Democritus

Democritus is the laughing half of the pair, and ter Brugghen made him young, flushed and open-mouthed, his head tipped back under a soft cap with a round badge. He rests his arm on a globe, and it is a celestial one, painted with the figures of the constellations, the lion of Leo among them. With his other hand he points off into the distance, where, the Rijksmuseum suggests, the folly of mankind is to be found. Hung beside the weeping old Heraclitus, the two canvases carry one moral message, that whether you laugh or cry, the world stays incurably foolish. Both are signed and dated 1628. In 1916 the art dealers B. Asscher and H. Koetser gave the pair to the Rijksmuseum, which lent them from 1924 to 1936 to the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the painter's home city.