in his homeland at the school of Abramo Bloemart, from whom he acquired particular chromatic tonalities, H. came to Rome at a very young age. His senior fellow student Ter Bruggen had preceded him there, and numerous Dutchmen (Baburen, Janssens, Seghers, Finsonius, etc.), all drawn into the Caravaggesque orbit, were converging there. The years of his Roman sojourn, from 1610 to 1621, were the happiest for his art, which, in adhering to Caravaggesque modes, attained a seriousness and stylistic rigor that would be lacking in his later works.
Caravaggism is already evident in one of his earliest paintings: the Beheading of St John the Baptist in S. Maria della Scala. It also reveals his predilection for artificial lights that harshly cleave the darkness, earning him the nickname by which he is known in Italy. In Rome he was protected by the two greatest patrons of the Caravaggists, the marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani and Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Paolo V. In addition to large altarpieces (S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome; S. Silvestro at Montecompatri; the Capuchin church at Albano, dated 1618 and perhaps his masterpiece), H. painted very numerous half-length compositions, with sacred or genre subjects. At the death of Paolo V he left Rome, and after a brief stay in Florence (a famous S. Notte by him remains there in the Uffizi) he returned to Utrecht; in 1628–29 he made a brief stay in London. In this second period of his life he almost completely abandoned the characteristic genre of nocturnal scenes that had made him known in Italy, and devoted himself above all to court portraiture, with great success, at the courts of England, Orange, and Berlin; but the solid pictorial qualities of the works from the Roman period were almost always replaced by empty craftsmanship. Nevertheless, in the early years after his return to his homeland, H., together with Ter Bruggen, was one of the first disseminators of Caravaggesque modes.