Literature

On May 19 1871 the general association of lecturers in Zurich took the decision to devote the profits made from the academic conferences of the next two years to the expansion of the new engraving collection of the Federal Politechnic, and in particular to permit purchases at the impending auction of the important Schaffhausen collection of Bernhard Keller (1789-1870) to be held at Gutekunst in Stuttgart. The only condition attached to the decision was that the association of lecturers should be included in the series of the Zurich donators. The first proceedings of the commission of control of the Graphische Sammlung, which met on June 5 1871, deal at length with this matter and above all with the financing of the purchases. For this purpose a private guarantee of a sum amounting to the as yet unsecured debts was also decided on. In this way it was possible to save at least a small part of this famous Schaffhausen collection of copper engravings for the as yet young print cabinet of the Federal Polytechnic.

Amongst these precious purchases from the Keller collection are to be found, alongside important works by Hendrik Goltzius and Jan Saenredam, sheets by Jan Swart van Groningen and Dirk Vellert who, together with a series of other Dutch artists, were overshadowed by the better-known art of Lucas van Leyden. The geographical area in consideration comprised the then northern and southern provinces of the Netherlands, which also included parts of Flanders. Mecheln, chosen by Margarete von Oesterreich as the Residenzstadt, was the southernmost artistic centre; Frans Crabbe was to remain linked to this town throughout his life. The northernmost was Amsterdam. An episode which probably served as the trigger for the boom which the trade of copper engraving, little practised until c. 1520, experienced was the journey of Albrecht Dürer in the Netherlands in 1521, a sojourn which was noted in wide artistic circles.

There existed numerous Netherlandish copper engraving workshops, amongst them that of Hieronymus Cock called Aux Quatre Vents. With these was later to associate itself an offer in printing that allowed the workshops to appear almost as image publishing houses. They were in the position always to have works in stock so that they could meet the demand from a wide clientele for devotional images, for landscapes and portraits and also for reproductions of pictorial inventions of well-known contemporary painters - amongst them a certain Pieter Brueghel. Further technical developments, such as the line which widens and thins, the so-called 'taille', by Hendrik Goltzius, were subsequent important discoveries, whose effects were to be felt far into the seventeenth century. The golden age of Dutch printing was later marked above all by the increased use of etching technique, which not only corresponded to Jacob Ruysdael’s intentions for his landscape etchings, but was also to constitute the foundations for Rembrandt’s printing activity.