Painter Hendrick Terbrugghen establishes a new reputation more than three centuries after his death. The Dutchman’s first exhibition is in Ohio’s Dayton Art Institute.

By 1600, European painters found themselves losing the Renaissance reverence for Greco-Roman antiquity. Following the Italian artist Caravaggio, they stopped looking backward and returned, as artists have done repeatedly throughout history, to the direct observation of the visible world. What they saw was a growing middle-class life in an ever…