Hendrick de Somer

His style was initially influenced by the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera who worked in Naples and was a follower of Caravaggio.

[9][1] Further research by art historians revealed that Hendrick de Somer had left Flanders for Italy where he settled in Naples in 1624.

During Somer's residence the Flemish community in Naples had become smaller than in the early 17th century when artists such as Louis Finson were active in the city.

This explains why de Somer became so fully integrated in Naples' social and artistic communities and became more a Neapolitan than a Flemish painter.

The attributions of work to Hendrick de Somer are based principally on the only three signed and dated works by de Somer: the Caritas Romana of 1635 in a private Roman collection and two versions of St. Jerome in the desert, one in the Trafalgar Galleries in London from 1651, the other in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Barberini in Rome from 1652.

Hendrick's works such as Caritas Romana (1635, private collection) and Tobias curing his father's blindness (c. 1635, Banco Commerciale Italiana, Collezione Intesa Sanpaolo) can be seen as de Somer's reaction to the northern realism of Matthias Stom.

[12] In later compositions de Somer reflects influences deriving from the example of other Neapolitan masters who asserted themselves in those years, such as Massimo Stanzione and Bernardo Cavallino.

Hendrick's palette moved gradually away from the tenebrism of Ribera and opened up to the neo-Venetian color, which in that period came to replace the chiaroscuro of the Caravaggisti.