Hendrick de Somer

Often erroneously referred to as Hendrick van Somer, the present panel is an unrecorded work by Hendrick de Somer, a Flemish painter who spent most of his life in Italy, and was mainly active in Naples where he settled around 1622.¹ Hailed for his religious and mythological compositions, his style bears the influence of Jusepe de Ribera, by whom he is commonly thought to have been trained, and by his contemporary Matthias Stom, who is recorded as having worked in Naples between 1635 and 1638.² The absence of records about the artist after 1655 possibly indicate that he might have been a victim of the 1656 plague in Naples. This theory is also supported by the fact that there are no recorded works after the year 1654.³

The present work bears close similarities with Ribera's figures of saints and philosophers shown with sober realism in closely cropped formats and it is plausbile both artists shared the same models. Ribera’s formative influence is also exemplified by the deep interest in the naturalistic depiction of the saint and in the play of light and shadows.

We are grateful to Prof. Giuseppe Porzio for having endorsed the attribution of this painting to Hendrick de Somer on the basis of digital images.

¹ G. Porzio, in Maestri d'Olanda e di Fiandra nei Mari del Sud. La pittura olandese e fiamminga nella collezione di Camillo d'Errico, M. V. Fontana (ed.), exh. cat., Palazzo San Gervasio, Palazzo d’Errico, 2018, p. 36.

² G. Porzio, La scuola di Ribera, Naples 2014, pp. 93 and 97.

³ The 1654 date is associated with a monogrammed work in a private collection depicting Saint Jerome; see V. Damian, Massimo Stanzione, Guercino, Hendrick De Somer, et Fra’ Galgario, Paris 2016, pp. 20–25.