Thirty years ago, under the title The Woodcutters of the Netherlands (a little suggestive of a story for boys on life in a Dutch forest) Sir Martin Conway wrote a treatise on the early book-illustrations of the Low Countries, which is still the standard work on the subject, and only needed plenty of facsimiles to make it completely illuminating. Unfortunately in 1884 the process block was still in its infancy, and in the absence of this cheap method of reproduction the book was issued without a single picture. Written some nine years later the present chapter epitomises so much of Sir Martin's treatise as the rather scanty stock of Low Country illustrated books in England enabled me to visualise, and for lack of an intervening pilgrimage to Dutch libraries comparatively little can now be added to it.

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.

After Leeu's removal to Antwerp his activity as a printer of illustrated books suffered a temporary check, and our interest is transferred to the office of Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem, who, after borrowing some of Leeu's cuts for a Lijden ons Heeren, issued in December 1483, in the following February had printed under the name of Der Sonderen troest a Dutch version of the Belial of Jacobus de Theramo. This has altogether thirty-two cuts, the first of which occupies a full page, and represents in its different parts the fall of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve, the Flood, the Passage of the Red Sea, and the Baptism of Christ. Six half-page cuts represent incidents of the Harrowing of Hell, the Ascension, and the Day of Pentecost. The other illustrations at a hasty glance seem to be of the same size (5 in. by 3¾), but are soon discovered to be separable into different blocks, usually three in number. Eight blocks of 2½ in. each, and seventeen of half this width, are thus arranged in a series of dramatic combinations. Thus we are first shown the different persons who answer the citation of Solomon, whose judgment hall is the central block in thirteen illustrations; then the controversy in heaven before Christ as the judge; then scenes in a Royal Council Chamber, &c. Our illustration is taken from the opening of Solomon's Court, with Belial appearing to plead on one side, and Christ answering the summons of the messenger, Azahel, on the other.

In October of the same year, 1484, Bellaert printed an edition of the Boeck des gulden throens, in which four cuts, representing the soul, depicted as a woman with flowing hair, being instructed by an elder, serve as illustrations to all the twenty-four discourses. In 1485 we have first of all two romances, the Historie vanden vromen ridder Jason and the Vergaderinge der Historien van Troyen, both translated from Raoul le FÈvre, and illustrated with half-folio cuts, which I have not seen. At the end of the year came a translation of Glanville's De Proprietatibus Rerum, with eleven folio cuts, of which the most interesting are the first, which shows the Almighty seated in glory within a circle thrown up by a black background, and the sixth, which contains twelve little medallions, representing the pleasures and occupations of the different months. During 1486 Bellaert printed three illustrated books, an Epistelen ende Euangelien, Pierre Michault's Doctrinael des tyts, an allegory, in which Virtue exhibits to the author the schools of Vice, and a Dutch version of Deguileville's PÉlerinage de la vie humaine. The ten cuts in the second of these three books are described by Sir Martin Conway as carefully drawn, the more numerous illustrations in the others showing hasty work, probably produced by an inferior artist.

After 1486 Bellaert disappears, and most of his cuts and types are found in the possession of Gerard Leeu, who, since his removal to Antwerp, had lacked the help of a good engraver. He apparently secured the services of Bellaert's artist, and now printed French and Dutch editions of the romance of Paris and Vienne (May 1487), an edition of Reynard the Fox, of which only a fragment remains, the already-mentioned edition of Ludolphus, for which he used cuts both new and old, a Kintscheyt Jhesu (1488), Dutch and Latin versions of the story of the Seven Wise Men of Rome, who saved the young prince from the wiles of his step-mother, and numerous religious works. At the time of his death, in 1493, he was engaged on an edition of the Cronycles of England, which has on its title-page a fine quarto cut showing the shield of England supported by angels.

In 1485 Leeu had copied (Sir Martin Conway says, 'borrowed,' but this is a mistake) blocks from Anton Sorg, of Augsburg, for an edition of Æsop, and in 1491, in his Duytsche Ghetiden, he employed a set of woodcuts imitated from those in use in the French Horae. Sir Martin assigns these directly to a French wood-cutter, but the work, both in the cuts and the borders, appears to me sufficiently distinctive to be set down rather as an imitation than as produced by a foreign artist. Its success was immediate, and the designs appear in half a dozen books printed by Leeu during the next two years, and in nine others issued by Lieseveldt, their purchaser, between 1493 and the end of the century.

We must now look very briefly at some of the illustrated books printed in other Dutch towns. At Zwolle, from 1484 onwards, Peter van Os issued a large number of devotional works, the cuts in many of which were copied from sets made for Leeu. This, however, is not the case with a folio cut of the Virgin manifesting herself to S. Bernard, which is given as a frontispiece to three editions of the Saint's Sermons (1484, &c.), and is of great beauty. At Delft, Jacob van der Meer also copied Leeu's books; in 1483 he produced an original set of illustrations to the ever-popular Scaeckspul of Jacobus de Cessolis, and three years later, a Passionael, with upwards of ninety cuts, which were used again and again in more than a score of similar works or editions. He was succeeded by Christian Snellaert, who, in 1491, endeavoured to imitate Leeu's French cuts in an edition of the Kerstenen Spieghel. John de Westphalia continued to work at Louvain until 1496, but his illustrated books were few and unimportant. At Gouda, Gotfrid de Os, after borrowing blocks from Leeu, when the latter had departed for Antwerp, issued a few books with woodcuts, notably the romance of Godfrey of Boulogne (Historie hertoghe Godeuaerts van Boloen), and Le Chevalier DÉlibÉrÉ by Olivier de Lamarche, with sixteen large and very striking woodcuts, which have been reproduced in facsimile by the Bibliographical Society from the reprint issued about the end of the century at Schiedam.

At Deventer, Jacobus de Breda and Richard Paffroet, from 1486 onwards, printed a large number of books with single cuts, none of any great importance. In the last decade of the century, Hugo Janszoen commissioned several sets of crude religious cuts, while the illustrated books issued at Antwerp by Godfrey Back, who had married the widow of an earlier printer, Mathias van der Goes, do not seem to have been much better. This decline of good work Sir Martin Conway attributes chiefly to the influence of the French woodcuts introduced by Leeu. 'The characteristic quality,' he says, 'of the French cuts is the large mass of delicately cut shade lines which they contain. The workmen of the Low Countries finding these foreign cuts rapidly becoming popular, endeavoured to imitate them, but without bestowing upon their work that care by which alone any semblance of French delicacy could be attained. From the year 1490 onwards, Dutch and Flemish cuts always contain large masses of clumsily cut shade. The outlines are rude; the old childishness is gone; thus the last decade of the fifteenth century is a decade of decline.'

When we pass from the illustrations to the other decorations in early Dutch books, we find that large borders of foliage, boldly but rather coarsely treated, were used by Veldener in his Fasciculus Temporum of 1480, and in Gerard Leeu's edition of the Dyalogus Creaturarum the following year. Veldener's is accompanied by a fine initial O, in which the design of the border is carried on. Leeu's page contains a rather heavy S, and the woodcut of the faces of the sun and moon.

In 1491, as we have seen, Leeu printed a Psalter of the Blessed Virgin, by S. Bernard, in imitation of the French Horae. This has very graceful little floral borders in small patterns on grounds alternately black and white. After Leeu's death, they passed into the possession of Adrian van Lieseveldt, who used them for a Duytsche Ghetyden in 1495.

The most noteworthy initial letters are the five alphabets, printed in red, used by John of Westphalia. In the smallest the letters are a third of an inch square, in the largest about an inch and a quarter. This and the next size are picked out with white scroll-work, somewhat in the same way as Schoeffer's. Peter van Os at Zwolle used a large N, four inches square, with intertwining foliage. He had also a fount of rustic capitals, almost undecipherable. Leeu, besides his large S, had several good alphabets of initials. A very beautiful D, reproduced by Holtrop from the Vier Uterste (Quatuor novissima) of 1488, is much the most graceful letter in any Dutch book. No other initials of the same style have been found. Eckert van Hombergh also had some good initials, in which the ground is completely covered with a light floral design. Gotfrid van Os at Gouda, M. van der Goes at Antwerp, Jacob Jacobsoen at Delft, and Lud. de Ravescoet at Louvain, were the chief other possessors of initials, the use of which continued for a long time to be very partial.

Several of the devices of the Dutch printers are very splendid. The borders which surrounded the unicorn of H. Eckert van Hombergh and the eagle of Jacob Bellaert give them special magnificence. The Castle at Antwerp was used as a device by Gerard Leeu, and subsequently by Thierry Martens, and a printer at Gouda placed a similar erection on an elephant, perhaps as a pun between howdah and Gouda. Peter van Os at Zwolle had a large device of an angel holding a shield; M. van der Goes at Antwerp a still larger one of a ragged man flourishing a club, while his shield displays a white lion on a black ground. Another Antwerp printer, G. Back, used several varieties of bird-cages as his marks, in one of which the Antwerp castle is introduced on a shield hanging from the cage. Several printers—e.g. Colard Mansion at Bruges, Jacob Jacobsoen at Delft, and Gerard Leeu at Gouda, contented themselves with small devices of a pair of shields braced together. Leeu, however, while at Gouda, used also a large device of a helmeted shield supported by two lions.