A Complete First-Issue Copy in Sound Contemporary Vellum of Het Voorhof der Ziele, the First Book Romeyn de Hooghe Illustrated of His Own Invention, with the Signed Paris Title-Plate and All Sixty Etchings Present

HOOGSTRATEN, Frans van. Het Voorhof der Ziele, Behangen met leerzaeme Prenten en Zinnebeelden. Door F. v. H. Rotterdam: Fransois van Hoogstraeten, boekverkooper, 1668. Colophon: printed at Rotterdam by Hendrik van Puer.

Details

First edition, first issue. 4to, approx. 185 mm. [16], 199, [9] pp. Collation: π1,2 *3,4 2*⁴ A–2C⁴; 28 sheets. STCN fingerprint 166804.

With the added engraved title-plate, signed at lower left “R. de Hooge fecit” and dated at lower right “Parisiis 1668”; the letterpress title with woodcut vignette; and sixty half-page etchings in the text, all by Romeyn de Hooghe. Each plate stands above a Dutch poem headed by a motto in Latin, Dutch, Spanish or Italian, its source keyed in the margin, and indexed in the “Bladtwijzer der Prenten en Zinnebeelden 1.(–60.)” at the end. Dedicated to Johan de Vries.

Full contemporary vellum, structurally sound and firmly attached, the title lettered in manuscript on the spine in a later hand. Complete: engraved title-plate, 1668 letterpress title, and all sixty emblems present.

De Hooghe’s First Extended Commission

The Voorhof is commonly described as de Hooghe’s first illustrated book. Landwehr’s bibliography of his book illustration numbers it 3; no. 1 is a single frontispiece to Constantijn Huygens’s De zee-straet (The Hague, 1667). Van Nierop records that the Huygens plate was “his first commission to illustrate a book,” and identifies it as etched after a drawing by Jan de Bisschop. The Voorhof is accordingly his first extended campaign of book illustration and the first of his own invention: sixty plates and a signed, dated title-plate.

Van Nierop describes de Hooghe as “the most inventive, prolific, and versatile graphic artist of the Dutch Republic.” Samuel van Hoogstraten, whose commendatory poem appears in this book, later advised anyone wishing to become an etcher to “attend the school of the most ingenious Romeyn de Hooghe” (Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, 1678).

Etched in Paris

Van Nierop: “During his stay in Paris, Romeyn continued to work for the Dutch home market, etching the frontispiece and 60 illustrations for a Catholic emblem book entitled Het voorhof der ziele … It is likely that he secured the commission before he left, and then finished the work in Paris.”

The title-plate is signed and dated “Parisiis 1668” accordingly. Van Nierop adds that after de Hooghe’s return “the bulk of his creative output would consist of book illustrations.”

A Convert’s Emblem Book

Els Stronks, treating the Voorhof within Dutch Protestant emblematics, notes that the title engraving “includes several elements of Catholic iconography,” and that the book’s claim that images are “reliable means of attaining knowledge” is “a remarkable point of view in a Protestant context.”

Wiep van Bunge, in the Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia (2023), records that van Hoogstraten came of a Mennonite family but that, of these years, “By this time, however, van Hoogstraten had converted to Roman Catholicism” — his firm subsequently issuing three decades of Catholica, including Cardinal Bona in 1670 and 1675, Thomas à Kempis in 1674 and the Jesuit Gagliari in the same year. Van Nierop independently describes the Voorhof as “a Catholic emblem book.” Van Bunge calls it “an extremely pious emblem book” and “arguably van Hoogstraten’s most personal work.”

De Hooghe himself was not Catholic. Van Nierop describes him as “a confirmed and practising member of the Reformed Church” who nonetheless “cherished a spiritualistic piousness that sat uneasily with Reformed orthodoxy,” and who illustrated this Catholic book in 1668 and a Mennonite one in 1675: “The fact that the former book was a Catholic one and the latter Mennonite was irrelevant to Romeyn … What mattered was a shared view of the spiritual essence of Christian piety.”

The Sixty Plates

Alongside biblical subjects the plates depict scenes of daily life in the Republic: huntsmen and fishermen, children at play, a fire brigade in action, a surgeon operating, a traveller washing his feet, an armoured champion before a grandstand, landscapes, and a view of Rotterdam harbour.

The book derives from Diego de Estella’s Libro de la vanidad del mundo, which van Hoogstraten had translated into Dutch in 1659. Stronks records that his aim “was to instruct the reader about the vanity of the world rather than establish communication between God and the reader through the medium of these emblems.”

The Frontispiece of This Copy

The two modern descriptions of the title-plate differ. Stronks describes a man holding a burning heart and offering it to Jesus. Van Nierop describes a laurel-crested “Pious Soul” approaching his goal, “a burning torch in hand, barefoot as a penitent,” with an angel pointing to Christ.

On this copy the winged figure is clearly an angel and the striding figure is barefoot. The object in the outstretched fist is a lobed mass with flames radiating on all sides and no shaft or handle, consistent with a cor ardens rather than a torch. A skull and bones lie at the lower right, beside the bare foot; neither published description records them.

Issue and Completeness

The National Gallery of Art records that the edition sold slowly and that thirty years later “another printer issued this ‘second edition’ using the leftover copies and replacing only the title page,” the frontispiece, preface and final leaf of text of those copies still bearing the 1668 date. The STCN records that reissue as Rotterdam, E. Solmans, 1698, its colophon still reading 1668 (STCN 170847373). The 1668 letterpress title therefore distinguishes the first issue, and this copy has it.

The STCN records seventeen copies and notes defects in several: the Noord-Hollands Archief copy “lacks engraved title-page and part of gathering *”; Bibliotheek Rotterdam “lacks part of gathering A”; Utrecht “lacks typographical title-page.” The Royal Academy copy lacks p. 199 and seven of the nine final pages. This copy is complete at each of those points.

The USTC records the work in the sale catalogues of Dutch libraries of 1682, 1686, 1694 and 1697, and advertised in the Oprechte Haerlemse Courant. A copy from the Vershbow collection is now in the National Gallery of Art, accession 2013.67.7. Silvia Cazalla Canto’s Redes emblemáticas y cultura visual en la Edad Moderna (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2021) is a monograph devoted to the relationship between de Estella’s text and the Voorhof.

Provenance

An early owner’s pencil note beneath the engraved title, apparently “Rar[issima]”; pencil and ink notations on the front and rear pastedowns; and the spine lettered in a later hand, “Romein de Hooghe / 1682”.

Literature

Hollstein IX, 757–816; Landwehr, Emblem and Fable Books Printed in the Low Countries 1542–1813, 3rd rev. ed. (1988), 325, cited as no. 223 in the 1970 predecessor; Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) as Book Illustrator (1970), 3, p. 31; Landwehr, Dutch Emblem Books, 95a; Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed., I, p. 372; De Vries, De Nederlandsche emblemata (1899), 217; BCNI 12512; STCN 840087632; USTC 1805346.

H. van Nierop, The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe 1645–1708: Prints, Pamphlets, and Politics in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2018); W. van Bunge, ‘Het onbekent en wonderlijk Eyland’, in C. Shrank and P. Withington (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia (Oxford, 2023), 297–308; E. Stronks, ‘Never to Coincide’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 3:2 (2011); S. Cazalla Canto (Pamplona, 2021); W. H. Wilson, The Art of Romeyn de Hooghe (Ph.D. diss., Harvard, 1974).

Condition

Very well preserved copy. Full contemporary vellum, structurally sound and firmly attached, the title lettered in manuscript on the spine in a later hand (“Romein de Hooghe / 1682”). Soiling to the rear board. All edges trimmed, without loss to any engraving. Scattered light spotting to the text; some leaves at front and rear with wear along the fore-edge; a small loss in the lower margin of P2 affecting no rule, image, signature, catchword or text. Pencil and ink notations on the front and rear pastedowns, and a pencil note beneath the engraved title that appears to read “Rar[issima].” No tears, repairs, dampstaining or detached leaves.

Complete: engraved title-plate, 1668 letterpress title, and all sixty emblems present.

A complete, first-issue copy in sound contemporary vellum of the first book Romeyn de Hooghe illustrated of his own invention, with the signed and dated Paris title-plate and all sixty etchings present.