Beschreibung:
The engraver Jacob Matham and the debating chambers of Harlem. The engraver Jacob Matham (Harlem, 1571-1631) took over the Harlem atelier of his father by adoption, Hendrick Goltzius, in 1598. His rapid and successful integration into the town’s circles of notables and intellectuals is attested by several emblems, often inspired by motifs of Goltzius or Karel van Mander. These emblems were commissioned by the town’s leading debating chambers — De Witte Angierken, the Pelicanists and the Wijngaarddranken — or were festive engravings for the Christmas guilds of Saint Hubert and Saint Jacques. These pious, allegorical compositions, along with a curious, unpublished religious engraving made up of pictographic signs, are characteristic of the social and emblematic life of Holland during the first third of the seventeenth century.