Sir Martin Conway divided his book into three parts, the first giving the history of the woodcutters, the second a catalogue of the cuts, and the third a list of the books containing them. Putting on one side the blocks imported or directly copied from France and Germany, he attributes the illustrations in fifteenth century Dutch books to some five-and-
twenty different workmen and their apprentices. His first group is formed of—
(i.) A Louvain woodcutter who worked for John and Conrad de Westphalia, for whom he cut two capital little vignette portraits of themselves, and for Veldener, for whom he executed the nine illustrations in an edition of the Fasciculus Temporum, published on December 29, 1475.
(ii.) A Utrecht woodcutter, whose most important works are a set of cuts to illustrate the Boeck des gulden throens, published by a mysterious printer, Gl., in 1480, some additional cuts for a new edition by Veldener of the Fasciculus Temporum, and a set of thirty-nine cuts, chiefly on the life of Christ, for the same printer's Epistolen ende ewangelien of 1481.
(iii.) A Bruges woodcutter, possibly the printer himself, who illustrated Colard Mansion's French edition of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (1484); and
(iv.) A Gouda woodcutter, by whose aid Gerard Leeu started on his career as a printer of illustrated books with the Dialogus Creaturarum (of which he printed six editions between June 3, 1480, and August 31, 1482), and the Gesten van Romen, Vier Uterste, and Historia Septem Sapientum.
Of these books, whose illustrations are grouped together as all executed in pure line work, the most interesting to us are the Metamorphoses and the Dialogus. The former is handsomely printed in red and black in Mansion's large type, and has
seventeen single-column cuts of gods and goddesses and as many double-column ones illustrating the Metamorphoses themselves. The larger cuts are the more successful, and are certainly superior to the average French work of the day, to which they bear a considerable resemblance. Uncouth as they are, they were thought good enough by Antoine Vérard to serve as models for his own edition of 1493. The Metamorphoses, Mansion's first illustrated book, was also the last work issued from his press; and part of the edition was not published till after his disappearance from Bruges. The hundred and twenty-one cuts in Leeu's Dialogus Creaturarum are the work of a far more inspired, if very child-like, artist. With a minimum of strokes the creatures about whom the text tells its wonderful stories are drawn so as to be easily recognisable, and we have no reason to suppose that the humour which pervades them was otherwise than intentional.
We come now to the best period of Dutch illustration, which centres round the presses of Leeu at Gouda and Antwerp, and of Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem, whose business was probably only a branch of Leeu's. During his stay at Gouda, Leeu commissioned an important set of sixty-eight blocks, thirty-two of which were used in the Lijden ons Heeren of 1482, and the whole set in a Devote Ghetiden, which Sir Martin Conway conjectures to have been published just after the printer's removal
to Antwerp in the summer of 1484. Fifty-two of them were used again, in conjunction with other cuts, in the Boeck vanden leven Christi of Ludolphus in 1487, and the history of many of them can be traced in other books to as late as 1510. Thus they were evidently popular, though neither their design nor their cutting calls for much praise. Another set of seven cuts, to each of which is joined a sidepiece showing a teacher and a scholar, appears in Leeu's last Gouda book, the Van den Seven Sacramenten of June 19, 1484, and evinces a much greater mastery over his tools on the part of the engraver. The little sidepiece, which was added to bring the breadth of the cuts up to that of Leeu's folio page (5½ in.), is particularly good.