PIETER SOUTMAN
Haarlem 1580 – 1667 Haarlem
A painter, etcher, engraver, draughtsman and publisher of prints
mainly in Haarlem, Soutman spent a few years, around 1618,
in Antwerp in Rubens’s workshop, either as a pupil or a collaborative assistant.
Rubens nocturne of the Old Woman and Boy with Candles, c1616-17
(now in the Mauritshuis) painted with dramatic chiaroscuro in the style
of Caravaggio and Elsheimer, was a painting he felt to be significant
and kept in his studio for the rest of his life.
Rubens was never an engraver, but it has been thought that he may
have done the preliminary etching on the plate for the reverse copy
of this painting, which he published, finished with the burin by Paulus Pontius,
and certainly closely supervised its production, hand writing on a counterproof
the Latin inscription.
Pieter Soutman’s engraving is a direct copy in reverse of the Rubens/Pontius print,
and thus in the same direction as the original painting.
Soutman repeated Rubens’ Latin ‘caption’ .
Old Woman and a Boy with candles
Ex Hollstein
245 x 193 mm (sheet)
Etching and engraving after Rubens; with Rubens’ name but before the addition
of Soutman’s own name as engraver.
On laid paper with a watermark.
Trimmed to or just into the plate, with plate borders all round.
A small repaired tear in the blank area to the left of Ruben’s name.
Sold
Ex collection Alexander Gibson Hunter of Ballskelly (Lugt 2306)
Ger Luijten found, via Jan Bloemendal, that Rubens’ inscription
was a quotation from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, in which the poet urged
that youthful beauty be employed to the full where love is concerned,
and conjuring the spectre of an old wrinkled woman at night, sorrowfully
looking back over her life and reflecting on the chances of love she had denied.
In the catalogue Mirror of Everyday life Luijten translates it as
Who forbids the taking of light from a light that is set before you.
Even if thousands do so, naught is lost therefrom.
Earlier commentators, not knowing the source of the quotation and connotation,
had connected it to the similar Dutch proverb
“No harm comes to a candle if someone else uses its light”.
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