Printing plate for Untitled (copy after Anthony van Dyck portrait of Frans Snyders and his wife)

This copper printing plate was made for the portrait etching of the famous Flemish animal and hunting painter Frans Snyders (1978-0045-1). It was made by New Zealand artist and longtime director of the National Art Gallery, Stewart Maclennan (1903-73), and is a real rarity in Te Papa's collection. It shows Maclennan's reverence for the past, his technical prowess and his refusal to be bothered by the inferior status of a copy - all of which are totally alien to contemporary art practice.

It is influenced by two works: firstly, van Dyck's famous double portrait painting of Snyders and his wife (1621; Museumslandschaft Hessen, Kassel), as indicated in an inscription on the support of Te Papa's impression, although Margaretha Snyders has obviously been omitted, and secondly van Dyck's portrait etching of the artist. The latter is one of the 18 original prints by van Dyck for what became the vast and  Iconography series of portraits of famous people, especially artists, which continued in production long after van Dyck's death in 1641. Maclennan is far more indebted to the early vignetted and deliberately incomplete states of the etching than to its later revisions where it was given a highly wrought finish by the engraver Jacques/Jacobus Neeffs.

See:

Fitzwilliam Museum, 'Frans Snyders...', https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/vandyck/biographies/franssnyders2.html

Wikipedia, 'Anthony van Dyck', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_van_Dyck

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   September 2018