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Overview
Wenceslaus (or Wenzel) Hollar (1607-77) was an Anglo-Czech artist, and one of the greatest and most prolific printmakers of the 17th century. His art reveals his immensely wide subject range, and reflects the priorities of his time: religion, mythology, satire, landscapes, geography and maps, portraits, women, costumes, sports, natural history, architecture, heraldry, numismatics, ornaments, title-pages and initials.
Between 1636 and 1644 Hollar was employed as an artist and cataloguer in the household of Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel, one of the greatest art collectors of his era. The Earl, a victim of the English Civil War, fled overseas and died in 1646; Hollar himself moved with his family to Antwerp in 1644. The return of political stability led to Hollar's own return to London in 1652, where he lived and worked until his death.
This complete series of twelve plates was etched and published in Antwerp in 1646, and is based on drawings made in England before Hollar left the country. Musacarum, scarabeobrum & vermiumque... (Of flies, beetles and worms) was almost certainly based on a set of coloured drawings in the Arundel Collection, as the Latin inscription on the title page indicates, rather than on actual specimens. But it also seems possible that the series is a medley of observations made from life and on existing drawings: the furry caterpillars in one of the plates could not have been preserved.
Such natural curiosities formed part of the cabinets of many collectors; Lord Arundel was certainly not the first. The tradition of depicting butterflies and insects was also well established, and the marginalia of late medieval illuminated manuscripts doing just this would certainly have been known to Hollar.
These works are etched with the greatest refinement and delicacy of line, emphasising Hollar's all-embracing curiosity towards the world about him, and his compulsion to depict it. Plate 12 ends the series with an attractive array of butterflies, possibly catering to the tastes of the many people who like them but have an aversion to moths, beetles and caterpillars.
See:
http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/tag/wenceslaus-hollar/
Richard T. Godfrey, Wenceslaus Hollar: A Bohemian Artist in England (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1994), p. 131.
Richard Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar 1607-1677 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 335 (no. 2175).
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art June 2017