Jan van Bijlert

Jan van Bijlert learned to paint in Utrecht under Abraham Bloemaert, teacher of nearly every Utrecht master of the age, then did what ambitious northern painters did around 1620: he went to Rome. There he fell under the spell of Caravaggio, dead only a few years, whose scenes threw a single hard light across ordinary faces pulled close to the picture's edge.

In Rome he helped found the Bentvueghels, a hard-drinking fraternity of Dutch and Flemish artists who handed each other nicknames, and his was Aeneas. Back in Utrecht by 1625 he became one of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, the painters who carried that dramatic Roman lighting north, alongside Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst.

Bijlert did not stay in the dark manner. From around 1630 his colours lightened and his subjects grew calmer and more elevated, closer to a classical taste. He was busy and civic-minded to the end, a guild deacon and a founder of a Utrecht painters' school, and left roughly 200 pictures when he died in 1671.