A Family Affair: Artistic Dynasties in Europe (Part I, 1500–1700)
Saturday, January 25, 2025 - Sunday, June 15, 2025
How far does the apple fall from the tree? Just as certain traits, abilities, and resources might be inherited from a parent, professions traditionally were as well. This exhibition tells the stories of 16 printmaking families active in European cities from Antwerp to Prague in the 16th and 17th centuries. In some cases, families appear artistically tight-knit, developing a “house style” to a degree that the works of individual members are almost indistinguishable from one another and their “brand” is maintained. In other instances, members of the younger generation struck out on their own, venturing far across Europe to seek new patrons and updating their style to suit changing tastes (although still trading on their parents’ reputations). The copperplates of famous relatives were valuable inheritances that, through reprinting, prolonged the legacies of certain artistic dynasties for several centuries.
Drawing from the Blanton’s collection of historical European art, "A Family Affair" presents prints, drawings, and paintings created by some of the continent’s most fascinating artistic families, revealing patterns of inspiration, rivalry, and changing family fortunes.
The second part of this exhibition, "A Family Affair: Artistic Dynasties in Europe (Part II, 1700–1900)", opens June 28, 2025.
Curated by Holly Borham, Curator of Prints, Drawings and European Art, and Sarah Bane, Assistant Curator, Prints & Drawings, Blanton Museum of Art.
Gallery TextDrawing from the Blanton’s collection of historical European art, "A Family Affair" presents prints, drawings, and paintings created by some of the continent’s most fascinating artistic families, revealing patterns of inspiration, rivalry, and changing family fortunes.
The second part of this exhibition, "A Family Affair: Artistic Dynasties in Europe (Part II, 1700–1900)", opens June 28, 2025.
Curated by Holly Borham, Curator of Prints, Drawings and European Art, and Sarah Bane, Assistant Curator, Prints & Drawings, Blanton Museum of Art.
Introduction
How far does the apple fall from the tree? This exhibition examines the influence of family relationships on artistic production in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Just as certain traits, abilities, and resources might be inherited from a parent, professions traditionally were as well. Artists typically trained in an apprentice system, where they assisted a master until they could demonstrate technical proficiency and start their own workshop. In the case of intaglio printmaking, apprentices would learn to draw; engrave or etch designs on copperplates; prepare inks and paper; and, in many cases, ink and print the plates as well. Within this economic structure, it was customary for fathers to train their sons (and occasionally daughters) who would eventually inherit the workshop, which included such assets as drawings, tools, and copperplates.
A Family Affair tells the stories of sixteen printmaking families active in European cities from Antwerp to Prague. In some cases, families appear to have been artistically tight-knit, developing a “house style” to a degree that the works of individual members are almost indistinguishable from one another and their “brand” is maintained. In other instances, members of the younger generation struck out on their own, venturing far across Europe to seek new patrons and updating their styles to suit changing tastes (although still trading on their parents’ reputations). The copperplates of famous relatives were a valuable inheritance that, through reprinting, prolonged the legacies of certain artistic dynasties for several centuries. Drawing from the Blanton’s deep holdings of historical European art, A Family Affair presents prints, drawings, and paintings created by some of the continent’s most fascinating artistic families, revealing patterns of inspiration, rivalry, and changing fortunes.
Please visit again for A Family Affair: Artistic Dynasties in Europe (Part II, 1700–1900), June 28–December 7, 2025. This entirely new installation will trace the evolution of family workshops through the late nineteenth century and include such prominent artistic families as Giambattista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot, and James McNeill Whistler and Francis Seymour Haden.
Workshop Organization
Many of the artworks in this exhibition are intaglio prints, created by incising lines in a copperplate with either a sharp tool called a burin (engraving) or with acid (etching). The division of labor inherent to printmaking typically involves three components: (1) creating a design (2) engraving or etching the design on a copperplate (3) commissioning and overseeing the printing of the plate. The person responsible for each role is often indicated on the plate with a Latin term (or a version of its abbreviation) next to their name: “Invenit (inv.)” for the designer; “sculpsit (sculp.)” for the engraver or etcher; “fecit (fe.)” when the designer and engraver/etcher are the same person; “excudit (ex.)” for the publisher. Some artists took on all three tasks, while others operated more like freelancers, working for many different publishers. Publishers financed the printmaking process, so they owned the plates and determined the print runs. As the print publishing industry grew, some enterprising artists began to commission designs and plates from one another, and could purchase and reprint older plates as well.
BEHAM FAMILY
Brothers Sebald and Barthel Beham were born in Nuremberg, an important German artistic center that was home to the great printmaker and painter Albrecht Dürer, with whom they likely trained. Like Dürer, the Beham brothers became experts in both woodcut and engraving, while also producing paintings and designs for works in other media, such as stained glass and manuscript illumination. The brothers are numbered among the “Little Masters,” German artists of the period who specialized in tiny engravings. Such works were purchased by a new class of print collectors, as well as by other artisans who used these designs as models to embellish their wares. Sebald and Barthel are also known as the “godless painters” because they were expelled from Nuremberg in 1525 for their unorthodox religious beliefs and their refusal to recognize the authority of the city council. Allowed to return later that year, but then accused by town authorities of plagiarizing Dürer’s manuscript on the proportion of horses, Sebald left Nuremberg and found patrons in Munich, Mainz, and Frankfurt. Barthel spent the rest of his career at the Bavarian court in Munich, with intermittent trips to Italy.
Brothers Sebald and Barthel Beham were born in Nuremberg, an important German artistic center that was home to the great printmaker and painter Albrecht Dürer, with whom they likely trained. Like Dürer, the Beham brothers became experts in both woodcut and engraving, while also producing paintings and designs for works in other media, such as stained glass and manuscript illumination. The brothers are numbered among the “Little Masters,” German artists of the period who specialized in tiny engravings. Such works were purchased by a new class of print collectors, as well as by other artisans who used these designs as models to embellish their wares. Sebald and Barthel are also known as the “godless painters” because they were expelled from Nuremberg in 1525 for their unorthodox religious beliefs and their refusal to recognize the authority of the city council. Allowed to return later that year, but then accused by town authorities of plagiarizing Dürer’s manuscript on the proportion of horses, Sebald left Nuremberg and found patrons in Munich, Mainz, and Frankfurt. Barthel spent the rest of his career at the Bavarian court in Munich, with intermittent trips to Italy.
Both brothers are credited with introducing classical subjects and ornament to German art. Barthel Beham’s Battle of Eighteen Nude Men, for example, was inspired by relief sculpture on ancient stone sarcophagi, as well as by contemporary Italian prints, and probably served as a model for arms and armor designs. Barthel also seems to have been the more inventive artist. Sebald frequently made copies of his younger brother’s designs and likely inherited Barthel’s plates upon his death in 1540. While Barthel originally engraved Death and Three Nude Women in 1525–27, Sebald reworked the plate some twenty years later, strengthening the shadows and adding his own monogram (HSB) at the lower margin.
HOPFER FAMILY
A third-generation painter from a small town, German artist Daniel Hopfer also developed skills as an armor decorator, which likely brought him in 1493 to the imperial city of Augsburg, the leading center of arms and armor production in Germany. It was there that he adapted the process of etching on armor to etching on metal plates, a critical development in the history of printmaking as well as for the rise of his family’s fortunes. Hopfer’s invention involves drawing designs with a fine needle into an acid-resistant waxy substance that has been applied over an iron plate (later artists used copperplates). The plate is then submerged in a bath of acid that etches the design into the plate, which is then inked and printed.
Augsburg’s unique geographic and religious situation shaped Hopfer’s artistic output. Because it was located along a major trade route to Italy, the city’s artists were among the first in Germany to embrace Italian Renaissance designs. For example, in his etching Christ Blessing the Virgin, Daniel Hopfer incorporates the columns and rounded arches of classical architecture in the choir stalls surrounding the holy figures, decorating them with such antique motifs as acanthus leaves and hybrid creatures. While the imagery in this etching would have appealed to Catholic viewers, Hopfer’s own religious convictions were strongly influenced by church reformers like Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli. Many of Augsburg’s residents embraced Lutheranism, and the artist’s Scenes from the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, an innovative biblical word-image tableau that resembles a comic strip, conveys his Protestant sympathies in its critique of Catholic dietary restrictions and clerical celibacy.
Two of Daniel’s sons, Hieronymus and Lambrecht, joined the family workshop and specialized in copying works by other German and Italian masters. The enduring popularity of the Italianate style is exemplified in Hieronymus’s engraving of Roma, in which ancient Rome is personified by a classical warrior with trophies at his feet, holding a statue of Victory beneath a Roman arch. In 1530, Hieronymus left one family business for another; he moved to Nuremberg and became a wealthy merchant like his elder brother, Georg. With Daniel’s death in 1536 and Lambrecht’s early demise in around 1550, the fate of the workshop was unclear. Demand for the family’s designs, however, remained strong and plates produced by the various Hopfers continued–– remarkably––to be printed by other publishers in Augsburg and Nuremberg through the early nineteenth century. In a similar feat of artistic longevity, nine generations of Daniel’s descendants (through the late nineteenth century) included prominent painters, printmakers, goldsmiths, and musical composers.
WIERIX FAMILY
All three sons of the Antwerp painter and cabinetmaker Antonius I Wierix became printmakers known for their meticulous style of engraving. Johannes and Hieronymus are thought to have apprenticed with a goldsmith, while the youngest brother, Antonius II, learned his craft from his brothers. As part of their training, all three brothers made copies of outstanding engravings by earlier masters. On view in this exhibition is Hieronymus’s engraved copy of Sebald Beham’s Judith, which the young artist signed “IRW” and noted his age “AE 13” at the lower left. By contrast, Johannes’s Melencolia, completed at the age of 52, was a mature artist’s attempt to rival the great master engraver, Albrecht Dürer.
Antwerp’s many publishers regularly commissioned the Wierix brothers to engrave designs by other artists (most commonly Maarten de Vos); in around 1585, for example, Johannes Wierix produced Absalom Conspiring Outside the Gates of Jerusalem, the first plate from a biblical series on the life of David by De Vos. Despite their skill in rendering finely detailed works of predominantly religious subjects, the brothers were notoriously profligate in their personal lives. Reportedly, after having worked one or two days, they would spend all their earnings in taverns, even pawning their engraving tools and the shirts on their backs. Exasperated employers had to bail them out and keep them under close watch until their debts had been paid, and then the process would start all over again. Nevertheless, the brothers were prolific artists, producing more than 2,500 prints and book illustrations, some of which were self-published. Many of their book illustrations were commissioned by the Jesuits, whose worldwide evangelical mission ultimately meant that the Wierixes’ designs were dispersed and influential far beyond Europe. While only Antonius II had a son who also engraved, the lively resale market for the artists’ copperplates––which were reprinted until they wore out––extended the legacy of the Wierix name into the 1850s.
CARRACCI FAMILY
While the Carracci dynasty emerged from unlikely sources, its members changed the course of Italian painting and printmaking. The three most prominent figures––Agostino and Annibale, sons of a tailor, and Ludovico, son of a butcher––trained as painters in their native Bologna. Agostino also received instruction in engraving and trained his brother in the technique. In 1582, while still in their twenties, the three Carracci cousins founded a painting academy that created a new model for artistic training, one fundamentally different from that of the family workshop. The Carraccis’ academy established life drawing of human models as the foundation of instruction and introduced discussions of art theory. Their naturalistic and emotionally affecting style resulted in many commissions and, famously, when asked who painted a particular work, they answered, “It is by the Carracci; all of us made it.” This apparent harmony, however, was not to last. By the mid-1590s, the artists had grown apart stylistically, professionally, and personally.
Their diverging styles can be seen in their approaches to printmaking. The most important engraver in late sixteenth-century Italy, Agostino is credited with putting Bologna on the map as a center of engraving. He masterfully adapted his style according to the subject; in his The Virgin Appearing to Saint Jerome, for example, he varies the length, width, and curvature of his lines to match the coloristic effects of Tintoretto’s original painting. In contrast to Agostino’s output of more than two hundred engravings, Annibale made only twenty-two prints, almost exclusively after his own designs. Annibale achieves a sketch-like quality through the combination of engraving and etching, which allows for freer lines. Ludovico turned to printmaking later in his career and Holy Family Under an Arch of around 1585–90 is the first of only four prints that he executed. His engraving style is less systematic than that of his cousins and the arbitrary shape and luminous facets of the Virgin’s drapery here exemplify the form of this individual expressiveness.
The more ambitious Agostino and Annibale left for Rome in 1595 to accept prestigious painting commissions, while the elder Ludovico chose to stay in Bologna. Within a few years, conflict between the brothers ensued and Agostino departed Rome to spend the rest of his career serving the court in Parma. Among the next generation, only Agostino’s son, Antonio, achieved fame. Ludovico’s younger brother and another nephew have been judged by one Carracci scholar as “mediocre talents who produced no works of importance to the history of art.”
VAN DOETECUM
In his 1609 publication Teutscher Nation Herligkeit (The Magnificence of the German Nation), engraver, poet, and cartographer Matthias Quad von Kinkelbach reports that:
Around the year 1570 two brothers, Jan and Lucas van Dotecum, invented a completely new and ingenious manner of etching, whereby they could, and still can, etch copper pictures and maps with all the writing and lettering in them so neatly and smoothly and with such gentle gradations, that it was long considered by many connoisseurs as not etching but pure engraving. The art remained their secret until Lucas died; after some years, his brother Jan revealed it to his two sons Baptist and Jan, who practice it now in Haarlem and produce many excellent plates with little work.
Jan and Lucas van Doetecum’s “secret” process for mimicking the appearance of engraved lines (which require a higher level of skill and much more time) involved three techniques: the use of systematic hatching to create shading; submerging the etched plate in acid multiple times to vary the width of the lines; and going over those lines with a burin to produce the pointed end characteristic of engraved lines. The brothers specialized in architectural and ornamental designs (as in the two examples here), landscapes, and topographical views and maps, entirely after the designs of other artists. Unless produced after Lucas’ death, prints by the Van Doetecums are always attributed to both brothers because it is virtually impossible to distinguish their individual hands.
Descended from a stained-glass painter in Deventer, the Van Doetecums likely learned their trade from Antwerp’s prominent print publisher Hieronymus Cock and also worked for several other publishers in that city. However, their workshop was for many years in Deventer, about a hundred miles north of Antwerp, and after that city fell to Spanish troops in 1587, Jan sought refuge in Haarlem. From there, he also worked for Amsterdam publishers, primarily producing maps. His two sons, Jan the Younger and Baptista, joined the workshop and their hands are almost impossible to distinguish from their father’s. Jan the Younger inherited most of his father’s plates and moved to Rotterdam, where he continued specializing in cartographic prints. Baptista worked in Amsterdam, mainly making siege maps related to the conflict between the Netherlands and Spain, and later in Deventer, where he became the town printer and published official ordinances and almanacs.
DE BRY FAMILY
Trained in his father’s goldsmith’s workshop in Liège, a center of metalworking since the medieval period, Theodor de Bry later turned to copperplate engraving, specializing in ornamental designs for metalwork. In an example from his series of designs for tazze or drinking vessels, De Bry celebrated the circular and portable form of a wide-mouthed cup by designing a central medallion that takes on different guises depending on the angle from which it is viewed. In this double-headed depiction of pride and folly, the jester’s profile morphs into a satyr when seen upside down by the drinker.
A fervent Calvinist in a region of the Netherlands controlled by Catholic Spain, Theodor moved to Strasbourg in the late 1550s to escape religious persecution. There, he met his first wife, Katharina Esslinger, and the couple had four children. He trained his two sons Johann Theodor and Johann Israel as engravers, and both maintained their father’s strong associations with the tradition of metalwork. For example, Johann Theodor’s tiny engraving here is a highly detailed design for a knife handle. In the central oval he represents the biblical account of Jesus praising the seated Mary for listening to his words, while chiding her sister Martha for being distracted by dinner preparations. This food-related episode is particularly apt for a piece of cutlery.
The De Bry family would relocate several more times in search of religious freedom, eventually settling in Frankfurt in 1588. There, they set up a highly successful publishing house that would become famous for its monumental series of illustrated books of Grandes Voyages, the accounts of European travelers to distant continents. The hugely successful volumes on Virginia and Florida appeared in 1590 and 1591, and with later ones on Africa, the Far East, and the Americas, they provided Europeans with a first comprehensive collection of images of unfamiliar regions of the world.
SCULTORI FAMILY
Born in Verona, Giovanni Battista Scultori moved to Mantua to train in the workshop of the renowned painter and architect Giulio Romano. He first created stucco decoration inspired by ancient Greek and Roman architecture and then took up engraving in 1527, possibly with the goal of disseminating Giulio’s work to a larger audience. Loosely based on a fresco design by Giulio, David and Goliath demonstrates Scultori’s mastery of the engraving technique. As he leaps over the sprawling body of the giant Goliath, the young shepherd David swiftly raises a sword to deal the final blow to his enemy. The sword’s diamond point and curved handle share a remarkable resemblance to a burin, the tool engravers use to carve their designs into copper. By connecting his work as an engraver to the story of David and Goliath, Scultori powerfully proclaims his skill as an artist and printmaker.
Giovanni Battista trained both of his children, Adamo and, notably, his daughter Diana, as printmakers. Within the family’s Mantuan workshop, Adamo and Diana continued to engrave after Guilio Romano’s classicizing designs. For example, Adamo created The Invention of Wine after a now-lost drawing by Giulio of an ancient bas-relief sculpture. At the right, a seated faun opens a new wineskin, while the faun reclining on the ground lifts his drinking horn for a taste. Diana’s Latona Giving Birth to Apollo and Diana on the Island of Delos, also engraved after a design by Giulio Romano, depicts Latona’s attendants caring for the newborn infants and for Latona while she rests under a makeshift tent. One of the first female artists to sign her name in print, Diana gained recognition for her talent as an engraver, eventually receiving a special papal privilege to publish and market her own work.
BLOEMAERT FAMILY
Son of the architect and sculptor, Cornelis Bloemaert, Abraham Bloemaert became the foremost painter in the Dutch city of Utrecht during the first half of the seventeenth century. As a devout Catholic in the newly independent Protestant Dutch Republic, he produced a large number of religious paintings as well as more than a thousand drawings, many of which were reproduced by other artists in print. Abraham introduced prominent landscape elements into his religious works––as in his drawing of Saint John the Baptist Preaching––and country life was one of his favorite subjects.
Abraham was father to fourteen children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. Of those, two became painters, while Cornelis II and Frederick focused on printmaking. Cornelis II’s Pastorale series reproduces now-lost drawings by his father, who reportedly sketched elements of nature scenes outdoors and then composed them into drawings in his studio. Like many Dutch artists of his day, Cornelis II traveled to Rome to study the works of antiquity and participate in the city’s vibrant art scene. Once there, he ceased making prints after his father’s designs and never returned home (in part because he wanted to avoid having to engrave many more of his father’s drawings). Among his commissions in the Eternal City were engravings of ancient sculptures, such as Reclining Woman Asleep, for the catalogue of the Giustiniani Collection.
Frederick was the son and pupil most responsible for ensuring his father’s legacy because of the more than 380 prints he made after Abraham’s drawings (taking on the task Cornelis II had avoided). Their etched “Tekenboek,” a drawing manual that focused on human anatomy and figural compositions, was so popular that it was reproduced into the nineteenth century. On the book’s title page, a young artist sketches antique sculpture, an activity that, along with figure drawing, was considered fundamental to an artist’s training in this period.
DE JODE FAMILY
The De Jode printmaking dynasty began with Antwerp publisher Gerard de Jode, whose world atlas, Speculum Orbis Terrae of 1578, and illustrated Bible, Thesaurus Veteris et Novi Testamenti of 1585, were ambitious projects that required him to commission engravings from many of the best Netherlandish designers and engravers of his day. Other artistic families such as the Wierixes and Sadelers, also represented in this exhibition, contributed to these important publications. Although all of Gerard’s fourteen children maintained a connection to the world of art production either by marriage to other artists and dealers or through their own activities, only one – Pieter I – achieved international fame as an engraver. Pieter likely trained with the Wierixes and was also a pupil of Hendrick Goltzius in Haarlem.
In 1595, Pieter traveled to Italy, where, like many young Netherlandish artists, he continued to engrave plates that he sent home to be published. While in Venice, Pieter engraved The Four Temperaments (which he signed “Peter de Jode sculptor in Venetia”), based on designs by Maarten de Vos and published by Crispin de Passe, both of whom had worked for his father. When his older brother, Cornelis, died in 1600, Pieter inherited the workshop and returned to Antwerp. Although he republished some of his father’s plates, he preferred to modernize his stock by commissioning new designs, while also continuing to engrave and produce designs for other publishers.
Pieter’s wife Suzanna Verhulst was related to two prominent artistic families, the Coecke van Aelsts and the Bruegels. Pieter trained their son, Pieter II, who came of age in the era when Flemish painters like Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck sought printmakers who could successfully translate their colorful and painterly canvases into black and white. Rather than the regular, parallel lines with crosshatching employed by his father, Pieter II introduced much finer, irregular lines and more stippling to create subtle variations of tone that evoked the richness of their painted models. A close acquaintance of Pieter I, Van Dyck painted a portrait of the father and son that Pieter II adapted for his self-portrait engraving in Van Dyck’s Iconography of 1632, a portrait series of famous contemporary statesmen and women, scholars, artists, and connoisseurs. Pieter II contributed eleven engravings to the project and went on to specialize in engraved portraits, unlike his father who rarely produced such works.
Pieter II's only son, Arnold, became an engraver in London, where he contributed illustrated plates to Alexander Browne’s Ars Pictoria, an instruction manual for artists published in 1669. This continued a family tradition, since his grandfather, Pieter I, had published the first academic drawing book in Antwerp in 1629. With the death of Arnold in circa 1699 and his father a year later, the De Jode printmaking dynasty came to an end.
GOLTZIUS/MATHAM FAMILY
Hendrick Goltzius was the most talented Netherlandish engraver of his day. Rather than apprenticing with his father, a third-generation painter, he learned his trade from the humanist, writer, and engraver Dirck Coornhert, whom Goltizus depicted in an impressively large portrait. At age nineteen, Goltzius moved to Haarlem with Coornhert and two years later, became stepfather to eight-year-old Jacob Matham when he married the widow Margaretha Jansdr., depicted with a slight smile by her new husband in a tiny, engraved portrait shown here. Goltzius was celebrated for his chameleon-like ability to adapt his technique according to the content, size, and style of the subject, employing bold swelling and tapering lines for large, muscular figures in prints like The Dragon Devouring the Fellows of Cadmus and Commodus as Hercules and fine, delicate strokes for more intimate scenes like The Adoration of the Shepherds. His versatility extended to experiments in color printing, as seen in his chiaroscuro woodcut, Aether. As his fame grew, so did his business acumen. While the most fashionable painters in Europe clamored to have Goltzius reproduce their designs in print, he brought the entire print production process under his own roof, designing prints to be executed by his talented team of assistants, and publishing them on his own press.
Goltizus’s stepson, Jacob Matham, was one of his many pupils in Haarlem. The Four Seasons was designed by Goltzius and was Matham’s first set of independently signed works. The contrasting physiques of lean, muscular Summer and stocky Autumn symbolize the ages of man in the prime of youth and in the fullness of middle age. Both are “classic Goltzius” in their sensuality of form and precision of engraving, revealing Matham’s allegiance to his stepfather’s style. During Goltzius’s travels to Italy in 1590–91, Matham ran the large workshop. When Goltizus abandoned engraving in favor of the more prestigious medium of painting at the end of the decade, Matham officially took over the publishing house. In addition to making engravings after his own designs and those of other Netherlandish and Italian artists, Matham continued to work after designs by Goltzius, as in his large Saint Luke Painting the Virgin. After his stepfather’s death, he inherited the workshop and its inventory and published several plates that, for unknown reasons, Goltzius had never printed, including the unfinished Adoration of the Shepherds.
Matham had four sons, two of whom he trained as engravers: Adriaen and Theodor. The social and economic ascendance of the dynasty established by Goltzius continued through the third generation. Adriaen was a member of Haarlem’s civic guard, as portrayed in a painting by Frans Hals in 1627. He also made engravings after Hals’s portraits and traveled as a member of the Dutch delegation to the King of Morocco in 1640. When Jacob died in 1631, all the workshop’s plates seem to have been sold and his sons looked further afield. Theodor was active in Paris and Rome, where he produced plates of antique statuary for the illustrated catalogue of the Giustiniani Collection. Since more than twenty artists were involved in this publication (including Cornelis Bloemaert), Theodor must have been directed to adopt a uniform “house style” that differed from his training in the Goltizus/Matham manner. His engraving of Apollo with the Head of Marsyas reflects this new approach, with a figure constructed of relatively few lines and minimal crosshatching. Both brothers also contributed to print projects in The Hague and Amsterdam, cities that eclipsed Haarlem as printmaking centers in the seventeenth century.
SADELER FAMILY
With ten engravers active in more than seven European cities, the multigenerational Sadeler family of artists was the largest and most geographically diverse of its day. Prints by three of its most successful members are on view in this exhibition. Jan I and Raphael I came from a family that produced armor, a profession with metalworking skills that were transferable to engraving. The brothers began their careers in Antwerp, the printmaking capital of the Netherlands, which was also the epicenter of conflict between the occupying Spanish forces and the local populace. Political and economic uncertainties spurred the brothers to leave Antwerp in the 1580s and they each traversed Europe in search of opportunity, ultimately working in Cologne, Frankfurt, Mainz, Munich, Venice, Verona, Florence, Rome, and Prague. Jan and Raphael were known for their portraits and reproductions of figural and landscape scenes by other artists, exemplified in the engraved series Skills of a Prince, to which they each contributed three plates. The two artists matched their engraving styles so perfectly that their individual plates are distinguishable only by their signatures.
Trained by Jan I, Aegidius II surpassed his uncles in both skill and fame, earning the title of imperial engraver to three Hapsburg emperors. After traveling extensively in Italy and engraving after designs by many celebrated Italian artists, he spent the rest of his career at the imperial court in Prague. There, he engraved portraits of high-ranking officials, including Emperor Rudolph II and the Persian ambassador Mechti Kuli Beg. Sadeler renders the foreign diplomat’s ornamented cloak, elaborate headdress, and facial features with finely detailed burin work and captions the image with a Persian inscription. In a display of his technical versatility, his Three Marys Returning from the Tomb is a brilliant interpretation of a painting by the emperor’s court artist, Bartholomaeus Spranger, whose exaggerated forms Aegidius II aptly translates into mesh-like, swelling lines. Narcissus is an example of Aegidius II’s work after his own designs, and was published by Marco Sadeler, who was either Aegidius II’s brother or his nephew.
CUSTOS FAMILY
Dominicus Custos descended from an artistic dynasty in Antwerp and, through marriage, he founded a new one in Augsburg, Germany. His grandfather was a sculptor, and his father was a painter, engraver, and publisher who trained Dominicus (one of his ten children) in engraving. At age twenty-one, Dominicus left Antwerp to work for patrons in Austria and Italy before settling in Augsburg in 1588. There, he married Maria Pfeiffelmann, the widow of goldsmith Bartholomäus Kilian I, taking over his predecessor’s workshop and becoming stepfather to three young sons. Custos is credited with introducing copperplate engraving to Augsburg, a city known for its high-quality production of metalwork and scientific instruments. Along with two of his stepsons, Lucas and Wolfgang Kilian and their progeny, the Custos-Kilian workshop and publishing house turned Augsburg into an important center of engraving.
Custos’s Archangel Raphael and his Archangel Gabriel attest to another familial relationship; they are based on drawings by Franz Aspruck, a Brussels-born artist who moved to Augsburg and was related to Custos by marriage. Custos is best known, however, for his many portrait series of historic and contemporary rulers, important families, and leading citizens of Europe. The Kilian brothers continued to dominate these areas of the market, as did Wolfgang’s son, Bartholomäus II. They often followed Custos’s compositional formula of a figure posed within a dark niche, set inside an oval frame, and circumscribed by a larger rectangular frame. Wolfgang’s descendants remained prominent artists in Augsburg through the late eighteenth century.
VISSCHER FAMILY
The brothers Cornelis and Jan de Visscher began their careers in the thriving artistic center of Haarlem during the first half of the seventeenth century. Their father was likely an artist or craftsman since their entry records into the artists’ Guild of St. Luke identify him as a “master.” The eldest brother, Cornelis, quickly gained acclaim for his lively approach to portraiture, collaborating with the acclaimed painter and engraver Pieter Soutman on a series of thirty-eight bust-length portraits of historic counts and countesses of the Netherlands, two of which are on view in this exhibition. Cornelis moved to Amsterdam in the 1650s following a sharp decline in Haarlem’s once booming art market. Recent scholarship has suggested that The Rat Catcher relates to this pivotal moment in the artist’s career. In the first state of the print, the coat of arms of Haarlem, a sword surrounded by six-pointed stars, is visible on the left side of the rat catcher’s arsenic box. In later states, however, Cornelis also includes Amsterdam’s coat of arms on the right side of the box. In this period, both artists and rat catchers were considered tricksters, offering goods they might not actually be able to deliver. This seemingly successful rat catcher can therefore be seen as stand-in for the artist as he seeks commissions in his new city.
Shortly after his move to Amsterdam, Cornelis died at just thirty years of age. Jan quickly sought to meet a growing demand for Cornelis’s work by producing prints in his style and manner; since he had apprenticed with his brother, Jan proved to be an expert imitator. His commemorative image of the Dutch vice-admiral Abraham van der Hulst’s heroic death in battle, for example, effectively perpetuates the Visschers’ significant tradition of engraved portraiture.
CASTIGLIONE FAMILY
Born in the thriving artistic center of Genoa, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione studied with the Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck during their Italian sojourns and developed a distinctive approach to landscape in both painting and etching. In Finding of the Bodies of Saints Peter and Paul, for example, he confines the apocryphal narrative to a third of the image, instead highlighting the cavernous space that envelops the two apostles’ bodies. Contrasting areas of dense mark-making with open passages of scrawling line work, he etches in a sketchy, almost improvisational manner that is well suited to the representation of natural forms. Giovanni Benedetto’s talent for creating dynamic landscapes extends to his engaging depictions of animals, reflecting his special interest in Flemish animal painting. In this oil sketch of Noah Leading the Animals into the Ark, he sensitively portrays the individual creatures as they line up in pairs.
Giovanni Benedetto established a thriving family workshop with his brother Salvatore and son Francesco, who shared his very Genoese fondness for animal imagery. In Salvatore’s Jacob Asking for Laban, the goats and cattle command more attention than the human figures. These animals in the foreground may have been copied from an earlier work by Giovanni Benedetto, leading to difficulty attributing this work within the family workshop. Salvatore was once characterized as the commercial manager of his brother’s more successful artistic career due to the limited number of surviving works signed by him, but the monumentality of the figures in this painting has led scholars to conclude that it is by Salvatore. The Raising of Lazarus is the only print Salvatore ever made and is one of only a few works that he actually signed.
Francesco Castiglione developed a masterful ability to imitate his father’s keen observations of the natural world. While the father and son frequently collaborated on their paintings, A Shepherd and His Flock in a Landscape has recently been reattributed to Francesco alone based on its limited color palette in comparison to that found in his father’s mature work.
VAN DE VELDE FAMILY
Some family relationships are difficult to determine given limited archival information. Long described as cousins in the art-historical literature, Jan van de Velde II and Esaias van de Velde both had familial connections to Antwerp and worked in Haarlem; however, their exact relationship is hard to prove. New research has revealed that Jan van de Velde II was present at the baptism of Esaias’s eldest son in 1614, suggesting a close connection between these two artists in any case.
Jan van de Velde II’s father was a famous calligrapher who produced popular handwriting manuals, and his mother came from a highly successful family of book publishers. Jan apprenticed with the renowned engraver Jacob Matham, whose work is also included in this exhibition. During his training, his father encouraged Jan to develop his own compositions, writing to his son: “Do your best to become a master this year with the burin to draw and engrave that which you might put out yourself, otherwise you would not engrave much and would have to serve others. The art of invention is better than copying or imitating.”
Jan and Esaias’s innovative approaches to the landscape genre proved influential during the seventeenth century. Dilapidated Outhouse demonstrates Jan’s development of an oblong format for landscapes as well as his interest in depicting regional settings. Esaias similarly celebrated the distinctly Netherlandish qualities of the local landscape in his black-chalk drawings. Landscape with a Lighthouse, for example, highlights the low horizon line associated with the Dutch landscape and includes local fisherman along the edge of the sea. This turn toward a more realistic depiction of the region can be seen as a celebration of the recent independence of The Netherlands from Spain.
STELLA FAMILY
Jacques Stella’s father, François, was a painter from the Netherlands who worked in Italy and settled in Lyon, France. His early death, however, meant that Jacques must have begun his training in the workshop of another artist. Like his father, Jacques eventually traveled to Italy, finding success as a court painter in Florence and immersing himself in the study of the classical past in Rome. Children Dancing is a rare, early work in which he fuses the Netherlandish tradition of genre scenes with his own interest in antiquities. Indeed, the nude, merrymaking children would seem to be more at home on an ancient sarcophagus than in a contemporary townscape.
Upon his return to France in1634, Stella received a special appointment as painter to the king, granting him a sizable pension and an apartment and a studio in the Louvre. There, Jacques established a thriving printmaking workshop. Since he had no descendants of his own, he invited his sister’s four children to train with him as collaborators. Notably––and highly unusually for the time––three of them were girls. Jacques died in 1657, shortly after publishing the first of a series of planned print portfolios with his newly established family business. His eldest niece, Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella, took over the workshop and was given the exclusive rights to publish prints after her uncle’s designs, allowing the siblings to remain in their Louvre studio. Pastorales is one such series that, while planned during Jacques’s lifetime, is thought to be Claudine’s invention as no preparatory drawings by her uncle have been identified.
Jacques’ youngest niece, Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella, trained alongside her sisters Claudine and Françoise as well as their brother Antoine. Her etched series, The Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua, builds upon drawings Antoine made of a stucco frieze by the sixteenth-century Italian artist Giulio Romano in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua. Claudine published the series, demonstrating the collaborative nature of the Bouzonnet-Stella family workshop. On the publication’s title page, dedicated to Jean Baptiste Colbert, First Minister of State under Louis XIV, Antoinette depicts Bellona, a Roman goddess of war, protectively leaning over two female figures at the center of the composition. In a possible allusion to the three Bouzonnet-Stella sisters, Antoinette visually recalls both the guidance her eldest sister Claudine provided to the family operation and the difficult position occupied by female printmakers during the seventeenth century.
Introducción
¿Qué tan lejos del árbol cae la manzana? En esta exposición, se analiza la influencia de las relaciones familiares en la producción artística de Europa durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Así como es posible heredar ciertos rasgos, habilidades y recursos de una madre o un padre, tradicionalmente las profesiones también se heredaban. Los artistas solían formarse mediante un sistema de aprendices, en el cual asistían a un maestro hasta que podían demostrar su dominio técnico y abrir su propio taller. En el caso del grabado a buril, los aprendices se instruían en el arte de dibujar, grabar o marcar diseños sobre planchas de cobre, preparar tintas y papel y, en muchos casos, también aprendían a entintar e imprimir las planchas. Dentro de esta estructura económica, era costumbre que los padres formaran a sus hijos (y, en ocasiones, a sus hijas), quienes eventualmente heredarían el taller, el cual incluía bienes como dibujos, herramientas y planchas de cobre.
A Family Affair [Un asunto familiar] cuenta las historias de dieciséis familias de grabadores activas en ciudades europeas, desde Amberes hasta Praga. En algunos casos, las familias parecen haber estado muy unidas artísticamente y haber desarrollado un "estilo propio", hasta el punto en que las obras de cada miembro son casi indistinguibles unas de otras y mantienen, así, su "marca". En otros casos, los miembros de la generación más joven se independizaban, y se aventuraban lejos por toda Europa en busca de nuevos mecenas y de actualizar sus estilos para adecuarlos a los cambios en los gustos (aunque seguían aprovechando la reputación de sus padres). Las planchas de cobre de familiares famosos eran una herencia invaluable que, gracias a la reimpresión, prolongaban los legados de ciertas dinastías de artistas durante varios siglos. A partir de la vasta colección de arte europeo histórico del Blanton, A Family Affair [Un asunto familiar] presenta grabados, dibujos y pinturas creados por algunas de las familias de artistas más fascinantes del continente, obras que revelan patrones de inspiración, rivalidad y cambios en sus fortunas.
Vuelva a visitarnos para ver A Family Affair: Artistic Dynasties in Europe (Part II, 1700-1900), [Un asunto familiar: dinastías artísticas en Europa (Parte II, 1700-1900)], desde el 28 de junio hasta el 7 de diciembre de 2025. Esta instalación, totalmente nueva, recorrerá la evolución de los talleres familiares hasta fines del siglo XIX e incluirá a destacadas familias de artistas, como las de Giambattista y Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Édouard Manet y Berthe Morisot, y James McNeill Whistler y Francis Seymour Haden.
Organización del taller
Muchas de las obras de arte de esta exposición son grabados a buril, y fueron creadas mediante incisiones de líneas en una plancha de cobre con una herramienta filosa llamada buril (grabado) o con ácido (aguafuerte). La división del trabajo inherente al grabado suele involucrar tres fases: (1) la creación de un diseño, (2) el grabado del diseño en una plancha de cobre, con buril o con aguafuerte, y (3) el encargo y la supervisión de la impresión de la plancha. La persona responsable de cada función a menudo está indicada en la plancha con un término en latín (o una versión de su abreviatura) junto al nombre: "invenit (inv.)" para la persona que diseña y "sculpsit (sculp.)" para la que graba con buril o aguafuerte; "fecit (fe.)" cuando el diseñador y el grabador (con buril o aguafuerte) son la misma persona y "excudit (ex.)" para el editor. Algunos artistas asumían las tres tareas, mientras que otros operaban de manera más independiente y trabajaban para diferentes editores. Los editores financiaban el proceso de grabado, así que eran los propietarios de las planchas y determinaban las tiradas de la edición. A medida que crecía la industria de la edición impresa, algunos artistas emprendedores empezaron a encargarse diseños y planchas unos a otros, y también solían comprar y reimprimir planchas más antiguas.