Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth CenturyBinyon, Laurence
History
Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century
Binyon, Laurence
Etchers -- Netherlands
So far, we have considered only the native school of landscape artists,
who took their subjects from Holland and its borders. But towards the
end of the sixteenth century there was established in Rome a group of
painters from the Netherlands, to which each succeeding generation added
new members, whether they settled there for life or stayed only for a
few years.
Belonging to this group are a certain number of etchers, deriving
originally, in more or less degree, from Elsheimer, and receiving a
second and more powerful stimulus from the art of Claude.
Jan van de Velde,[10] it seems probable, spent some years of his manhood
in Italy, and perhaps worked under Elsheimer himself. At any rate, a
number of his plates are entirely in Elsheimer’s manner. These are so
heavily overworked with the burin that they must count rather as
line-engravings than as etchings. The burin plays, indeed, a more or
less important part in all Jan van de Velde’s prints.
One set, illustrating the story of Tobias, was etched from designs by
Moses van Uytenbroeck, an artist who also published a number of plates
of his own. Here again is an instance of the traditional chronology
being at fault. Uytenbroeck’s birth is usually given as 1600. But Bode
has pointed out that there are engravings after his work by an artist
who died in 1612. The date must therefore be put back several years.
Uytenbroeck is perhaps the nearest to Elsheimer of all his followers.
The relation of the figures to the landscape, the curious human types,
with their rather stolid, plain faces and heavy gestures, the treatment
of Italian landscape, all are intimately akin to the German master’s
art.
Elsheimer’s influence still persists strongly in Cornelis Poelenburg,
one of the most popular of the Dutch artists in Rome, whose small,
smoothly glowing pictures of grottoes and bathing nymphs are familiar in
every
[Illustration: _Fig. 20.--Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh.
B. 17._]
gallery. Poelenburg did not etch himself, but his friend Jan Gerritz
Bronchorst etched from his paintings and in his style, though with less
grace and elegance. We find here the beginnings of that school of
landscape, “Arcadian” as Bode calls it, which so soon received its
fullest and most perfect expression in the large and tranquil art of
Claude.
[Illustration: _Fig. 21.--Landscape. By Both. B. 3._]
Pieter de Laer, of whose etchings of animals we shall say something in
the next chapter, etched one landscape at least in the delicate soft
manner of that master. And with him maybe associated Bartolomeus
Breenbergh, who lived in Rome from his twenty-first to his twenty-eighth
year, 1620-1627. He was married at Amsterdam in 1633 and died there in
1659 or earlier; but was at Rome again in the interval, during which he
published (1640) a set of very attractive little prints. Fig. 20 is an
example of his work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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