Matthias Stom (1600–after 1649), Esau Returning from the Hunt, Selling his Birthright to Jacob for a Bowl of Lentils, c.1639–43, Oil on canvas,155.7 × 204.5cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
In 1637, the Neapolitan Holy Office investigated a complaint lodged by a pupil of a foreign painter residing in the city. The painter, Matthias Stom, was accused of holding and promoting heretical beliefs within his household (Osnabrugge, 2019). Records such as this appear sporadically, at various times and locations across Italy, making it challenging to construct a continuous biography of the artist. Instead, Stom’s movements and activities must be pieced together from these scattered references, which are often separated by several years and sometimes consist of only a brief mention in archival documents.
The Status Animarum [state of souls] of San Nicola in Arcione, compiled in Rome in 1630, lists a lodger on the Strada dell’Olmo as Mattheo Stom, fiamengo pittore, aged thirty. This places his birth around 1599 or 1600 (Hoogewerff, 1942; Osnabrugge, 2019). The designation fiamengo (Flemish) suggests he originated from the Spanish Netherlands. However, Amersfoort, near Utrecht in the Dutch Republic, was proposed as his birthplace in 1942 but has since been deemed erroneous (Bok, 1986; Osnabrugge, 2019). Art scholars also suggest that his surname, Stom, was common only in the southern Netherlands but rare in the Dutch Republic, where it was primarily found among immigrants from the south, particularly from the Brussels and Ostend regions (Bok, 1986; Osnabrugge, 2019).
The date of Stom’s arrival in Rome remains unknown. A document from 1625 mentioning the name Matthia Strozzer has been recovered, but its Italianised distortion makes this identification uncertain (Vodret,2011). The 1630 Roman census document, however, places Stom within an established international artistic community. His rooms had previously been occupied by the Amersfoort painter Paulus Bor (c. 1601–1669), and he shared them with the French painter Nicolas Provost (1604–1670). Rome’s northern and French artists maintained their own social and professional networks, including the drinking confraternity known as the Bentvueghels, which provided newcomers with accommodation, introductions, and credit. Stom may have entered the city through this network (Hoogewerff, 1942; Osnabrugge, 2019).
After Rome, the records indicate a succession of moves across Italy. Stom is documented in Naples by July 1635, though he may have settled there earlier, and reappears in Neapolitan records from 1637 and 1638 (Osnabrugge, 2014; Osnabrugge, 2019). By 1640, he was in Palermo, where an illegitimate son, also named Matthias, was baptised. The godfather was the consul of the Flemish nation, a body representing foreign merchants in Palermo, who was himself a painter. The following year, Stom signed and dated the work that provides the firmest point in his chronology: the Miracle of Saint Isidore the Farmer, an altarpiece for the Augustinian church at Caccamo in Sicily (Osnabrugge, 2019; Papi, 2025). The last known records mentioning the artist are two entries in Venice, dated 1643 and 1645, after which Stom completely disappears from the documented historical record. Older studies placed him in Sicily until about 1649 or linked him with a disputed altarpiece at Chiuduno in Lombardy dated 1652. A more cautious modern reconstruction concludes the secure evidence in 1645 and leaves the date of his death unknown (Nicolson, 1977; Osnabrugge, 2019).
The silence of the archives is striking given the number of paintings attributed to him that are found in major art collections worldwide. More than 250 are currently known, and many entered important collections as early as the 17th century. Antonio Ruffo (1610/11–1678), Prince of Scaletta and a patrician of Messina who would later commission three works from Rembrandt (1606–1669), owned three of Stom’s paintings by 1648 (Osnabrugge, 2019; Papi, 2025). A northern painter working in Italy often occupied a different segment of the market from his Italian contemporaries, who competed for altarpieces, chapel commissions, and fresco cycles—the types of commissions through which a local reputation and a more sustained livelihood could be built (Haskell, 1980). Cabinet paintings were smaller, portable, and easier to sell to collectors whose tastes were less tied to local traditions, while expatriate networks offered the credit and introductions needed to maintain such a career (Malice, 2017; Spear and Sohm, 2010). Stom appears to have followed this second route, which may also explain why so few of the records that typically anchor an Italian painter’s career survive in his case.
Since the recovered documents currently provide no information about his training, this question has always been approached through the paintings themselves, and here, older academic opinions are beginning to shift. Bartolomeo Manfredi (1582–1622), the celebrated follower of Caravaggio, was once identified as Stom’s master. This attribution is difficult to sustain, however, if Stom only reached Rome around 1630, eight years after Manfredi’s death. Other proposals, involving Abraham Bloemaert (1564–1651) and the French Caravaggist Nicolas Régnier (c. 1588–1667), have likewise failed to resolve the question (Osnabrugge, 2019). The strongest visual connection has long been with the Utrecht Caravaggisti, especially Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656), who had returned from Italy to Utrecht in 1620, and alongside him Dirck van Baburen (c. 1592/3–1624) and Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629). Together, these artists established the Caravaggesque manner in the city during precisely the years a young Stom might have spent in the north (Gesino, 2019; Papi, 2020). Honthorst’s technique of concealing a candle behind a hand or figure, casting light across a darkened interior, became one of the most persistent themes in Stom’s work (Neumeister, 2003).
Recent scholarship has complicated this artistic lineage by looking further west, towards Antwerp and the circle of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). The luminous passages and fluid, almost liquid handling in parts of Stom’s work are difficult to derive solely from the Utrecht Caravaggisti and could equally reflect training in Flanders before he crossed the Alps (Papi, 2025). If so, why does his candlelight remain so closely associated with Utrecht? The census description fiamengo, the southern Dutch surname, and the lost Messina altarpiece signed Flandriae Stomus—’Stom of Flanders’—all point towards a Flemish connection, while the paintings retain a strong Utrecht Caravaggesque character (Osnabrugge, 2019; Papi, 2025). The distinction between the two cities may, however, be less clear than it seems. Antwerp lay in the Spanish Netherlands and Utrecht in the Dutch Republic, which were at war for much of Stom’s youth, but both formed part of a broader Netherlandish artistic culture. Painters, families, and artworks continued to cross the frontier; artists trained on one side and worked on the other, married across it, and maintained networks of pupils and patrons. Rubens himself travelled from Antwerp to The Hague in 1627 to visit Honthorst’s studio (Judson and Ekkart, 1999). Utrecht retained an unusually large and relatively prosperous Catholic minority, particularly among the landowning gentry, long after the Reformation had reshaped the northern provinces. Its continuing connections with Rome help explain the number of Utrecht painters who travelled to Italy, returning with Caravaggio’s manner and with Catholic subjects suited to a clientele that was less readily available elsewhere in the Dutch Republic (Spicer and Orr, 1997). A formation drawing on both Utrecht and Antwerp may therefore have been less unusual for a Netherlandish painter of Stom’s generation than the modern division between the two cities suggests. The attempt to assign him exclusively to one or the other may impose a distinction that his own artistic world probably did not maintain so firmly.
One early painting provides firmer ground for the Antwerp side of the argument. An Old Woman and a Boy by Candlelight (Birmingham Museums Trust), painted on an oak panel and probably dating from the 1620s, adopts the composition of a night piece by Rubens made around 1616–17. This work depicts an old woman shielding a candle from which a boy lights his own (Mauritshuis, The Hague). Rubens kept the panel in his studio, and it never left Antwerp, making it unlikely that Stom saw the original. He could, however, have known it through the print started by Rubens and completed by Paulus Pontius (1603–1658), published in Antwerp from about 1620. The print carries Rubens’s chosen line from Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18), Quis vetet apposito, lumen de lumine tolli [‘who could forbid one light to be kindled from another set beside it’], alongside the flame passed from wick to wick without diminishing (Mauritshuis, n.d.; Treves et al., 2016). That transmitted flame recurs throughout Stom’s candlelit paintings. It therefore offers a possible Antwerp source for one of the motifs most closely associated with his work, alongside the Utrecht Caravaggisti tradition usually invoked to explain it.
The transformation of Stom’s style in Italy can be observed in his paintings. In Naples, the heavy bodies and unidealised heads characteristic of Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) appear to influence Stom’s figures; in the Sicilian works, gestures become larger and stiffer, often held as if caught between one movement and the next (Nicolson, 1977; Osnabrugge, 2019). The stylised heads and heavily worked surfaces of the later Sicilian paintings have also been compared to baked clay, a treatment associated with the 1640s (Nicolson, 1977). Stom continued to work in the Caravaggesque manner even after it had lost much of its prominence elsewhere in Italy, which makes the chronology of his work particularly difficult to establish. The same broad, almost carved treatment of a head can suggest either a young northerner still adapting to the Roman style or a mature painter working within an established vocabulary. Depending on the preferred interpretation, the same painting can be dated two decades apart.
The Berlin canvas belongs to a small group of Old Testament subjects within his large oeuvre, which is otherwise dominated by New Testament scenes and devotional half-lengths. A single candle, screened at the centre of the table, illuminates three faces from the darkness: Jacob on the left, bare-chested beneath a gold wrap, holding out the bowl of lentils; Esau on the right in hunting red, a hare over his shoulder and a dog at his feet; and their mother Rebecca between them, one hand raised to her breast (Genesis 25). The bargain that will alter the line of descent is reduced to the two hands meeting over a blue faience bowl. Stom allows the transaction to carry the scene. The dating has shifted considerably. Nicolson placed the painting in the Roman years, around 1630, close to the Honthorst style from which it derives (Nicolson, 1977). The museum and more recent scholarship have moved it into the 1640s, based on its handling and a possible connection with a Neapolitan inventory, placing it closer to the Sicilian and Venetian works than to the Roman paintings (Osnabrugge, 2019; Gemäldegalerie, n.d.).
This painting’s history under the Honthorst name is the clearest illustration of the entire problem. It entered the Berlin collection in the nineteenth century as a Honthorst, and the attribution held for decades because the resemblance to Honthorst’s candlelit interiors is genuinely close (Gemäldegalerie, n.d.). A reproductive engraving from 1663 had already labelled the composition as after Honthorst rather than Stom, so the confusion is nearly as old as the painting (British Museum, n.d.). Berlin was not alone in this. That a canvas could pass for two generations as the work of the Utrecht painter most often proposed as Stom’s teacher, while current scholarship looks beyond Utrecht to Antwerp for his origins, shows how unsettled the basic account of him still remains. His style travelled between Utrecht or Antwerp,Rome, Naples, Palermo, and Venice in the baggage of a painter who changed patrons and markets as he went, and whose paintings have survived but not the facts of his life; the BerlinEsau, painted by a man his own century could only classify asfiamengoand the next could only call Honthorst, is among the clearest measures of how much about him is still unknown.
References
Birmingham Museums Trust (n.d.) Old Woman and a Boy by Candlelight, 1630–1650, Matthias Stom, oil on panel, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Available at: Birmingham Museums Trust Digital Asset Bank (Accessed 1 June 2023).
Bok, M.J. (1986) ‘Matthias Stom’, in Blankert, A. and Slatkes, L.J. (eds.) Nieuw licht op de Gouden Eeuw. Hendrick ter Brugghen en tijdgenoten [New Light on the Golden Age. Hendrick ter Brugghen and Contemporaries]. Exhibition catalogue, Centraal Museum
British Museum (n.d.) Esau selling his birthright; after Honthorst, after Matthias Stom. Engraving, 1663, museum no. 1928,0313.45. London: The British Museum. Available at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1928-0313-45 (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (n.d.) Esau Selling His Birthright (Matthias Stom).Available at: https://search.smb.museum/object/obj-868621 (Accessed 1 June 2023).
Gesino, A. (2019) ‘Tracce di Matthias Stom nel collezionismo tra la Sicilia e Genova’ [Traces of Matthias Stom in the collecting culture of Sicily and Genoa], in Orlando, A. (ed.) Caravaggio e i genovesi. Committenti, collezionisti, pittori [Caravaggio and the Genoese. Patrons, collectors, painters]. Exhibition catalogue, Palazzo della Meridiana, Genoa. Genoa: Sagep
Haskell, F. (1980) Patrons and Painters. A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque. Rev. edn. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Hoogewerff, G.J. (1942) Nederlandsche kunstenaars te Rome (1600–1725): uittreksels uit de parochiale archieven [Netherlandish artists in Rome (1600–1725): extracts from the parish archives]. The Hague: Nijhoff
Judson, J.R. and Ekkart, R.E.O. (1999) Gerrit van Honthorst 1592–1656. Doornspijk: Davaco
Malice, C. (2017) ‘Matthias Stom, oltre i confini del naturale: un “caravaggesco romanzato” on the road’ [Matthias Stom, beyond the limits of the natural: a “fictionalised Caravaggesque” on the road], Zeusi, 3.Available at : https://www.academia.edu/36186026/Claudio_Malice_Matthias_Stom_oltre_i_confini_del_naturale_Un_caravaggesco_romanzato_on_the_road_in_ZEUSI_a_III_2017_n_5_6_pp_68_82 (Accessed 1 June 2023).
Mauritshuis, The Hague (n.d.) Peter Paul Rubens, Old Woman and Boy with Candles, c. 1616–1617, oil on panel, 77 × 62.5 cm, inv. 1150. The Hague: Mauritshuis. Available at: https://www.mauritshuis.nl/en/our-collection/artworks/1150-old-woman-and-boy-with-candles (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
Neumeister, M. (2003) Das Nachtstück mit Kunstlicht in der niederländischen Malerei und Graphik des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts [The nocturne with artificial light in Netherlandish painting and graphic art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries]. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag
Nicolson, B. (1977) ‘Stomer Brought Up to Date’, The Burlington Magazine, 119, pp. 230–245. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/i236720 (2 June 2023).
Osnabrugge, M. (2014) ‘New Documents for Matthias Stom in Naples’, The Burlington Magazine, 156(1331), pp. 107–108.
Osnabrugge, M. (2019) The Neapolitan Lives and Careers of Netherlandish Immigrant Painters (1575–1655). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Papi, G. (2020) ‘Alcune riflessioni su Dirck van Baburen e il primo tempo di Matthias Stom’ [Some reflections on Dirck van Baburen and the early period of Matthias Stom], in Un misto di grano e di pula. Scritti su Caravaggio e l’ambiente caravaggesco [A mix of wheat and chaff. Writings on Caravaggio and the Caravaggesque milieu].Editori paparo, Naples
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Matthias Stom, Esau Selling His Birthright, c. 1642–1645. RKDimages, image no. 62038. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/62038 (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Peter Paul Rubens, Old Woman and Boy with Candles, c. 1616–1617. RKDimages, image no. 62554. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/images/62554 (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Peter Paul Rubens (etcher) and Paulus Pontius (engraver), A Boy Lighting a Candle from One Held by an Old Woman, c. 1620–1630. RKDimages, image no. [to be confirmed]. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/explore/images/[to be confirmed] (Accessed: 1 June 2023).
Rubens, P.P. (etcher) and Pontius, P. (engraver) (c. 1620–1630) A Boy Lighting a Candle from One Held by an Old Woman, etching and engraving, published by P.P. Rubens, Antwerp. British Museum, London, reg. no. S.7263. Available at: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/16732927 ((Accessed: 25 August 2026).
Spear, R.E. and Sohm, P. (2010) Painting for Profit. The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Spicer, J.A. and Orr, L.F. (eds.) (1997) Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age. Exhibition catalogue, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; The National Gallery, London. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Treves, L. et al. (2016) Beyond Caravaggio. Exhibition catalogue, The National Gallery, London. London: National Gallery Company
Vodret, R. (2011) Alla ricerca di “Ghiongrat”: Studi sui libri parrocchiali romani (1600–1630). Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider
Later updates
Papi, G. (ed.) (2025) Matthias Stom. Un caravaggesco nelle collezioni lombarde [Matthias Stom. A Caravaggesque in the Lombard Collections]. Exhibition catalogue, Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia, 18 September 2025 – 15 February 2026. Milan: Skira