King David Playing the Harp, Gerard van Honthorst, 1622

Honthorst painted this small, intense panel in 1622, not long after returning to Utrecht from nearly a decade working in Rome, where he had absorbed Caravaggio's method of building a scene almost entirely out of a single source of light against total darkness. It is that method on display here: David's face, upturned and lit from below, floats out of a background so dark it barely registers as a room at all.

The subject draws on the Old Testament, where the young David was brought before King Saul specifically to play the harp and calm the older king's episodes of torment, a detail that makes the upward, almost pained expression on David's face read less as simple praise and more as a man absorbed completely in the act of playing.

The painting is a fairly small work, roughly 81 by 65 centimetres, closer in scale to a devotional object than a grand history painting, which suits its subject: a private, interior moment rather than a public one.

It has been held by the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, in the city where Honthorst himself was born, trained, and eventually returned to found his own workshop after Rome.

Source: Centraal Museum, Utrecht.