Backhuysen’s etchings are later than Zeeman’s, being all produced in 1701, when the artist was seventy years old,[9] and seven years before his death at Amsterdam. A pupil of Everdingen, he had soon risen to fame and was employed or sought after by many foreign princes, including the Tsar Peter the Great; and from over much production his work suffered.
The etchings, however, though produced so late in life, are neither languid nor feeble. In freshness and vivacity they excel Backhuysen’s drawings. It is the same with Zeeman: probably because the etching-needle has so much more capacity for giving the crispness of foam and the sharp lights of running waves, than pencil and sepia. No one, till Turner came, succeeded at all in painting the mass and weight of water as the tides move it in deep seas; but the easily agitated, breezy motion of the shallow Dutch waters is often suggested with a pleasant freshness by Backhuysen. The best of the etchings is that of the ship under sail, crushing the water under her bows into foam.
X
So far, we have considered only the native school of landscape artists, who took their subjects from Holland and its borders. But towards the end of the sixteenth century there was established in Rome a group of painters from the Netherlands, to which each succeeding generation added new members, whether they settled there for life or stayed only for a few years.
Belonging to this group are a certain number of etchers, deriving originally, in more or less degree, from Elsheimer, and receiving a second and more powerful stimulus from the art of Claude.
Jan van de Velde,[10] it seems probable, spent some years of his manhood in Italy, and perhaps worked under Elsheimer himself. At any rate, a number of his plates are entirely in Elsheimer’s manner. These are so heavily overworked with the burin that they must count rather as line-engravings than as etchings. The burin plays, indeed, a more or less important part in all Jan van de Velde’s prints.
One set, illustrating the story of Tobias, was etched from designs by Moses van Uytenbroeck, an artist who also published a number of plates of his own. Here again is an instance of the traditional chronology being at fault. Uytenbroeck’s birth is usually given as 1600. But Bode has pointed out that there are engravings after his work by an artist who died in 1612. The date must therefore be put back several years. Uytenbroeck is perhaps the nearest to Elsheimer of all his followers. The relation of the figures to the landscape, the curious human types, with their rather stolid, plain faces and heavy gestures, the treatment of Italian landscape, all are intimately akin to the German master’s art.
Elsheimer’s influence still persists strongly in Cornelis Poelenburg, one of the most popular of the Dutch artists in Rome, whose small, smoothly glowing pictures of grottoes and bathing nymphs are familiar in every
Fig. 20.—Road, with Trees and Figures. By Breenbergh. B. 17.