From Rembrandt’s Circle to the Birth of Modern Political Satire: Romeyn de Hooghe’s First Major Illustrated Book — Het Voorhof der Ziele, 1668
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.
First edition, first issue. 4to, approximately 185 mm. [16], 199, [9] pp. With the separate engraved title signed at lower left “R. de Hooge fecit” and dated at lower right “Parisiis 1668”; letterpress title with woodcut vignette; and sixty half-page etchings by Romeyn de Hooghe integrated with the text. Each emblem is accompanied by a Dutch poem and a motto, variously in Latin, Dutch, Spanish or Italian, and the complete series is indexed at the end. Dedicated to Johan de Vries, burgomaster of Rotterdam. Preliminary poems by Heiman Dullaert, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Cornelis van Santen, Jan Zoet and Pieter van Bracht. Contemporary full vellum, title in manuscript on the spine. Complete with the engraved title-plate, original 1668 letterpress title and all sixty numbered emblems.
Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) became one of the great graphic artists of the late Dutch Golden Age and a formative figure in the emergence of modern political satire. The National Gallery of Art describes him as “one of the greatest artists to come out of the late Dutch Golden Age” and records more than 3,500 prints associated with his extraordinarily broad practice.[1] For scale, Rembrandt made about 300 etchings and drypoints over his entire career.[2] The figures are not directly comparable — De Hooghe’s much larger corpus includes extensive book illustration and workshop production — but they indicate how completely he inhabited the printed visual culture of his age.
His subjects ranged from books, maps, histories and religious imagery to battles, ceremonies, architecture and current affairs. A much smaller group of political satires secured his particular place in the history of print. Meredith Hale writes that with roughly twenty such works De Hooghe “revolutionized the political print in the Netherlands.”[3] He brought the elaborate visual language of the Baroque — crowded action, dramatic contrasts, emphatic gesture, allegory and dense symbolic detail — into direct contact with contemporary politics. Louis XIV, James II, William III, ministers, armies and nations became actors in images that combined news, caricature, propaganda, poetry and learned symbolism. Text and image were designed to be read together. The picture no longer merely recorded an event; it argued about what the event meant.
Het Voorhof der Ziele belongs to the beginning of that career and places De Hooghe unusually close to the artistic world of Rembrandt. Frans van Hoogstraten’s elder brother Samuel, a contributor to the preliminary verses, had been one of Rembrandt’s pupils. So had Heiman Dullaert, another contributor. De Hooghe himself is not documented as a pupil of Rembrandt, but his first substantial book-illustration cycle appeared in the immediate literary company of two men trained in Rembrandt’s studio. The National Gallery identifies both Rembrandt and Rubens among the important influences on his art.[1][4]
The familiar description of Voorhof as De Hooghe’s “first illustrated book” requires one qualification. Henk van Nierop has identified an earlier commission: the frontispiece to Constantijn Huygens’s Zee-straet of 1667, which De Hooghe etched after a drawing by Jan de Bisschop. Voorhof was something fundamentally larger — a signed engraved title and sixty original illustrations forming a sustained visual programme for one book. Landwehr accordingly called it “the first book illustrated by De Hooghe”; more precisely, it is his earliest major sustained book-illustration cycle.[5]
The engraved title also records an unusual circumstance of its creation. “Parisiis 1668” places De Hooghe in Paris while the work was being made. Van Nierop writes that during his Paris stay he continued to work for the Dutch market, “etching the frontispiece and 60 illustrations” for Het Voorhof der Ziele, and considers it likely that De Hooghe obtained the commission before leaving the Netherlands and completed it abroad.[5]
The subject he was given was itself concerned with the problem of seeing correctly. Frans van Hoogstraten came from a Mennonite family, within the Dutch Anabaptist tradition and outside the established Reformed Church. His Rotterdam circle included Christians accustomed to disagreement over doctrine, conscience and religious authority. In 1659 he had translated the Spanish Franciscan Diego de Estella’s Libro de la vanidad del mundo, a meditation on vanitas: the human habit of assigning lasting value to wealth, reputation, pleasure, beauty, power and other things that cannot last. Van Hoogstraten later explained that translating Estella allowed him to become intimately acquainted with ideas that mattered to him personally. Silvia Cazalla Canto’s 2021 monograph is devoted specifically to the transformation of Estella’s work into Het Voorhof der Ziele.[6]
The title describes the form Van Hoogstraten devised. A voorhof is a forecourt, the space through which one passes before entering an inner sanctuary. His “forecourt of the soul” is hung with instructive prints and zinnebeelden, or emblems. An emblem was not simply an illustration. Picture, motto, biblical quotation and explanatory verse were intended to be considered together; the reader had to compare what was seen with what was written and arrive at its moral meaning.
Van Hoogstraten explains the principle directly in his preface: one may be edified “by images and words, by sight and sound.” A preliminary poem makes the purpose still clearer: through images the reader should learn to separate false appearance from truth.[7]
The sixty etchings make that idea concrete through subjects drawn as much from ordinary life as from Scripture. A post rider arrives at an inn; a painter listens to a peasant’s judgment of his picture; neighbours extinguish a house fire; a surgeon performs an operation; a stork carries a frog into the air; a flower stands at the height of its morning beauty; a lamb hangs from a wolf’s mouth; a criminal is stretched upon the rack; a man falls when the reed on which he leans breaks. Elsewhere appear fishermen, soldiers, craftsmen, animals, biblical figures and Rotterdam harbour. A familiar scene is recognized first and interpreted afterward as a lesson concerning pride, dependence, mortality, knowledge, attachment or salvation.
The first emblem states the method with striking economy: a man turns his back on his own shadow and faces the sun. Els Stronks describes Van Hoogstraten’s purpose as instruction in “the vanity of the world”; Samuel van Hoogstraten’s preliminary poem says the images encompass “everything that nature brings forth on earth.”[7] The visible world itself supplies the material from which the reader learns to judge appearances.
The engraved title carries the same problem into devotional imagery. Stronks describes its principal figure as offering a burning heart toward Christ; Van Nierop reads him as the barefoot, laurel-crested “Pious Soul,” carrying a burning torch while an angel points toward Christ. Above appear the divine name and the dove of the Holy Spirit. Beneath the image are lines from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy concerning false goods and the mind’s recognition of truth — a classical formulation of the same problem of misplaced value that runs through Van Hoogstraten’s book.[7][8]
The book’s religious character does not fit neatly within one confessional category. Van Hoogstraten had been formed in a Mennonite environment, had immersed himself in the writings of a Spanish Franciscan and subsequently became Roman Catholic; modern scholars differ over the exact chronology of that conversion. Stronks shows that Voorhof nevertheless does more than reproduce Catholic meditative imagery. Its pictures remain rooted in everyday experience and moral instruction. Catholic devotional forms and Dutch emblematic practice meet in a book whose persistent concern is how visible things can deceive, instruct and finally be understood.[7][9]
That problem gave De Hooghe an unusually revealing early commission. Each plate had to function on two levels: an immediately recognizable scene and a meaning that emerged only through interpretation. Contemporary readers noticed his ability. Jan Zoet praised the prints as “schoon aan ’t oog en leer en zinryk voor verstandigen” — pleasing to the eye, instructive and rich in meaning for the understanding. Landwehr already finds in these plates one of De Hooghe’s characteristic technical devices: dark foregrounds opening gradually into increasingly illuminated distance. By 1678 Samuel van Hoogstraten could tell anyone wishing to learn etching to “attend the school of the most ingenious Romeyn de Hooghe.”[10]
Within a few years De Hooghe was applying the same capacity for densely coded visual argument to a very different world. The Dutch Disaster Year of 1672, the wars of Louis XIV, the rise of William III and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 became subjects for prints made in response to events still unfolding. Kings and armies replaced the surgeon, stork and falling traveller, but the viewer was again required to move from recognition to interpretation. Gods, monsters, allegorical figures, animals, poems and captions surrounded recognizable political actors. Hale notes that text and image were meant to work together and that these satires could be issued comparatively soon after the events to which they responded.[3]
Het Voorhof der Ziele need not be claimed as the cause of De Hooghe’s later political art. Its place is more precise. It is the first major sustained project in which he repeatedly had to make a picture carry an argument. Near the end of his life, the interpretation of symbols itself became a subject in his Hieroglyphica, his wide-ranging investigation of ancient, mythological and religious imagery.[8]
The history of the edition gives the present copy another point of distinction. In 1698 Engelbertus Solmans issued what its new title-page called a Tweede Druk, or second printing. The National Gallery and Landwehr record that the body of this later issue consisted of sheets already printed in 1668, with the title-page replaced; the engraved title, preface and final page continued to carry the earlier date.[11] The 1698 publication is therefore more accurately a reissue of the original sheets than a newly printed edition. The present copy retains the original 1668 Rotterdam letterpress title naming Fransois van Hoogstraeten and is consequently the first issue.
Completeness is also worth stating explicitly. Identified institutional copies include examples with substantive defects: the STCN records the Noord-Hollands Archief copy without the engraved title and part of a preliminary gathering, and the Bibliotheek Rotterdam copy without part of gathering A.[12] The present copy preserves both title-pages, the complete text and all sixty numbered emblems.
Full contemporary vellum, title in manuscript on the spine; soiling to the binding, more pronounced on the rear board. All edges trimmed. Scattered light spotting to the text. Some leaves at the beginning and end with wear along the fore-edge. Small loss in the lower margin of P2, not affecting the printed area. Pencil and ink notations on the front and rear pastedowns.
Complete with the engraved title-plate, the original 1668 letterpress title and all sixty numbered emblems.
Literature
Hollstein IX, 757–816; Landwehr, Dutch Emblem Books (1962), no. 95a; Landwehr, Emblem Books in the Low Countries (1970), no. 223; Landwehr, Emblem and Fable Books Printed in the Low Countries 1542–1813, 3rd rev. and augmented ed. (1988), no. 325; Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) as Book Illustrator (1970), no. 3, p. 31; Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed., I, p. 372; De Vries, De Nederlandsche emblemata (1899), no. 217; Beijers 82; BCNI 12512; STCN 840087632; USTC 1805346.
Modern scholarship: Henk van Nierop, The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe 1645–1708: Prints, Pamphlets, and Politics in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2018); Meredith M. Hale, “Romeyn de Hooghe and the Birth of Political Satire”; Els Stronks, “‘Never to Coincide’: The Identities of Dutch Protestants and Dutch Catholics in Religious Emblematics,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 3:2 (2011); Wiep van Bunge, “‘Het onbekent en wonderlijk Eyland’: Frans van Hoogstraten’s Translation of Utopia (1677),” in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 295–306; Silvia Cazalla Canto, Redes emblemáticas y cultura visual en la Edad Moderna: La Vanidad del mundo (1574) de fray Diego de Estella, origen de Het Voorhof der ziele (1668) de Frans van Hoogstraten (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2021); William H. Wilson, “Romeyn de Hooghe’s Emblem Books,” Quaerendo 8 (1978), pp. 135–156.
Provenance
Pencil and ink notations on the front and rear pastedowns. A pencil notation beneath the engraved title appears to read “Rar[issima].” The spine is titled in manuscript in a later hand.
References Cited Above
[1] National Gallery of Art, From the Library: The Book Illustrations of Romeyn de Hooghe (Washington, D.C., 2014), pp. 2–3.
[2] Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669): Prints”: approximately 300 etchings and drypoints, ca. 1626–1665.
[3] Meredith M. Hale, “Romeyn de Hooghe and the Birth of Political Satire,” Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Center 24, p. 89.
[4] John Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) as Book Illustrator (Amsterdam, 1970), pp. 13–15; National Gallery of Art, From the Library.
[5] Henk van Nierop, The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe 1645–1708 (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 61–62; Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe as Book Illustrator, no. 3, p. 31.
[6] Silvia Cazalla Canto, Redes emblemáticas y cultura visual en la Edad Moderna (Pamplona: EUNSA, 2021); Wiep van Bunge, “‘Het onbekent en wonderlijk Eyland’,” pp. 295–306.
[7] Els Stronks, “‘Never to Coincide’: The Identities of Dutch Protestants and Dutch Catholics in Religious Emblematics,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 3:2 (2011).
[8] Henk van Nierop, Life of Romeyn de Hooghe, especially pp. 405–406 and his discussion of Hieroglyphica.
[9] Wiep van Bunge, “‘Het onbekent en wonderlijk Eyland’,” pp. 295–306.
[10] Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe as Book Illustrator, pp. 13–15; Van Nierop, Life of Romeyn de Hooghe, p. 65.
[11] National Gallery of Art, From the Library (2014), p. 7; Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe as Book Illustrator, no. 3, p. 31.
[12] STCN 840087632, copy-level notes for the Noord-Hollands Archief and Bibliotheek Rotterdam examples.
First edition and first issue, complete with both title-pages and all sixty etchings: Romeyn de Hooghe’s earliest major sustained book-illustration cycle, produced in the immediate literary company of two Rembrandt pupils before he transformed the Baroque language of allegory into one of the most influential forms of political visual argument in the later Dutch Golden Age.
