HONTHORST, Gerard van (GHERARDO delle NOTTI). — Painter, b. at Utrecht on 4 Nov. 1590, d. there on 27 Apr. 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 native city under Abraham Bloemaert, from whom he derived particular chromatic intonations, Honthorst went at an early age to Rome, where he was preceded by his elder fellow-student Ter Brugghen, and where numerous Dutchmen (Baburen, Jannsens, Seghers, Finsonius, etc.) were gathered, all drawn into the Caravaggesque orbit. The years of his Roman sojourn, from 1610 to 1621, were the happiest for his art, which, in its adherence to Caravaggesque modes, attained a seriousness and stylistic rigour that would be lacking in his later works.
The Caravaggism is already evident in one of his earliest paintings: the Beheading of the Baptist in S. Maria della Scala. There also appears that predilection for artificial lights that slash harshly through the shadows, which earned him the nickname by which he is known in Italy. In Rome he enjoyed the patronage of the two greatest patrons of the Caravaggisti, the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani and Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Paul V. Besides large altarpieces (S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome; S. Silvestro at Montecompatri; the church of the Capuchins at Albano, dated 1618, perhaps his masterpiece), Honthorst painted very numerous half-length compositions, of sacred or genre subject. On the death of Paul V he left Rome, and after a brief stop in Florence (where the Uffizi possess a famous S. Notte by him) he returned to Utrecht, and in the period 1628–29 made a short stay in London. In this second phase of his life he almost entirely abandoned the characteristic genre of night scenes that had made him famous in Italy, and devoted himself chiefly to court portraiture, with great success, at the courts of England, Orange, and Berlin; but the solid pictorial qualities of his Roman-period works were almost always replaced by mere technical facility. Nonetheless, in the first years after his return home, Honthorst, together with Ter Brugghen, was one of the first disseminators of Caravaggesque modes.