T H É O D O R R O M B O U T S
1597-1637
A drinker with a Flask
Oil on Canvas
72 x 58 cm
The painting has been recognized as by Rombouts by Prof Albert Blankert and Dr Paul Huys Janssens, and is a great example of the artist’s work, who more often did larger compositions of musicians and tavern scenes, but a number of single figures have come to light in recent years. These include the Smoker in the Museum in Ghent (exhibited in Les Vanités, Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts 1999, no. O.32; a Flautist with Alfred Brod in London in 1958, and the unfinished Drinkers (two figures in the same canvas) in the Galleria Spada, Rome (Photo Alinari 28915, as by Caravaggio). These canvases aim to illustrate the passions, in this case pleasure and enjoyment, a concern that is akin to the expressions and emotions that Karel van Mander thought that it was the task of the painter to portray. The Italian flask is a still-life element of several artists at the time, including Tommaso Salini (as for instance in one of his best-known works, the Boy with a flask and a stilll-life of Cabbages in the Thyssen collection, Madrid.
Rombouts is one of the early generation of Caravaggio followers who turned to his example soon after the master himself had died, and he spent some eight years in Italy before returning to Flanders in 1625, but independent of those who actually knew the master like Saraceni, Guido Reni, Battistello Caracciolo and Prospero Orsi. His experience in Rome therefore coincided with the presence of Ribera, Baburen, Vouet, Valentin de Boulogne, Regnier, Honthorst and Stom, among others, at a moment when there was a conscious attempt to grasp the idiom and technique of Caravaggio. Ironically, many of these painters looked to the artists who rivalled his production rather than the works themselves, so the subject-matter turned to the characters from Roman life, the taverns and streets, that people like Caravaggio’s bitter rival, Tommaso Salini, and the engraver Francesco Villamena, made popular. Valentin followed this vein in his portrait of Raffaello Menicucci (Indianapolis Museum of Art), a picture of one of the bombastic characters from the Roman street scene, like also Villamena’s engraving of the street-sweeper at the Pantheon, a man also known for a certain literary virtuosity. It shares with Ribera the brisk, almost summary brushwork , but with a palette that is unmistakably Flemish, recalling the bright colours of Baburen and Stom. Here, as elsewhere with Rombouts, it is discernible that the background is added after the figure had been painted. Not so easy to see in Caravaggio himself, it is nonetheless one of the traits of the master, who was inclined to use the surround of the background in order to give the structure of form without the use of line. The Cup Bearer in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing shows this effect pronouncedly (see S. Raux, ‘L’échanson de Théodore Rombouts, Une allégorie de la Tempérance dévoilée’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts , CXXXI, 1993, p. 191f) and also shows the same handling of paint in the hands and drapery, very vigorously applied, to take advantage of the impression of movement and texture that rapid transitions of form and shadow can convey.
