Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene is an oil-on-canvas painting by Hendrick ter Brugghen dated to 1625. Now in the Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin, Ohio, the piece depicts the Roman Catholic subject of Saint Sebastian being saved by Irene of Rome and her maid following his attempted martyrdom by the Roman authorities. An exemplary piece of the Italianate Baroque tendency in Dutch Golden Age painting, the painting employs dramatic uses of light and skillful chiaroscuro to depict its religious subject, evidence of influence from Caravaggio and Ter Brugghen's fellow Utrecht Caravaggisti.
It was described by Seymour Slive as ter Brugghen's "masterpiece": "the large, full, forms of the group have been knit together into a magnificent design, and what could have been hard and sculptural is remarkably softened by the soft, silvery light which plays over Sebastian's half-dead, olive-grey body as well as the reds, creamy whites, and plum colours worn by the women who tend the saint".
The piece is recorded in the collection of Pieter Eris in Amsterdam during the 1660s. Its full provenance remains speculation; perhaps it was intended for a charitable institution where the sick were cared for, such as those with the plague which became prevalent in the Netherlands around the 1600s. Others supposed it was intended for a hidden church or private chapel, and then later reached the art market. It has also been suggested that the painting was commissioned by a schutterij (militia company) though this idea has generally been dismissed. It seems most likely to have been commissioned by Catholics, as the subject is virtually specific to Counter-Reformation art, though Ter Brugghen was himself Protestant. The painting eventually found its way to a Frederick Mont, from whom the painting was purchased by Oberlin College in 1953. The piece has been exhibited in the Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, Utrecht’s Centraal Museum and New York’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene was a mainly 17th-century subject, though found in predella scenes as early as the 15th century. It was painted by Georges de La Tour, Trophime Bigot (four times), Jusepe de Ribera, and others. It may have been a deliberate attempt by the Church to get away from the usual single nude treatment of the subject, which is already recorded in Vasari as sometimes arousing inappropriate thoughts among female churchgoers. The Baroque artists usually treated it as a nocturnal chiaroscuro scene, illuminated by a single candle, torch or lantern, in the style fashionable in the first half of the 17th century, and typically set it in an interior, after Sebastian has been carried away. Ter Brugghen's outside setting and choice of the earlier moment are unusual, though shared by the treatment of the subject by Dirck van Baburen.
This painting depicts Sebastian, slumped in pain as he is tended to by Saint Irene and her maid. According to the traditional story, the Emperor Diocletian, in the Diocletianic Persecution, has the soldier Sebastian shot by archers as punishment for his treason. Looking for his body to bury, Irene found Saint Sebastian tied to a tree and miraculously alive, then nursed him back to health. Rather than painting the scene of Sebastian being shot with arrows, in the midst of his attempted execution, Ter Brugghen chooses to show the moments afterwards where Irene and her maid untie him from the tree. Some attribute this narrative shift to the emergence of the plague within Utrecht in the 1600s: several artists desiring a subject saved from agony, turn to painting the rescue of the Catholicism's personification of suffering. Ter Brugghen’s depicts Sebastian with a sickly green pallor, his limp body lying in suffering and resembling much of the diseased or dead one would encounter in Utrecht at the time.
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