Hendrick ter Brugghen painting comes to the National Gallery

Last week the National Gallery of Art acquired Bagpipe Player in Profile, a 1624 painting by Dutch artist Hendrick ter Brugghen. The painting will be installed in the Gallery’s Dutch paintings galleries by late spring.

Ter Brugghen is the most important of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, artists who traveled to Rome in the early decades of the 17th century, and who returned to Utrecht having embraced the radical stylistic and thematic ideas of Caravaggio.

In the painting, Ter Brugghen gives his figures a sense of dignity, even though bag-pipes were associated with the lower class, with a larger-than-life scale and patterns on his instrument and clothing.