Musikant und Trinker

By the 1620s Caravaggio had been dead more than ten years, but Rome was full of young foreign painters living off his shadow, and Valentin de Boulogne was one of them, a Frenchman who had come south and settled into the city's hard-drinking circle of northern artists. Scenes like this were his favourite subject: musicians and drinkers pressed together by candlelight around a cluttered table, half of them tuning up, half already gone in the wine. He painted the world he actually lived in. That life caught up with him in 1632. According to a contemporary account, he died at 41 after a fever he took chilling himself in a fountain following a long night out.