Rubens

Another find at the church at Totnes, this time an engraving of a painting, 'The Elevation of the Cross', by Rubens. One point of interest being that the engraving by Withoue was more or less contemporary with the painting, properly a triptych, so an antique in its own right from the first half of the seventeenth century. The engraver was one of a number trained by the man himself to do full justice - in so far as the change of medium allowed - to his paintings. Full justice presumably including full commercial exploitation.

And according to the ticket, including the novelty of adding warmth by mixing passages of engraved lines with passages of etched lines. I supposed the latter to be rougher and broader than the former, but I would need a proper cognoscenti on hand to point out how all this worked out on the paper.

But I can say that the engraver was lazy to the extent of not bothering to reverse the image, so what you see here is the mirror image, left to right, of the original. Odd, considering that the engraver already had to do a fair bit of extra work anyway to get the huge painting, of 5 by 7 meters when fully open, down to something which could be managed by an engraver.

BH was able to trump my arty comments by pointing out that she had seen the original, at the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, when she was in town with FIL, in the margins of a visit to the flowers of the Keukenhof Gardens, a little way up the road.

Further researches today yield two more factlets. First, the people at Totnes have got the name of the engraver slightly wrong, properly Hans Witdoeck not H. Withoue. Second, Rubens painted the cartoon noticed at reference 1, somewhat different from the original painting, for the engraver to work from. And now that it has been said, it is clearly much easier to work from a copy in your own studio than have to go back and forth to the church who had paid for the painting and who wanted it up behind their altar, not lurking in some studio.

With the bonus that Rubens himself did the extra work mentioned above by painting a cartoon of much reduced size, pretty much, I imagine, to that of the engraving. Complicated business this art history - so maybe all those dim Sloanes who use to do it had not chosen the soft option after all.

See also reference 2, which includes a handsome photograph of the painting in its intended setting.

Reference 1: http://archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/projects/rubens/exhibition/designs4detail2.html.

Reference 2: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/monarchy-enlightenment/baroque-art1/flanders-1/a/rubens-elevation-of-the-cross.

Group search key: tna.