6 - Reclaiming Reproductive Printmaking

Summary

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, contemporary art critics argued that reproducing a work in print required less imagination and less skill than an original work, and therefore, was a particularly appropriate medium for female artists. Scholars of our own time, however, offer correctives to this assumption, and assert that reproductive printmaking often prompted innovation, specifically for female printmakers. We can examine the work of Dutch printmaker Magdalena van de Passe (1600–1638) as both a reproductive printmaker, highlighting the work of predominantly male artists understood primarily through her engravings, and also as an artist whose work was reproduced by her female students.

Keywords: printmaking; woman artist; reproductive engraving; gender; early modern Period

In 1620, printmaker Crispijn de Passe the Elder and Jan Janszoon from Arnhem jointly published the Heroologia Anglica in Utrecht. This folio included sixty-five portraits of kings, queens, noblemen, clerics, and scholars, in the tradition of Hendrick Hondius. The portraits are all reproductive, borrowed from paintings by court artists in England such as Hans Holbein. In addition to Crispijn the Elder, two of his children, Magdalena and Willem, also engraved portraits for the Heroloogia. The author of the book's Latin couplets, Dutch humanist Aernout van Buchell, recommended the young engravers in one of the introductory poems: “Both De Passes, too, joined in this celebrated work, MAGDALENA and her BROTHER, whose achievement well-nigh matches hers.” From this inscription, in which Magdalena de Passe is named and her brother is not, it is evident that Magdalena is the more notable printmaker in 1620. Perhaps Van Buchell, a friend of the De Passe family, singled her out because of her sex, but it is more probable that he mentioned her by name because of her skill as an engraver. By 1620, Magdalena had been signing work in her father's workshop for approximately six years. Yet since this seventeenth-century praise, Magdalena's contributions to the workshop have been summarily undervalued. As a female, and as a reproductive printmaker, her work has remained on the margins of the central narrative of individual creative genius that has shaped the discipline of art history. Reclaiming Magdalena's work as a reproductive printmaker reassesses both her artistic production and the medium in which she primarily worked.