Nicolaes de Bruyn (1571--1656) and the art of the professional engraver.
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Nicolaes de Bruyn 1571--1656) produced nearly three hundred prints in the fifty-eight years between his first dated engraving of 1592 to his final dated work of 1650. He had begun his training in Antwerp, where he was born, and was active in that city until 1617, when he moved from the southern, Catholic Netherlands to the northern, Protestant city of Rotterdam. Early in his career, de Bruyn produced small-scale, mostly serial works after his own designs and after the leading print designer of the day, Marten de Vos. After 1600, de Bruyn spent the next five decades honing his specialty as he produced startlingly large-scale engravings depicting forest landscapes. He initially engraved prints after some of the most famous landscape painters of the day, Gillis van Coninxloo and David Vinckboons. By around 1607, however, he had turned away from copying other artists compositions to designing his own engravings. Furthermore, aside from a few early mythological and genre scenes, the vast majority of de Bruyns large engravings after about 1600 depicted religious narratives. De Bruyn has been neglected until this point largely because his life and work often fall between categories established by scholars for studying the history of printmaking. He worked as both a reproductive engraver and an independent designer-engraver at the same time. Because of his work after other artists, de Bruyn has been branded a reproductive engraver, and he appears almost exclusively in scholarship that deals with the work of the painters or print designers of his reproductive engravings. Furthermore, because he made both large-scale, single-leaf landscapes and small-scale, serial prints, reconciling his early and late work presents a challenge. Finally, de Bruyn worked as a professional engraver during a time when our attention has focused on painter-printmakers in general, and on painter-etchers in particular. To his contemporaries and on the market, however, de Bruyn was a printmaker with a distinctive niche, with little competition. Few printmakers after the 1620s regularly made large-scale landscape prints and none did so in such a sustained manner as de Bruyn.