(Amersfoort circa 1600 – circa 1652 Sicily?)
Saint Jerome,
oil on canvas, 71.5 x 93 cm, framed

Literature:
G. Papi, Tre dipinti di Matthias Stom, in: G. Papi, Senza più attendere a studio e insegnamenti. Scritti su Caravaggio e l’ambiente caravaggesco, Naples 2018, pp. 243-247

We are grateful to Gianni Papi for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.

Stom’s oeuvre remained relatively unchanged during the more than twenty years the Dutch painter spent in Italy, divided between Rome, Naples and Sicily. He likely arrived in Rome in the late 1620s, possibly around 1628 (see A. Zalapì, in: Dipinto caravaggheschi 2000, pp. 48-79, 83-88).

Here Saint Jerome is depicted with a more youthful appearance than was iconographic custom, rustic and muscular, as if Stom had employed a carpenter or labourer to pose for him, as opposed to the habitual representation of Saint Jerome as an old and wrinkled man. The composition is dominated by a single figure immersed in dark space and dramatically illuminated by the light of a candle.

This work can be compared to other similar compositions by the artist in which the protagonist is also a single figure, or occasionally two figures, depicted half-length and illuminated by a candle or oil lamp. For example Christ before Pilate from the Koelliker Collection, exhibited in Ariccia in 2006 (G. Papi, in: La ‘schola’ 2006, p. 256), has the same spatial arrangement with a dark area on the right from which light emerges; also comparable is the composition of Christ captured in prayer with a Ruffian, (sold Sotheby’s, London, 16 April 1997, lot 152), in which the rendering of the red material of the saint’s mantle is almost identical to that in the present work. Even more pertinent to the present work is Saint Peter in prayer (Christie’s, London, 30 April 2015, lot 502) which employs similar compositional device of a black beam on the right that partially obscures the oil lamp, but still allows it to illuminate the scene. Such a compositional device appears to be derived from the invention of fellow Dutch Caravaggisti, Gerard van Honthorst, or Gherardo delle Notti, as he was celebrated in Rome. The same device of a beam, used in the same way to partly conceal and emphasise the light of an oil lamp can also found in Stom’s Old Woman reciting the Rosary, formerly in the Nicolson collection in London (see B. Nicolson, Caravaggism in Europe, Turin 1990, vol. III, fig. 1527).

Establishing a chronology for Matthias Stom’s works is complicated, due both to the lack of dates on which to base his output, as only one of his works The Miracle of Saint Isidore the Labourer in Caccamo is dated, to 1641, as well as the overall stylistic consistency of Stom’s oeuvre, which makes it difficult to construct a stylistic evolution.

Newly discovered documentary evidence has added certainty to Stom’s Neapolitan period, which has until recently only been assumed on the basis of the presence of various works by the artist in the city. It is now known that Stom lived in Naples from at least August 1635 to July 1638 (see M. Osnabrugge, New documents for Matthias Stom in Naples, in: The Burlington Magazin, 1331, 2014, pp.107-08).

Due to the pronounced stylistic similarities with works normally dated to this Neapolitan period, for example the two ex-Casadei canvases (The Annunciation and The Adoration of the Christ Child) recently included in the exhibition on Honthorst (Gherardo delle Notti, 2015, pp. 240-42, entries by G. Papi and G. Badino), The Death of Seneca in Capodimonte and The Adoration of the Shepherds in the Museo Filangieri in Naples, the present painting can also be placed within the chronological context of Stom’s Neapolitan period.