- Title
- Portrait of Gillis van Breen
- Date Made
- circa 1588
- Medium
- Chiaroscuro woodcut from three blocks
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 8 1/2 × 5 7/8 in. (21.59 × 14.92 cm)
Image: 8 1/4 × 5 3/4 in. (20.96 × 14.61 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.88.91.377
- Collecting Area
- Prints and Drawings
- Curatorial Notes
While little is known about the subject of this printed portrait, Gillis van Breen (c. 1560−after 1602), he appears to have played an important role in the workshop of Hendrick Goltzius, the leading engraver of the early Baroque in Haarlem. Goltzius made three portrait drawings of van Breen between 1588 and 1592. The earliest of these, done in colored chalk and now in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, closely parallels the present print, though it is not a preparatory drawing for it. A sixteenth-century inscription on the verso of another impression of this woodcut, in the Rijksmuseum collection, describes van Breen as Goltzius’s kunstdrucker, or “art printer.” Indeed, van Breen may have been working in this capacity for Goltzius as late as 1599, at which point he set up his own enterprise, producing engravings after the Dutch historian and draftsman Karel van Mander I (1548−1606).
It has been proposed that van Breen was the true creator of this print, but the work’s similarities to other large-scale portraits of artists done by Goltzius in the 1590s support his authorship. It is the only known woodcut portrait by Goltzius. The simplified format—devoid of inscription or background—may be due to his developing familiarity with the medium; equally likely is that the print’s informality reflects a collegial dynamic between artist and sitter.
Claire Spadafora Baes
2025
- Selected Bibliography
- Bartsch, Adam von. The Illustrated Bartsch. New York: Abaris Books, 1978.
- Strauss, Walter L. Hendrik Goltzius: The Complete Engravings and Woodcuts. Abaris Books: New York, 1977.
- Hollstein, F. W. H. Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1450-1700. Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1949.
