Visscher and the London Mysteries

A guest post by London Historians member Robin Reynolds.
You can see higher resolution versions of all images in this article in our Flickr space, here. 

Visscher’s view of London has long been a puzzle. If, as many people believe, he never visited the city, how was his panorama researched, and by whom? The further puzzle is why did his neighbour and rival, Ludovicus Hondius, publish the London panorama when Visscher himself was already an established and successful publisher?

We may never know for sure, but perhaps there’s enough, in the many engravings and etchings that he left behind, for us to understand something about the man, and to make a reasonable guess as to how the London engraving was compiled.

Visscher’s London Panorama of 1616

Existing documentation allows us to sketch his life in outline. Son of a shipyard carpenter, he was born in Amsterdam around 1587. So he’s 13 at the turn of the century, and 16 when Queen Elizabeth I dies, to be succeeded by the Stuart King James I.

Visscher marries Neel Floris in 1608, and the following year they buy a house in the city centre, where he bases his studio and publishing operation. So already, aged just 22, he’s a thrusting businessman, originating new work and reviving worn-out second-hand plates sold off by other publishers. (In those days an engraved copper plate was limited to 1,000 prints or so before the grooves faded under the weight of the press. Visscher’s craftsmen would recut the grooves and print off new editions.)

He runs a highly productive workshop up to his death in 1652, and he hands on to his son one of the most successful publishing businesses in Europe.

His own achievements as an engraver are humbling. His series of small landscapes capturing the rural life and scenery of the Low Countries are the subject of academic studies today. He produced posters – for example promoting a lottery to fund an old people’s home. The creation of polders – large-scale drainage and land reclamation projects – began in his time, and he produced maps of the new farmland, in which he promoted the precision of the surveyors’ measurements alongside the quality of his own work.

Dutch countryside by Visscher.

His most profitable line was publishing Reformation bibles, and his most spectacular work is Leo Belgicus, a stunning statement of the defiance of the protestant Low Countries in their long-running and bloody conflict with Catholic Spain.

Then there are his city panoramas. Not many prints survive, but we know that at least 28 came out of the Visscher workshop.

And finally there is his most intriguing line, news pictures.

Together, these works help us to picture the man and to get some measure of his personality.

Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat, where he lived and worked, was the publishing hub of the city, and a shared sense of humour and self-mockery seems to have attached itself to this emerging industry. Hondius names his workshop The Watchful Dog (Hondius = de Hondt = dog). Dancker Danckerts calls his publishing house In Gratitude. Likewise Visscher makes a joke of his own name, adopting as his trademark a fisherman with two rods. The figure appears again and again in different works, so perhaps this image – a cross between Father Christmas and a garden gnome – is how he saw himself.

On the face of it he’s a likeable fellow, referred to fondly in a poem by one of the writers with whom he collaborated:

‘The young should rack their brains
And with great diligence strive for knowledge,
As did Visscher, who teaches in his prints
How one may become a master in this art’

But to judge from his news prints, he’s far from being Father Christmas. He’s a Calvinist activist, supporting the House of Orange in the Dutch Revolt. He produces diagrams and illustrations of battles on land and at sea, and he revels in atrocities perpetrated by the Calvinists against their enemies.

Witness the fun he has over the execution of Hendrick Slatius, an Arminian protestant who plotted to kill the prince of Orange. As the sword falls, Slatius throws up his hands. One is sliced off and the other dangles by a thread. How do we know this? Visscher gives us a grisly close-up. Another image shows the headless torso exposed for the crows high on a wooden plinth. Thoughtfully nailed to the perch beside him is the severed hand.

Visscher produces a veritable comic strip of ensuing events. The body, head and hand are retrieved under cover of dark by friends unknown, and buried decently – albeit secretly – in a farm field. But not for long. The farmer’s plough turns up the coffin, and the bits, including the hand with its distinctive nail-hole, are dragged back to town.

Visscher has a final laugh as the body is reinstated. The clumsy handlers lose their grip, and the headless, naked body slips off its perch and dangles upside down.

That was in 1623. Seventeen years earlier, Visscher produced a news sheet depicting the execution of the Catholic Gunpowder Plotters in what is supposedly St Paul’s Churchyard, London. But, revealingly, the bodies are being chopped and burned by men in Dutch clothing against a Dutch townscape.

So we can say with certainty that in 1606 Visscher didn’t know what London or Londoners looked like. Ergo, he did not make sketches of Elizabethan London three or more years earlier.

The way Visscher went about his 1611 Amsterdam panorama tells us this is a man for the short cut. Rather than row across the river to make his own sketches, he buys the plates of a relatively sparse 1599 Amsterdam panorama by Pieter Bast, adds extra ships and foreground characters, and bish-bosh, we have what is probably his first wide city view.

Amsterdam panorama by Bast.

Amsterdam panorama by Visscher

I think this is further evidence that Visscher wouldn’t have taken time out to go to London, but I also think it’s where Visscher’s involvement in the London project begins.

The London project almost certainly belongs to the publisher, named as Ludovicus Hondius following the recent death of his father Jodocus Hondius. In fact Ludovicus would have been just 14 at the time, so in all probability his mother Colette (of the Van den Keere engraving family) was pulling the strings.

But it’s a solid guess that the idea originated with the late Jodocus, who was familiar with London and had substantial London connections. A Flemish cartographer and artist, Jodocus spent nine years in England, a refugee of the religious troubles in his homeland. In that time he hooked up with, among others, the seafaring hero Francis Drake. Two Drake portraits at the National Portrait Gallery are attributed to Hondius.

It’s possible that when he moved to Amsterdam in 1593, he took with him a sheaf of sketches of London, made from the top of St Mary Overie (today’s Southwark Cathedral). However it’s more likely that he remained in touch with artists in London, and was sent a sketched view, by an acquaintance unknown to us, of the city around the turn of the century.

Either way, nothing is done with those sketches until several years later. Possibly not until after Hondius’s death in 1612. By then Visscher’s Amsterdam panorama is in circulation, and no doubt doing well.

I fancy that at Number 9 Kalverstraat Visscher is thinking it’s time for another city panorama, while a few doors away Mrs Hondius is going through the papers of her late husband. She comes across the London sketches, knocks at Visscher’s door, and a deal is done. She supplies the sketches, Visscher does the engraving, she takes it to market.

Neither of them, evidently, takes much notice of content. That the royal barge is still flying the Tudor flag, 13 years into the reign of the Stuart King James, is neither here nor there. One of them – probably Mrs H – decides that for this first edition, there should be a tract of Latin text, lifted from William Camden’s Britannia, describing London in glorious terms. When the copy falls short, their solution is to drop in a few paragraphs about, of all things, glass-making, taken from Johan Pontanus’s recent History of Amsterdam. Again it doesn’t seem to matter that people might notice.

Visscher London with Latin

Some thirty years after Visscher’s death, the family produced a catalogue of the prints they had on offer. The inventory includes 28 four-plate city panoramas, from Lisbon to Constantinople, Augsburg to Vlissingen, Rome to Cracow.

It seems unlikely that Visscher engraved all of these himself, and still less likely that he researched them in person, on location. But in the world that explorers such as Drake had opened up, there was undoubtedly an appetite for the exotic, and Visscher exploited it to the full.

You can see higher resolution versions of all images in this article in our Flickr space, here. 

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Visscher Redrawn, the brainchild of Robin Reynolds, is a project in which Robin drew a panorama for 2016 from the exact viewpoint of Visscher’s famous 1616 version. Both images are on display at the Guildhall Art Gallery from Saturday 20 February until November. Robin will be speaking at a London Historians evening event at the gallery on 8 March. Over a glass of wine. Event details and booking here.

London panorama by Reynolds, 2016.