HOLLAND
Thirty years ago, under the title _The Woodcutters of the Netherlands_
(a little suggestive of a story for boys on life in a Dutch forest)
Sir Martin Conway wrote a treatise on the early book-illustrations of
the Low Countries, which is still the standard work on the subject,
and only needed plenty of facsimiles to make it completely
illuminating. Unfortunately in 1884 the process block was still in its
infancy, and in the absence of this cheap method of reproduction the
book was issued without a single picture. Written some nine years
later the present chapter epitomises so much of Sir Martin's treatise
as the rather scanty stock of Low Country illustrated books in England
enabled me to visualise, and for lack of an intervening pilgrimage to
Dutch libraries comparatively little can now be added to it.
Sir Martin Conway divided his book into three parts, the first giving
the history of the woodcutters, the second a catalogue of the cuts,
and the third a list of the books containing them. Putting on one side
the blocks imported or directly copied from France and Germany, he
attributes the illustrations in fifteenth century Dutch books to some
five-and-twenty different workmen and their apprentices. His first
group is formed of--
(i.) A Louvain woodcutter who worked for John and Conrad de
Westphalia, for whom he cut two capital little vignette portraits of
themselves, and for Veldener, for whom he executed the nine
illustrations in an edition of the _Fasciculus Temporum_, published on
December 29, 1475.
(ii.) A Utrecht woodcutter, whose most important works are a set of
cuts to illustrate the _Boeck des gulden throens_, published by a
mysterious printer, Gl., in 1480, some additional cuts for a new
edition by Veldener of the _Fasciculus Temporum_, and a set of
thirty-nine cuts, chiefly on the life of Christ, for the same
printer's _Epistolen ende ewangelien_ of 1481.
(iii.) A Bruges woodcutter, possibly the printer himself, who
illustrated Colard Mansion's French edition of the _Metamorphoses_ of
Ovid (1484); and
(iv.) A Gouda woodcutter, by whose aid Gerard Leeu started on his
career as a printer of illustrated books with the _Dialogus
Creaturarum_ (of which he printed six editions between June 3, 1480,
and August 31, 1482), and the _Gesten van Romen_, _Vier Uterste_, and
_Historia Septem Sapientum_.
Of these books, whose illustrations are grouped together as all
executed in pure line work, the most interesting to us are the
_Metamorphoses_ and the _Dialogus_. The former is handsomely printed
in red and black in Mansion's large type, and has seventeen
single-column cuts of gods and goddesses and as many double-column
ones illustrating the Metamorphoses themselves. The larger cuts are
the more successful, and are certainly superior to the average French
work of the day, to which they bear a considerable resemblance.
Uncouth as they are, they were thought good enough by Antoine V['e]rard
to serve as models for his own edition of 1493. The _Metamorphoses_,
Mansion's first illustrated book, was also the last work issued from
his press; and part of the edition was not published till after his
disappearance from Bruges. The hundred and twenty-one cuts in Leeu's
_Dialogus Creaturarum_ are the work of a far more inspired, if very
child-like, artist. With a minimum of strokes the creatures about whom
the text tells its wonderful stories are drawn so as to be easily
recognisable, and we have no reason to suppose that the humour which
pervades them was otherwise than intentional.
We come now to the best period of Dutch illustration, which centres
round the presses of Leeu at Gouda and Antwerp, and of Jacob Bellaert
at Haarlem, whose business was probably only a branch of Leeu's.
During his stay at Gouda, Leeu commissioned an important set of
sixty-eight blocks, thirty-two of which were used in the _Lijden ons
Heeren_ of 1482, and the whole set in a _Devote Ghetiden_, which Sir
Martin Conway conjectures to have been published just after the
printer's removal to Antwerp in the summer of 1484. Fifty-two of them
were used again, in conjunction with other cuts, in the _Boeck vanden
leven Christi_ of Ludolphus in 1487, and the history of many of them
can be traced in other books to as late as 1510. Thus they were
evidently popular, though neither their design nor their cutting calls
for much praise. Another set of seven cuts, to each of which is joined
a sidepiece showing a teacher and a scholar, appears in Leeu's last
Gouda book, the _Van den Seven Sacramenten_ of June 19, 1484, and
evinces a much greater mastery over his tools on the part of the
engraver. The little sidepiece, which was added to bring the breadth
of the cuts up to that of Leeu's folio page (5-1/2 in.), is
particularly good.
After Leeu's removal to Antwerp his activity as a printer of
illustrated books suffered a temporary check, and our interest is
transferred to the office of Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem, who, after
borrowing some of Leeu's cuts for a _Lijden ons Heeren_, issued in
December 1483, in the following February had printed under the name of
_Der Sonderen troest_ a Dutch version of the _Belial_ of Jacobus de
Theramo. This has altogether thirty-two cuts, the first of which
occupies a full page, and represents in its different parts the fall
of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve, the Flood, the Passage of the Red Sea,
and the Baptism of Christ. Six half-page cuts represent incidents of
the Harrowing of Hell, the Ascension, and the Day of Pentecost. The
other illustrations at a hasty glance seem to be of the same size (5
in. by 3-3/4), but are soon discovered to be separable into different
blocks, usually three in number. Eight blocks of 2-1/2 in. each, and
seventeen of half this width, are thus arranged in a series of
dramatic combinations. Thus we are first shown the different persons
who answer the citation of Solomon, whose judgment hall is the central
block in thirteen illustrations; then the controversy in heaven before
Christ as the judge; then scenes in a Royal Council Chamber, &c. Our
illustration is taken from the opening of Solomon's Court, with Belial
appearing to plead on one side, and Christ answering the summons of
the messenger, Azahel, on the other.
[Illustration: From Leeu's edition of _Der Sonderen troest_, Antwerp,
1484.]
In October of the same year, 1484, Bellaert printed an edition of the
_Boeck des gulden throens_, in which four cuts, representing the soul,
depicted as a woman with flowing hair, being instructed by an elder,
serve as illustrations to all the twenty-four discourses. In 1485 we
have first of all two romances, the _Historie vanden vromen ridder
Jason_ and the _Vergaderinge der Historien van Troyen_, both translated
from Raoul le F[e']vre, and illustrated with half-folio cuts, which I
have not seen. At the end of the year came a translation of Glanville's
_De Proprietatibus Rerum_, with eleven folio cuts, of which the most
interesting are the first, which shows the Almighty seated in glory
within a circle thrown up by a black background, and the sixth, which
contains twelve little medallions, representing the pleasures and
occupations of the different months. During 1486 Bellaert printed three
illustrated books, an _Epistelen ende Euangelien_, Pierre Michault's
_Doctrinael des tyts_, an allegory, in which Virtue exhibits to the
author the schools of Vice, and a Dutch version of Deguileville's
_P['e]lerinage de la vie humaine_. The ten cuts in the second of these
three books are described by Sir Martin Conway as carefully drawn, the
more numerous illustrations in the others showing hasty work, probably
produced by an inferior artist.
After 1486 Bellaert disappears, and most of his cuts and types are
found in the possession of Gerard Leeu, who, since his removal to
Antwerp, had lacked the help of a good engraver. He apparently secured
the services of Bellaert's artist, and now printed French and Dutch
editions of the romance of _Paris and Vienne_ (May 1487), an edition
of _Reynard the Fox_, of which only a fragment remains, the
already-mentioned edition of _Ludolphus_, for which he used cuts both
new and old, a _Kintscheyt Jhesu_ (1488), Dutch and Latin versions of
the story of the Seven Wise Men of Rome, who saved the young prince
from the wiles of his step-mother, and numerous religious works. At
the time of his death, in 1493, he was engaged on an edition of the
_Cronycles of England_, which has on its title-page a fine quarto cut
showing the shield of England supported by angels.
In 1485 Leeu had copied (Sir Martin Conway says, 'borrowed,' but this
is a mistake) blocks from Anton Sorg, of Augsburg, for an edition of
_[AE]sop_, and in 1491, in his _Duytsche Ghetiden_, he employed a set of
woodcuts imitated from those in use in the French _Horae_. Sir Martin
assigns these directly to a French wood-cutter, but the work, both in
the cuts and the borders, appears to me sufficiently distinctive to be
set down rather as an imitation than as produced by a foreign artist.
Its success was immediate, and the designs appear in half a dozen
books printed by Leeu during the next two years, and in nine others
issued by Lieseveldt, their purchaser, between 1493 and the end of the
century.
We must now look very briefly at some of the illustrated books printed
in other Dutch towns. At Zwolle, from 1484 onwards, Peter van Os issued
a large number of devotional works, the cuts in many of which were
copied from sets made for Leeu. This, however, is not the case with a
folio cut of the Virgin manifesting herself to S. Bernard, which is
given as a frontispiece to three editions of the Saint's _Sermons_
(1484, &c.), and is of great beauty. At Delft, Jacob van der Meer also
copied Leeu's books; in 1483 he produced an original set of
illustrations to the ever-popular _Scaeckspul_ of Jacobus de Cessolis,
and three years later, a _Passionael_, with upwards of ninety cuts,
which were used again and again in more than a score of similar works
or editions. He was succeeded by Christian Snellaert, who, in 1491,
endeavoured to imitate Leeu's French cuts in an edition of the
_Kerstenen Spieghel_. John de Westphalia continued to work at Louvain
until 1496, but his illustrated books were few and unimportant. At
Gouda, Gotfrid de Os, after borrowing blocks from Leeu, when the latter
had departed for Antwerp, issued a few books with woodcuts, notably the
romance of Godfrey of Boulogne (_Historie hertoghe Godeuaerts van
Boloen_), and _Le Chevalier D['e]lib['e]r['e]_ by Olivier de Lamarche,
with sixteen large and very striking woodcuts, which have been
reproduced in facsimile by the Bibliographical Society from the reprint
issued about the end of the century at Schiedam.
At Deventer, Jacobus de Breda and Richard Paffroet, from 1486 onwards,
printed a large number of books with single cuts, none of any great
importance. In the last decade of the century, Hugo Janszoen
commissioned several sets of crude religious cuts, while the
illustrated books issued at Antwerp by Godfrey Back, who had married
the widow of an earlier printer, Mathias van der Goes, do not seem to
have been much better. This decline of good work Sir Martin Conway
attributes chiefly to the influence of the French woodcuts introduced
by Leeu. 'The characteristic quality,' he says, 'of the French cuts is
the large mass of delicately cut shade lines which they contain. The
workmen of the Low Countries finding these foreign cuts rapidly
becoming popular, endeavoured to imitate them, but without bestowing
upon their work that care by which alone any semblance of French
delicacy could be attained. From the year 1490 onwards, Dutch and
Flemish cuts always contain large masses of clumsily cut shade. The
outlines are rude; the old childishness is gone; thus the last decade
of the fifteenth century is a decade of decline.'
When we pass from the illustrations to the other decorations in early
Dutch books, we find that large borders of foliage, boldly but rather
coarsely treated, were used by Veldener in his _Fasciculus Temporum_
of 1480, and in Gerard Leeu's edition of the _Dyalogus Creaturarum_
the following year. Veldener's is accompanied by a fine initial O, in
which the design of the border is carried on. Leeu's page contains a
rather heavy S, and the woodcut of the faces of the sun and moon.
In 1491, as we have seen, Leeu printed a _Psalter of the Blessed
Virgin_, by S. Bernard, in imitation of the French _Horae_. This has
very graceful little floral borders in small patterns on grounds
alternately black and white. After Leeu's death, they passed into the
possession of Adrian van Lieseveldt, who used them for a _Duytsche
Ghetyden_ in 1495.
The most noteworthy initial letters are the five alphabets, printed in
red, used by John of Westphalia. In the smallest the letters are a
third of an inch square, in the largest about an inch and a quarter.
This and the next size are picked out with white scroll-work, somewhat
in the same way as Schoeffer's. Peter van Os at Zwolle used a large N,
four inches square, with intertwining foliage. He had also a fount of
rustic capitals, almost undecipherable. Leeu, besides his large S, had
several good alphabets of initials. A very beautiful D, reproduced by
Holtrop from the _Vier Uterste_ (Quatuor novissima) of 1488, is much
the most graceful letter in any Dutch book. No other initials of the
same style have been found. Eckert van Hombergh also had some good
initials, in which the ground is completely covered with a light
floral design. Gotfrid van Os at Gouda, M. van der Goes at Antwerp,
Jacob Jacobsoen at Delft, and Lud. de Ravescoet at Louvain, were the
chief other possessors of initials, the use of which continued for a
long time to be very partial.
[Illustration: Mark of Jacob Bellaert.]
Several of the devices of the Dutch printers are very splendid. The
borders which surrounded the unicorn of H. Eckert van Hombergh and the
eagle of Jacob Bellaert give them special magnificence. The Castle at
Antwerp was used as a device by Gerard Leeu, and subsequently by
Thierry Martens, and a printer at Gouda placed a similar erection on
an elephant, perhaps as a pun between _howdah_ and Gouda. Peter van Os
at Zwolle had a large device of an angel holding a shield; M. van der
Goes at Antwerp a still larger one of a ragged man flourishing a club,
while his shield displays a white lion on a black ground. Another
Antwerp printer, G. Back, used several varieties of bird-cages as his
marks, in one of which the Antwerp castle is introduced on a shield
hanging from the cage. Several printers--_e.g._ Colard Mansion at
Bruges, Jacob Jacobsoen at Delft, and Gerard Leeu at Gouda, contented
themselves with small devices of a pair of shields braced together.
Leeu, however, while at Gouda, used also a large device of a helmeted
shield supported by two lions.
[Illustration: From the romance of _Tirant lo Blanch_, Valentia,
1490.]