Entry by
William W. Robinson,
completed March 07, 2019:
Hans Bol’s drawing Christ Calling Saint Peter 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. In addition to Christ Calling Saint Peter, drawings in the album include five landscapes and village scenes (1993.166, 1993.167, 1993.168, 1993.169, 1993.170) attributed to a close follower of Bol, which served as models for engravings in Hans Collaert I’s Views of the Environs of Brussels, one of the print series bound in the volume. The two other drawings, a village landscape (1993.171) and an allegorical composition (1993.172), are by different, unidentified hands. Preserved between the album’s pages since the 17th century, never remounted and seldom exposed to light, Christ Calling Saint Peter is in remarkably pristine condition.
Bol was a productive printmaker and designer of prints, particularly during the years he spent in Antwerp before immigrating to Holland in 1584. Christ Calling Saint Peter, with its neatly finished composition and meticulously described details, resembles his many surviving drawings that served as models for etchings and engravings issued by Antwerp’s prolific publishers. Some of the outlines of the composition have been incised with a stylus, usually an indication that the design was transferred to a copper plate to be engraved. Yet no print after this drawing has come to light. Stefaan Hautekeete has noted that some of Bol’s print publishing projects were either never realized or not as originally envisioned. He has also identified examples of finished compositions that appear to be models for prints but were never engraved or were engraved years after the date inscribed on the artist’s drawing. Hautekeete suggested that Bol produced some designs without a specific commission, intending to offer them for sale to publishers or collectors.
Bol’s drawing illustrates the account of Christ calling Peter as related in the gospel of Luke (5:1–11). After preaching from Peter’s boat on the shore of the Lake of Gennesaret, Jesus told Peter and his fishing partners John and James to put out and cast their nets. Although they had not caught anything the night before, the haul was so prodigious that their nets ripped and the boats began to sink. Astonished by the miraculous draft of fishes, Peter “fell down at Christ’s knees.” Jesus said to him: “Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men.” When Peter, James, and John “had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed him.”
Bol represented Christ calling Peter in three other drawings, dated 1571, 1573, and 1585, none of which was engraved, and in two prints, published in 1574 and 1580, for which no model drawings have survived. The two prints and the drawings of 1571 and 1573 include, like the Harvard composition, the figure of Peter wading ashore to prostrate himself at Christ’s feet. In the 1585 drawing in Brussels, Peter remains in the boat with James and John. Here Bol followed the texts of Matthew (4:18–22) and Mark (1:16–18), which do not mention the miraculous catch or Peter leaving the boat. Hautekeete observed that in the print dated 1580, Bol adapted the smoking lighthouse and the winding waterway with promontories and urban structures from the background of the Harvard drawing.
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