A few streets from here lived the painters who brought the dark to Utrecht.
At the start of the seventeenth century a number of young Utrecht painters travelled to Rome, and there they saw the work of . Saints belonged in golden light. He put them in a tavern, with dirty feet, lit by a single candle that lifts everything out of the dark.
We have added a painting by to this story: a laughing fiddler leaning out of a window with a glass of wine in his hand. That is what they brought back from Rome, a man who looks you straight in the eye rather than a saint in golden light.
Honthorst and lived close together on the Snippevlucht, behind the city hall, and together with they became the best known of that group. Honthorst got so good at painting by candlelight that the Italians called him Gherardo delle Notti, Gerard of the nights.
There was a reason Utrecht took to this. The city had stayed Catholic in a country that had turned Protestant, and Catholic patrons wanted exactly these scenes. The split you heard about at Adrian put food on the table here.
Their paintings now hang in the a few hundred metres away, and in museums from London to New York. The famous painter Johannes Vermeer studied them closely, because one of Baburen's paintings appears in the background of two of his own works. Honthorst himself is buried in the Catharijnekerk, here in the city.
We now continue down the Nieuwegracht towards Ledig Erf.
Sources. Story: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (SK-A-180); Centraal Museum Utrecht; National Gallery of Art, Washington
