One of the most interesting art exhibitions currently on view in New York arrived with so little fanfare that it’s not even present on its museum’s home page. Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until mid-January, presents 45 of the French artist’s extant 60 paintings, including all of those in the collection of the Louvre.

Valentin (1591-1632) spent his entire brief career in Rome, from around 1614, when the Baroque period lifted the shutters on the idealism of the High Renaissance era, making way for a new art so real that it seemed inspired by personal experience. During this time, a highly contemporaneous style in art emerged, inspired by an art market in which wealth, rather than nobility, set the pace. This influence is seen in Valentin’s choice of subject matter [cardsharps, gypsies, Christian martyrs] and style [naturalism, extreme lighting, a pervasive sense of melancholy]. Not much is known about the artist’s short life beyond a few references to his hedonistic lifestyle—in fact he died at the age of 41, drowning in a fountain after a night of binge drinking—and his appearance: he was his own model in two of the paintings of saints on view. And that he was influenced by the work of Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who introduced chiaroscuro to the arsenal of Baroque painting techniques.

Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1626); Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta

Like his close predecessor, Valentin created a sense of drama through the high contrast of light and dark paint, combined with a fluid painting style and the unusual choice of cropping in on a scene as if it were framed by a camera, which was 300 years in the future. But the darkness of Valentin comes more from a sense of melancholy, especially in the six magisterial paintings of musicians installed in a separate gallery, along with a selection of period instruments from the Met's collections. In these brooding scenes you get a sense that life was short and that Rome was a dangerous place to live if you were not a person of great wealth.

This feeling of darkness also pervades his choice of grandiose and gory subject matter—St. Bartholomew being flayed alive, the beheadings of Goliath and of Holofernes, to name a few—perhaps even contributing to his marketability to patrons beyond church circles. He seems to have brought into play a low-life kind of violence that had to be drawn from street experience, especially in the commission of his career. In The Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian [see], for an altar in St. Peter’s Basilica, the extreme cropping places the viewer among the participants of this hideous drama, which is overseen by an angel that seems no more divine than one of the pickpockets of his earlier paintings. This show is a must-see, if you like your art large and in your face.

Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio continues through January 16at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1000 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY Info The exhibition will open on February 22 at the Louvre, Paris. Info