HONTHORST, GERARD van (GHERARDO delle NOTTI). - Painter, b. in Utrecht on 4 Nov. 1590, d. there on 27 Apr. 1656. He belongs 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 derived particular chromatic inflections, H. came at a very young age to Rome, where the older fellow pupil Ter Bruggen had preceded him, and where numerous Dutchmen gathered (Baburen, Janssens, Seghers, Finsonius, etc.), all drawn into the orbit of Caravaggio. The years of his Roman stay, from 1610 to 1621, are the happiest for his art, which in its adherence to Caravaggesque modes finds a seriousness and a stylistic rigor that would be lacking in his later works.
Caravaggism is already evident in one of his early paintings: the Decollazione del Battista in S. Maria della Scala. There also appears that predilection for artificial lights that crudely pierce the shadow, which would earn him the nickname by which he is known in Italy. In Rome he had as patrons the two greatest patrons of the Caravaggesque painters, the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani and Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Paul V. Besides the great altarpieces (S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome; S. Silvestro at Montecompatri; the church of the Capuchins at Albano, dated 1618, perhaps his masterpiece), H. painted very numerous half-length compositions, on sacred or genre subjects. On the death of Paul 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, and in the period 1628-29 made a brief stay in London. In this second period of his life he almost completely abandoned the characteristic genre of night scenes that had made him known in Italy, and devoted himself above all to court portraiture, with great success, at the courts of England, of Orange and of Berlin; but the solid painterly qualities of the works of the Roman period are almost always replaced by an empty craft. Nevertheless, in the early years after his return to his homeland, H. was, together with Ter Bruggen, one of the first disseminators of Caravaggesque modes.