Matthias Stom

Almost everything we know about Matthias Stom starts with a single Roman census of 1630, which lists a Flemish painter of that name, about 30 years old, lodging with a French colleague on a street in Rome. From that one line his birth is placed around 1600, and the rest of his life is pieced together from the paintings he left behind.

He was one of the northern followers of Caravaggio, the Italian who had made raw light and deep shadow the whole drama of a picture. Stom took that lesson and narrowed it to a single candle. Half-length figures lean in around a flame, their faces warm and their backgrounds swallowed in dark, and he returned to that effect again and again.

Unlike many of his fellow northerners in Italy, he mostly avoided their bawdy tavern scenes and painted the Bible instead. Around 1635 he left Rome for Naples, then moved on to Sicily, where in 1641 he delivered altarpieces to churches near Palermo. He kept close to the English and Dutch sailors in port, more at home among the foreign community than among the locals, and the last written trace of him there dates from 1649.