Attributed to Hendrick ter Brugghen

Attributed to Hendrick ter Brugghen is the label a museum gives a painting that experts think is probably by ter Brugghen, the Utrecht follower of Caravaggio, without being able to prove it.

The doubt has real causes. In the early 1620s several painters in Utrecht worked in the same close-up, strongly lit manner, among them Dirck van Baburen, who had also come back from Rome, and an unsigned canvas can sit uneasily between them. Ter Brugghen's own compositions were copied too. In 2007 the art historians Leonard Slatkes and Wayne Franits published a catalogue of his paintings that sets the pictures they accept apart from copies and rejected attributions.