Entry by
William W. Robinson,
completed March 07, 2019:
A View of Eggevoort is preserved in an album in a plain vellum binding of the late 16th or 17th century (1993.165–M22249). The album includes 97 prints and 8 drawings: the sheets with printed images had been trimmed to a uniform size and bound directly into the album, while the drawings were mounted to blank leaves of the same trim size. The prints, all issued by Antwerp publishers between 1562 and about 1600, comprise five complete sets that depict landscapes, birds, Old Testament scenes, mythological subjects, and architectural perspectives. Among the drawings in the album are Hans Bol’s Christ Calling Saint Peter, dated 1576 (1993.165), and two studies by different, unidentified hands: a village landscape (1993.171) and an allegorical composition of two nude female figures (1993.172).
The other five drawings (1993.166, 1993.167, 1993.168, 1993.169, 1993.170), including A View of Eggevoort, served as models for prints in a series of 24 plates, Views of the Environs of Brussels, engraved by Hans Collaert I and published around 1575–80 by Hans van Luyck. A complete set is bound in the volume (M22197–M22220, see 1993.165–M22249) . Now an urban municipality within the Brussels-Capital Region, Eggevoort in the 16th century was a rural domain outside the city.
Like the two print series of 1559 and 1561 known as the “Small Landscapes” (see 1994.137), which portray sites in the countryside outside Antwerp, the Views of the Environs of Brussels represent suburban villages, castles, and abbeys in an intimate, direct manner based closely on studies from life. Their naturalistic approach differs from that of the imaginary, composite panoramas produced by most landscapists of the period. Printed within the images are titles identifying the locales pictured on the respective plates, underscoring the topographical purpose of the prints—the works might have been marketed to city dwellers as mementos of agreeable places for leisure and recreation.
In the first edition of Views of the Environs of Brussels, the draftsman who furnished the models for the 24 engravings was not identified. When the Amsterdam printmaker and publisher Claes Jansz. Visscher reissued the series at the beginning of the 17th century, he added an inscription attributing the designs to Hans Bol. While the five Harvard landscapes are neither by Bol nor by Jacob Grimmer, to whom they have also been ascribed, Stefaan Hautekeete has discovered that a drawing by Bol might have served as the model for one plate in the set. Hautekeete proposes that Bol likely produced designs for some of the 24 plates, while others were executed by the unidentified draftsman of the Harvard views, who was Bol’s follower or collaborator.
A View of Eggevoort is inscribed by an early hand, swerte gillis. Stijn Alsteens has suggested that “Black Gillis” might be an otherwise unknown nickname for the landscapist Gillis Mostaert, but the technique and style of the Harvard drawings show no compelling connection to Mostaert’s documented work.
A few other works by the same draftsman are known, although none of them provided a direct model for a print in Views of the Environs of Brussels. Three landscape drawings that first appeared on the art market in 1985 are securely attributable to the hand that designed the five compositions in the Harvard album. Hautekeete recognized another in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It is a study from life of a mill that appears, with its surroundings altered and elaborated, in the print Achter Schaerbeecke. Finally, a work that depicts a secluded clearing with a Gothic church and the buildings of an abbey or country estate, last recorded on the art market in 1954, is almost certainly by the same hand as the Harvard landscapes. This drawing was inscribed B de . . . by an early hand, but it is uncertain whether this partially illegible inscription is the signature of the draftsman or a topographical identification.
Of the five models in the album for engravings in the series of sites around Brussels, only View of Over Muelen is reproduced in reverse in Collaert’s print (see 1993.170 and M22209). The verso of that drawing was rubbed with black chalk and the outlines of the composition were incised to copy them onto the copper plate. Since the design was transferred to the plate in the same orientation as the drawing, it printed in reverse. The engravings after the other four drawings, including A View of Eggevoort, do not reverse their models, so they reproduce more accurately the artist’s study of the site (M22199). To print them in the same direction as the drawings, the engraver had to transfer their compositions to the plates in mirror images. He did so by indenting the outlines of the recto with a stylus so that they showed on the verso, then drawing over those contours on the verso with black chalk. Afterward, he laid the drawing recto-side down on the plate and incised the black chalk lines, transferring the reversed design from the verso of the drawing to the copper surface.
Notes