CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Romeyn de Hooghe: virtuoso etcher

Exhibition: 8 August - 11 October 2009

From the museum website, 24 September

Romeyn de Hooghe was a tireless and endlessly inventive chronicler of the later Dutch Golden Age. Operating at a time when the production of graphic work and books from Dutch publishers was at its pinnacle of volume and variety, De Hooghe produced single-leaf prints, broadsheets, pamphlets, sea charts and maps, and book illustrations, etching well over four thousand plates in all. This exhibition, drawn from the superb collection of De Hooghe scholar Dr. Joseph B. Dallett, illustrates the range of genres De Hooghe made visible, including battle scenes, current events and historical subjects, political and religious allegories, and manuals on law and hand-to-hand combat, ranging in size from tiny pocket books to large broadsheets. In addition to exploring the astonishing detail and versatility of De Hooghe’s etchings, visitors will be able to learn about the manufacture and trade of the paper on which they were printed through a display by paper conservator and seventeenth-century paper expert Tatyana Petukhova LaVine.