Roman Charity

1655 · Private collection

mythological

Drost's Roman Charity is a remarkable synthesis of the artist's early training in Amsterdam under Rembrandt and the more mature style he developed in Venice, when he came under the direct spell of both Titian and the Italian tenebrist movement made popular by Jusepe de Ribera. His Italian oeuvre reveals a strong affinity for this tenebrist style prevalent in Venice at the time. Of the examples of 'filial piety' in the literature of antiquity, that of Cimon and Pero was one of the ones that appealed most to artists of the 16th to 18th centuries in Italy and the Netherlands.

About the Artist

Willem Drost

1633 – 1659

Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker, possibly of German origin. Almost nothing is known of his life, and only half a dozen paintings (and an even smaller number of etchings) are recognized as being by him. According to Houbraken, he was a pupil of Rembrandt, possibly in or shortly before 1650. All the works that are dated are of the 1650s, and it would seem that at this time Drost was one of Rembrandt's closest and most talented followers. His earliest dated paintings are two pendants of 1653: the Portrait of a Man (New York, Metropolitan Museum) and the Portrait of a Woman (The Hague, Museum Bredius). An early etching signed w drost 1652 is probably a self-portrait, in which Drost portrayed himself as a young man drawing. His Portrait of a Young Man in the Wallace Collection, London, bears a false Rembrandt signature.

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