Moving Pearls: 300 years of struggle

Moving Pearls: 300 years of struggle
Jacobs Worstelinge by Jan Janszn Calckman/Kalckman
Published by J. van Poolsum in 1716, Utrecht

In a world in which human existence is constantly changing, it is a permanent struggle leaving behind the old and accepting the new. Letting go of something that is deeply cherished never goes without pain, struggle and suffering. This is not just a contemporary theme, but was already touched on in the old Bible story of Jacob wrestling with God which has inspired many authors over time.


One beautiful example is the small book Jacobs worstelinge[1] written by the devoted Calvinist Jan Janszoon Kalckman (1565-1641) and published in 1716 by J. van Poolsum. This book, exactly 300 years old, relates Kalckman’s account of the old Bible story (Genesis 32:22-32).

To know Jacob’s story is to know that his life was one of never ending struggle. Early in his life, God promised Jacob that he would create not only a great nation through Jacob, but a whole company of nations. This expectation made Jacob a man of fears and anxieties, fearful that this was about to happen at any moment. He was also afraid that his brother would carry out his vow and kill him. Anxious for his life, Jacob concocted a bribe and sent a caravan of gifts along with his women and children across the River Jabbok in hopes of pacifying his brother. Physically exhausted, alone in the desert wilderness, facing certain death, Jacob was divested of all his worldly possessions. He was powerless to control his fate. He collapsed into a deep sleep on the banks of the Jabbok River. He had a vision of two family members who wanted to kill him but he was too spent to struggle any more. However, his real struggle actually began at this point. After fleeing his family history, wrestling with God Himself was a different matter altogether.
  

One night an angelic stranger visited Jacob. They wrestled through the night until daybreak, at which point the stranger crippled Jacob with a blow to his hip that disabled him and left him with a limp for the rest of his life. It was by then Jacob knew what had happened. “I saw God face-to-face, and yet my life was spared” (Genesis 32:30). In the process, Jacob the deceiver received the new name Israel, “He struggles with God.” However, the most important event occurs at the conclusion of that struggle: God “blessed him there” (Genesis 32:29).

The book starts with the “voorreden aan den christelijke lezer” – an introduction to the Christian reader – by J.J. Kalckman. Kalckman attracted a lot of attention with his work Antidotum, tegengift vant gebruyck of ongebruyck vant orgel, which he wrote only one year before his death in 1641. This work was a direct critical response to the work of the Dutch Golden age poet and composer Constantijn Huygens (1596 – 1687), and is a plea against the use of the organ during Christian/religious worship.

But it is Kalckman’s narration of Jacob wrestling with God that Antiquariaat Van der Steur is proud to have in its collection. This very rare book, printed in the smallest letters –  the reader too wrestles through the pages – and vellum covered, celebrates its 300^th year of existence this year. It is a beautiful little book, a true historical treasure. Amen.

Benthe van Houthum
                  

The Masoretic Bible text reads as follows.:

The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Peniel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob's hip on the sinew of the thigh.

— Genesis 32:22-32

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[1] Full title: Jacobs Worstelinge, by forme van t’ Samensprekinge, tusschen Godt ende den armen Sondaer. In Meditatien en Gebeden. Met neerstigheyt by een vergadert.

On the move: finding pearls II: Jewish synagogue Naarden, Two Letters

Jewish synagogue Naarden
Two Letters

In the course of the 17th century, a group of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam settled in Naarden. Naarden was a beloved place for rich Portuguese traders at that time. Initially the Jews came together in a private house to practice their religion. In 1727 the first synagogue, the Esnoga Magen David de Narda, was consecrated in the Gansoordstraat. At first, the dead were buried around Amsterdam but after 1825 the Jews had their own cemetery inside the walls of Naarden. A Star of David on the façade of the building at Kloosterstraat 78 still reminds one of this graveyard.
             In the 19th century, the community of Portuguese Jews was in decline. It was in this period that two letters were written about the Jewish Portuguese synagogue. The first one is by M.C. de Leew and S.L. van Gelder and dated 19 August 1856. In this letter, the writers thank the owners of the Ring synagogue in Naarden for the improvements and beautification that they made possible to the Portuguese synagogue, and they noted that the ‘new’ place of worship will be festively consecrated on the 31^st of August. The second letter, to J. Henriquez de Castro, is written by P. Verkerk Wz on 30 November 1856. This document describes the current state of the restored synagogue. It also includes the payment (?) to the building contractor E.J. Nijkerk and son.  
These letters are true pearls, as documents concerning this synagogue are very rare because of a monstrous act of pride. The Naarden synagogue was closed down in 1933 because of the decreasing number of religious practitioners. Furious at the declining numbers, a man called S. Ph. Heilbron, burnt all the Naarden synagogue’s archives. These two remaining letters, which give an interesting insight in the history of the Naarden synagogue and the Dutch Jewish community, are two of the few documents that survived this horrible deed.    
Click here for more information.

Benthe van Houtum

On the move: finding pearls

 A recognizable situation: you’ve lost something precious and been looking for it for ages. All of the sudden - when you move or clean - it appears again. The joy you feel!
                   It happened with the very special edition of the early eighteenth century book La Babylone demasque’e (1727). 

This almost 300 year old masterpiece is written by Johanna Dorothea Lindenear (1664-1737) and is special in many ways. Besides the remarkable age, it is written by a woman, which is unique for that time. The author is known for her very interesting life story, which influenced this book greatly. Lindenaer, or Johanna Dorothea Zoutelande or Madame de Zoutelandt, was a writer, memoirist and translator from The Netherlands. In 1703 she got arrested in Maastricht. Lindenear was accused of high treason and spying activities in connection to the war of the Spanish succession. A year later she escaped and fled to Paris, where she did her ‘confession of faith’ to the Roman Catholic Church. She also continued professional writing, which she started with describing her memoires while in prison. This combination led to the creation of La Babylone demasque’e. 

La Babylone demasqu’e is written as a letter from a Dutch protestant lady to Miss Van Zoutelande with questions about her devotion to Catholicism. In five lengthy letters she gives extensive answers to all of the questions, which comprises information on various religious factions and many examples from the daily Catholic life.
                  With special attention we pack this book, just like all of our other outstanding works, to reveal it again in The Hague.

For more information about this book, click here 

Benthe van Houtum

 

A fake Potter: history of a small album of prints

The Friesian Horse

In 1652, Paulus Potter (1625-1654) produced a series of five prints of horses in landscapes.^[1] In 1974 Jan Verbeek suggested that these prints represent different seasons, namely spring, late spring, summer, autumn and winter, and that the demeanour and the condition of the animals correspond to the stages in human life.^[2]

The Album

The album in our collection contains remarkable copies of the second and third states of this well-known series by Potter. It is highly likely that these etchings were made by Ignace-Joseph de Claussin (France, 1766-1844). De Claussin was an amateur engraver who travelled through England and the Netherlands. He etched an impressive number of copies – more than 200 – after the most famous Dutch masters in his collection: Rembrandt, Potter, Berchem, Du Jardin. From literature we know that he definitely copied Potter’s Vaches et taureaux.^[3]

 

The Worn-out horse

The album is bound in blue paper, with an annotation on the front: “Vente de Rigal en 1817 (...)” and a note pasted in the doublure with a brief description of the volume in French. These prints are best seen in their original setting, in their frail but at the same time effective binding. The plates however do not follow the order proposed in 1974 by Jan Verbeek. Although he suggested that the prints should have been read as a progression, from the young and healthy horse to the worn-out and dead ones, the album is not in the order as proposed by Verbeek which is: 1) the healthy clean Friesian; 2) the Neighing horse; 3) the Cropped horse; 4) the Plough horse; and finally 5) the Worn-out horse. In the album however, the Worn-out horse is placed between the first two plates and the Cropped horse is located at the end. 

 

The Cropped horse

The symbolism of decay was not taken into consideration in this album. Instead, we think that the copyist arranged the prints according to the order of another album of originals by Potter that he might have seen previously. However, this remains speculation. 

 

The Neighing horse

The etchings are very sharp, so they might be from among the first pressed. Overall the plates are somewhat smaller than the originals, but they preserve the same direction and the copyist carefully transcribed the date and the signature of Potter on each plate. The etcher did his best to copy the originals faithfully, yet his skills did not allow him to obtain the same successful results of Potter. For example in the Neighing horse the head of the animal is very dark and flattened, especially in the neck area. Either the etcher etched too deeply in the plate and his scratches are too close to each other, or he did not know how to handle the mordant and its timing. Similarly, the landscapes in the background suffer de Claussin’s inexperience. Potter was able to create a thick atmosphere between the foreground with scant vegetation beside the horses and the villages in the distance, whereas in the plates by the French master the sense of a three-dimensional space is less perceivable, due to the sharpness of the contours of the houses in the background. 

 

The Plough horse

What is further interesting is that we know that the album was sold at the sale of the Count of Rigal in 1817 as a suite of copies.^[4] In the sale catalogue these prints are praised for their similarity to the originals: it is noted that they preserve the same direction but are smaller in size. 

by Anna Bianco

Ref. nr. 60561

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^[1] Hollstein, F.W.H. Hollstein's Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, Ca. 1450-1700. Vol. XVII. Amsterdam: Van Gendt &, 1976. Print. Andries Pauli (Pauwels) - Johannes Rem. “Series of Horses” 9-13, pp. 216-218. 

^[2] Verbeek, Jan. “Vroege staten van de etsen van Paulus Potter. 1625-1645”. Antiek vol. 10 (1974), pp. 854-861. In the same school of thought is the article by Alexandra Turnbull ‘The Horse in Landscape: Animals, Grooming, Labour and the City in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands’ included in Shift: Queen’s Journal of Visual & Material Culture, no. 3 (2010), pp. 1-24, available online (link).

^[3] Treydel, Renate. "Claussin, Ignace Joseph de" Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon. Berlin, Boston: K. G. Saur. 2015.

^[4]Catalogue Raisonné Des Estampes Du Cabinet De M. Le Comte Rigal. Paris: Chez L'auteur, 1817. Print., lot 635, p. 288-289.

Two 'Vinkenbaan' manuscripts

The delightful past time of catching small birds

There are those dishes that everybody knows, but no one ever had. Perhaps the most famous one is the French delicacy of ortolan, a small bird that has to be eaten completely at once, including the head. It is also famous because eating the dish in the correct way requires wearing a blindfold. The consumption of this cute bird was forbidden by the EU in 1999. The ortolan is a small bird that resembles a finch and was difficult to catch, mostly with nets, which must have been a hectic endeavor. 

 

               In Holland the catching of small birds with nets was popular in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but nowadays it has completely disappeared, little known about and would be very much frowned upon. It was a must for every owner of a larger country house with some land, a ‘buiten’, to have a range where these small birds could be caught. These were called finch-ranges, ‘vinkenbanen’. There were especially many ranges in the dunes area, because this was a natural reserve without any buildings and therefore used by birds to travel along the coast. Because finching was almost exclusively possible in areas that were owned by a landowner, it was the perfect activity for the upper class. Therefore any records of attendees to a finch-range would make excellent cultural-historical information about the upper-class networks of Holland.

               This is exactly what is on offer at Antiquariaat Van der Steur: two very rare books in which the catchings and catchers at a number of finch-ranges are meticulously noted by hand by the owners of the ranges.

               The first book is a large register, bound in vellum, with about 200 written pages. In this Mr. Paulus Cornelis Hoynck van Papendrecht (Dordrecht 1793 - Rotterdam 1877) noted the amount of catches on his finch range at the Weilust estate (probably near Rotterdam), over the years 1840-1858. The manuscript starts with recordings of the number of caught finches per day (3000 to 6000 finches a year). But Hoynck also gives an account of the weather, wind, other caught birds, visitors, etc. Then follow notes on the contruction of the range. The celebrated architect Zocher had designed the Weilust estate, but when Hoynck asked him to do the finch range in 1839, Zocher recommended the expert Manus Lokerman to do the job, who was a fincher himself and his father too.

In the winter of 1839/40 Lokerman made a single 'druip' (open field) finch range, but this was not to the liking of Hoynck, who preferred to have a double range, by example of the famous double range of Jan Bondt (1766-1845) at the Jachtduin estate in Bloemendaal. Lokerman followed the wishes of his client.
The manuscript ends with lists of friends and acquaintances, who were given 25 to 50 finches per year as a gift, to take home as a pet or for consumption.

               The other book is a 19th century copy of a part of the manuscript of Cornelis van Lennep’s Fasti fringillares, a two volume manuscript book on the finching practice, also with numbers of caught birds (Van Lennep family archive 104-105). However, this copy has additional information up to 1850 with catch numbers of the ranges Jagtduin, Spaarnberg, Elswout, Watervliet, Huis te Bloemendaal, Manpad, Saksenburg, Roos en Beek, Duinlust, Boekenrode en Weilust.

               Together these books contain valuable information about the practice of finching, an activity that had a firm role in daily life and is completely faded away from memory. Moreover, it shows us who visited who and what amount of finches they were given by the host. There is really no comparison to this in our current times.


by Hugo Rijpma

B2284

Antiqbook:
http://www.antiqbook.com/search.php?action=search&l=nl&searchform=antiqbook&o=steu&action=search&l=nl&catalog=&author=&title=&year=&century=&keyword=&since=&sBn=&full=vinkenbaan

Source: Matthey, Ignaz. Vincken moeten vincken locken, Vijf eeuwen vangst van zangvogels en kwartels in Holland. Hollandse Studiën 39. Verloren, Hilversum, 2002.

How the raven became a gentleman: the evolution of the fable of the fox and the raven in book illustrations

Gustave Doré in: De Fabelen van La Fontaine, 1895

J. Punt in: Fabelen van J. De la Fontaine, 1805

Practically everybody knows the story of the tortoise and the hare. The overconfident hare that decides to take a nap in the middle of a running contest, while the slow but modest tortoise follows through and finally wins the competition. A story that teaches us that slow but certain is better than fast and improvident and that teaches us morals about how to behave well in society.

These fables find their roots in the sixth-century before Christ. It is thought that they were written by the Greek slave Aesop. Although his existence remains uncertain and none of his writings survived, numerous tales credited to him, were gathered across the centuries. Many of the tales are characterized by animals and lifeless objects that speak, solve problems, and have human characteristics.

The representation of fables in pictures has a long history as well. In comparison to other illustrative fashions the fable was a conservative one, which makes the development of the fable illustration a very interesting subject. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century there has been little to none evolution in the way the fables were depicted. To demonstrate this, one can compare different illustrations of the fable ‘the fox and the raven’. In this fable a raven (or sometimes a crow) has found a piece of cheese and decides to eat it on a branch. The fox, who wants it for itself, flatters the bird, calling it beautiful and wondering whether its voice is too. While it starts singing, the cheese falls out of his beak and is eaten by the fox.

J. Gole in: Sinryke Fabulen, 1685

The scene is originally portrayed in the same way over and over again as seen in the small selection of the work by J. Gole, J. Van Vianen and J. Punt. This goes on until the French illustrator and caricaturist J. J. Grandville (1803-1847) gets his hands on the story. Instead of disguising the moral of the story in animal figures, he gives the animals back their human characteristics and places the scene in the spirit of his age. The raven becomes an elite gentleman with his glasses and honorary medal, while the fox is depicted as a mischievous fellow of the lower class.

J. van Vianen in: Ezopische fabelen van Fedrus, 1703

Another innovator of the fable illustration was the French illustrator and painter Gustave Doré (1832-1883). Doré perfectly represented the romantic ideas of his time in his illustrations. 

He did this by depicting the events of the fable in the corner and filling the predominant part of the plate with dark forests and wild cloudscapes, although his picture of the fox and the raven is more conservative than innovative.

J. J. Grandville in: Fables de La Fontaine, 1852

De Rave om hoog op eenen boom gezeten

Zou een stuk kaes, dat zy gerooft had, eten.

Dit zag de Vos, en sprak aldus haer aen:

Wat zytge, o Raef, met schoonheit aangedaen!

Hoe schoon is uw gelaet! hoe schoon uw veren!

Hoe zeer zoud gy elk een betrionferen,

Indien ’t geluk, dat alles overheert,

U midelyk had met een’ stem vereert,

Waer van gy ongelukkig blyft versteken!

De domme Raef begint hier op te spreken.

Maer zy verliest terstond naer lekker aes.

De looze Vos schiet toe, gaet met de kaes.

Voort stryken, en belacht dees grove botheit.

De Rave ziende in ’t einde hare zotheit,

Sprak dus: Ik leer met schade dezen dag,

Dat wysheit meer dan sterkte en kracht vermag.

Ezopische fabelen van Fedrus, 1703, 21-22 pp.



[left] (Probably) J. van Noord, 1791

[right] J. Desandré and W. H. Freeman in: Fables de J. de la Fontaine, 1868

by Sanne Hansler