The Adoration of the Magi

Ter Brugghen signed and dated this canvas in 1619, about five years after he came home to Utrecht from Rome, and two ways of painting meet in it. The figures are packed tightly together in fairly stiff, still poses, and the bright colours, the reds and blues of the robes, belong to the older Mannerist manner that already looked old-fashioned by then. The faces are another matter. The Child on his mother's lap, reaching into the cup held up by the kneeling old king, has the plain, unidealised look of a real baby, the kind of realism that points to the Italian painter Caravaggio. Behind them a Black king holds up a gilded vessel, and a horse and a camel push their heads in at the edge. The Rijksmuseum bought the painting in 1970.