Dirck van Baburen

Dirck van Baburen died young, in Utrecht in 1624, probably not yet 30, and only a handful of his paintings survive. Yet one of them had a strange afterlife. His Procuress of 1622 — a lute-playing woman, a grinning client holding out a coin, and the old bawd counting the money — later belonged to the family of Johannes Vermeer, and Vermeer painted it, hanging on the back wall, into two of his own quiet interiors.

Baburen was one of the Utrecht Caravaggisti. As a young man he had gone to Rome, like many northern painters, and come home carrying the manner of Caravaggio, who had died there in 1610: strong light, deep shadow, ordinary people pushed close to the viewer. Back in Utrecht he shared a studio with the painter Hendrick ter Brugghen, and together with Gerard van Honthorst the three set that Roman style down in Dutch art.

In the few years he had, he became one of the most inventive painters in the city, and the pictures he made were copied by others almost at once. His Procuress hangs today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.