The Eye: Hendrick ter Brugghen

Name: Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Ph.D.

Occupation: Curator of Northern Baroque Painting, National Gallery of Art

Residence: Cleveland Park

The work: Hendrick ter Brugghen, Bagpipe Player in Profile, 1624

Why I love this piece: Hendrick ter Brugghen was one of a group of artists from Utrecht in the Netherlands who in the early 17th century had gone to Italy and been inspired by Caravaggio, and had brought Caravaggio’s ideas back to the north. These people are now called the Utrecht Caravaggisti, and ter Brugghen is the best of them. We did not have any painting in our collection by any of these artists. To find one had been high on my list of priorities ever since I’ve been here. You cannot tell the story of Dutch art without a member of this group. Ideally, you would want to have a ter Brugghen.

This was a restitution painting, returned last year to the heirs of Herbert von Klemperer, the German businessman who had been forced to sell it by the Nazis before he fled in the late 1930s. It ended up in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, where it hung until July of 2008. It’s one of ter Brugghen’s finest paintings. We were surprised to have this opportunity to acquire what’s always been regarded as one of his greatest works, and which we’d always thought was in a public collection.

We’ve tried over the years to expand the range of our collection so it reflects the 17th century, more than it does the tastes of 1893-1938, when Gallery benefactors Paul Mellon and Joseph Widener were collecting. The ter Brugghen really transforms our collection.