Meredith Hale

Early Modern Low Countries

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Early Modern Low Countries 3 (2019) 1, pp. 149-151 - eISSN: 2543-1587 149
DOI 10.18352/emlc.95 - URL: http://www.emlc-journal.org
Publisher: Stichting EMLC, supported by Utrecht University Library Open Access Journals | The Netherlands 
Copyright: The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0  
International License.
Review
Henk van Nierop, The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe 1645-1708. Prints, Pamphlets, 
and Politics in the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 
2018, 452 pp. isbn 9789462981386.
The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe is the first book-
length biography of printmaker Romeyn de 
Hooghe, one of the most important artists 
working in the late seventeenth-century 
Netherlands. It brings together research on 
which Henk van Nierop has been engaged 
since 2008, when he edited (together with 
Ellen Grabowsky, Anouk Janssen, Huigen 
Leeflang, and Garrelt Verhoeven) a volume 
of essays, Romeyn de Hooghe. De verbeeld-
ing van de late Gouden Eeuw, accompanying 
an exhibition of de Hooghe’s prints at the 
Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. The 
2008 volume contained contributions from 
nineteen different authors on various aspects 
of De Hooghe’s life and his large oeuvre, 
from book illustrations and political sat-
ires to designs for stained-glass windows 
and paintings. Two essays in that volume, 
those by Anna de Haas and Inger Leemans, 
 considered De Hooghe’s biography, as have 
earlier studies such as those by Jeanine Otten (1988) and William Harry Wilson (PhD 
diss., Harvard University, 1974). Van Nierop’s study, however, is the first comprehensive 
examination of De Hooghe’s life. It is a substantial history that is also eminently readable.
The book is divided into fourteen chapters which guide the reader through De Hooghe’s 
life from his baptism in Amsterdam’s Zuiderkerk on 10 September 1645 to his burial in 
Haarlem’s St Bavo’s Church on 15 June 1708. Each chapter is helpfully subdivided, which 
serves to highlight the most important events in each phase of De Hooghe’s life and allows 
for easy reference. As one might expect, Van Nierop tackles his subject chronologically, 
beginning in chapter one with a discussion of the printmaker’s family. These relationships, 
both historical and contemporary, are usefully organised in family trees and tables, and 
the author demonstrates their significance in his analysis both of De Hooghe’s personal 
Review 150
fortunes and the artist’s crafting of his own ‘persona’. Chapter two charts De Hooghe’s 
emergence as a printmaker and discusses some of his earliest works, among them news 
sheets such as The Peace Negotiations at Breda (1667) and book illustrations including his 
annual frontispieces for Hollandse Mercurius, first issued in 1670. Here the author fleshes 
out the little-known circumstances surrounding De Hooghe’s trip to Paris in 1668 and 
provides important new information on his contacts at the French court. Chapter three 
is devoted to De Hooghe’s significant output during the rampjaar of 1672 and the estab-
lishment of his studio as one of the most important in the contemporary print market. 
Chapter four introduces the first of a series of scandals in which De Hooghe would become 
embroiled over the years. This discussion revolves around the 1681 publication of a novel, 
Het wonderlijk Leeven van’t Boulonnois hondtje (The Curious Life of the Bolognese Dog), 
in which the printmaker was accused of theft, fraud, and sexual deviance. In chapters five 
and six Van Nierop charts De Hooghe’s move to Haarlem, his establishment of a draw-
ing school, and his prints on the subject of the Glorious Revolution. Chapters seven and 
eight are devoted to the political satires, and in chapters nine, ten, and eleven, Van Nierop 
returns to the question of scandal with his thorough and enlightening discussion of the 
so-called Pamphlet War of 1690. Chapters twelve and thirteen examine De Hooghe’s later 
life, from his various positions in Haarlem government and running of a spy network to 
his work for William iii as an artist and as the director of the Lingen Quarries. De Hooghe’s 
final years are considered in chapter fourteen. This is the period after William iii’s death 
in 1702, when the printmaker turned his hand to writing, producing the political and legal 
treatise Spiegel van Staat (1706-1707) and Hieroglyphica (1708), a study that purported 
to be an instruction manual on the use of ancient emblems, but which Van Nierop sees 
as a medium through which De Hooghe expressed his ‘mature thinking on religion’. Van 
Nierop also resolves a range of long-standing questions in the literature, for example the 
question of whether De Hooghe studied with the radical philosopher Franciscus van den 
Enden (Van Nierop determines that he did not); and his purported ennoblement by the 
Polish king (he was not ennobled but was given the rank of servitor, which was commonly 
bestowed upon court artists).
Van Nierop makes clear that his goal with this study was not to produce a catalogue rai-
sonné. He writes: ‘This biography does not follow the typical “The-Man-And-His-Work” 
path. […] In focusing on De Hooghe’s life, I have discussed his art only when it seems 
to bear direct relevance to his biography’ (28). There are, without question, a plethora of 
difficulties to sort out in providing a narrative account of De Hooghe’s life, but for the 
art-historian, the discussion of his work – which is, after all, De Hooghe’s chief claim to 
our attention – may seem thin and rather patchy. The author’s primary interest is emphat-
ically in the life of the artist and his thesis begins to take shape in the discussion of De 
Hooghe’s early years in which he asserts that much of the artist’s activity, both personal 
and professional, extended from a desire to ‘improve his lot […], to overcome the  confined 
conditions of his childhood and achieve the cultural, social, and financial level of his well-
off De Hooghe relatives and his former class-mates at the Latin School’ (48-49). In this 
sense, Van Nierop strays from the strictly ‘what’ of De Hooghe’s biography into the ‘why’, 
the rather more speculative arena of psychobiography which entails the exploration of 
the subjective origins of an individual’s public actions. With De Hooghe, there is much 
Review 151
to recommend this approach and Van Nierop devotes four chapters (4, 9, 10, and 11) to 
the events that provide the most potential insight to the printmaker’s ‘inner experience’. 
Indeed, Van Nierop manages the mass of relevant material constituting the Pamphlet 
War beautifully, not only incisively conveying the complex content of the individual pam-
phlets, but also creating a coherent narrative of the unfolding dispute between De Hooghe 
and Amsterdam, which was played out in the public arena and to which De Hooghe made 
infamous contributions.
Van Nierop is not only concerned with elucidating the nature and circumstances of 
the conflict between Romeyn de Hooghe and certain of the Amsterdam regents, he is also 
intent on determining the veracity of the claims against De Hooghe. Indeed, in the book’s 
conclusion, he analyses the evidence for and against the various accusations. He dismisses 
the more outlandish allegations made in the libels and pamphlets as ‘fake news’ and ‘an 
early version of infotainment’ but argues that the attestations published in Memorie van 
Rechten (Memorandum of Rights) must be taken more seriously (414). For those behav-
iours he deems to be possible or even probable (such as theft), he seeks to identify De 
Hooghe’s motives. For example, with respect to the ‘motives behind his cheating’, Van 
Nierop asks: ‘Was it pure greed and lust for money, as contemporaries believed? Was it 
part of his life project of escaping the straightened circumstances of his youth? Or did he 
suffer from kleptomania, a clinical affliction? Was he in it for the money, or for the excite-
ment of the act of stealing, followed by relief if he was successful? Was it a combination 
of these motives?’ (415) Van Nierop’s conclusion is that ‘the verdict of the historian must 
therefore be that most of the accusations against Romeyn were based on truth’ (416). While 
Van Nierop provides a firm conclusion with respect to the nature of the  printmaker’s life, 
how this information informs an analysis of his work is less clear.
Indeed, making sense of the relationship between De Hooghe’s life and his work is one 
of the goals of this study which is expressed in the book’s introduction and conclusion: ‘In 
spite of De Hooghe’s astonishing and wide-ranging talents, his life was not an unqualified 
success. There was an unbalanced and roguish streak to his character that drove him to 
take vast and unwarranted risks, threatening to destroy his career time and again’ (27); and 
‘in striking contrast to his fame as an artist, he was to remain an example of immorality 
until long after his death’ (411). As an art historian, I would argue that the life and the 
work require no particular connection, especially in the intensely market-driven world of 
printmaking and publishing in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. However, for 
a life as complex and contradictory as that of Romeyn de Hooghe, one could find no better 
guide than Van Nierop, a major scholar in the field of seventeenth-century Dutch studies 
for over thirty years.
 Meredith Hale, Loughborough University/Wolfson College, Cambridge


Henk van Nierop, The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe 1645-1708. Prints, Pamphlets, and Politics in the Dutch Golden Age

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Henk van Nierop, The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe 1645-1708. Prints, Pamphlets, and Politics in the Dutch Golden Age

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