| 介绍（英） | In his short life, Cornelis Visscher produced nearly 200 engravings, along with numerous finished drawings (mostly portraits) in black chalk on vellum. This sheet, a preparatory drawing on paper for one of the artist’s most celebrated prints (2016.431), is his only certain surviving print design. In its presentation of a woman breastfeeding an infant in the presence of two other children, the image follows a well-established iconography for personifications of Charity (see, for example, 51.501.2273 and, especially, 53.601.16[84]). In its emphasis on the desperate circumstances of the figures—made explicit by the caption accompanying the print—it also bears a close relationship with an allegory of Poverty engraved by Zacharias Dolendo after a design by Jacques de Gheyn II in 1596-97 (49.95.1239). Visscher, however, sheds the allegorical language of such precedents in favor of a naturalistic approach to the figures’ attire and emotional expressions, framing this image of an impoverished woman struggling to feed her family as a scene of contemporary life.
Although looser in execution than his finished portrait drawings, this sheet exhibits the accomplished modeling and the individualized and expressive faces for which Visscher is known. Varying the pressure on the chalk and blending it in places, he renders the folds, creases, and tattered edges of the woman’s dress. A few rapid strokes suffice to detail the patch on her elbow. Horizontal and vertical marks where the drawing was once folded suggest that the sheet originally extended to the right and the top and probably originally included the entire composition of the print. Although the sheet is thoroughly incised for transfer, Visscher continued to revise his design when working on the printing plate, rendering the teeth of the two older children and modifying slightly the facial expression of the nursing infant and the angle at which the eldest boy holds his spoon—precisely the areas he completed last, as indicated by an impression of a proof state of the print (Musée du Louvre, Paris). There are two other drawn versions of the composition, both in the same orientation and with the same cropping as the present sheet and both executed in black chalk on vellum: an authentic sheet in the Musee du Louvre (Paris, 566 DR/ Recto) and a later copy in the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge (1965.218).
(JSS, 7/5/18) |