De kruisiging met Maria, Johannes en leden van de familie van Adriaen Willemsz. Ploos

This Crucifixion with Mary, John, and members of the family of Adriaen Willemsz. Ploos, painted in 1624 and held at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, represents the tradition of donor portraits embedded within religious compositions — a practice with deep roots in Netherlandish painting going back to Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. By placing contemporary Dutchmen and women alongside the figures of Mary and John at the foot of the cross, the painter collapses the temporal distance between the scriptural event and the present devotional moment: the donors are shown as actual witnesses and participants in sacred history. Hendrick ter Brugghen's inclusion of identifiable contemporary figures alongside biblical characters was not unusual in early seventeenth-century religious commissions, though it was becoming less common as secular genre painting grew in prestige. The Ploos family's commission demonstrates that traditional forms of devotional patronage continued in Utrecht even as the Dutch art market was shifting toward secular subjects. The painting's dual function — religious meditation and family memorial — gives it a historical specificity unusual among ter Brugghen's surviving works.

The composition must accommodate both the central religious drama and the donor portraits, which follow their own representational conventions — more formal, more individually characterised, typically kneeling in a devotional posture. Ter Brugghen integrates both registers within a consistent lighting scheme that gives the composition visual unity despite its dual function. The cross and the mourning figures establish the religious setting that contextualises the donors' pious presence.