Wolfgang Heimbach

In 1928 the Italian critic Roberto Longhi found a monogram on a small candlelit canvas in the Galleria Borghese, and with it restored two pictures to a painter nobody had connected them with. The Borghese inventory of 1833 had given them to Gerrit van Honthorst, the Dutch specialist in night scenes. They were by Wolfgang Heimbach, a German painter who was deaf and could not speak.

Heimbach came from Ovelgönne near Oldenburg in northern Germany, where his father served the local ruler, Count Anton Günther, and he learned to read and write several languages. He studied in the Low Countries and spent about 12 years in Italy, painting for noble families including the Pamphilj and the Medici. From 1653 he was court painter to King Frederik III of Denmark in Copenhagen, and in his large painting of the homage to Frederik in 1660 Heimbach put himself in the foreground, waving his hat.

The Borghese pair was bought by Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese in 1783 for 70 scudi. In Man with a Candle a figure walks forward shielding the flame with one hand, while in the next room two men sit by a fire, one of them smoking a long pipe.