Times of Day/ Aurora

Jan de Visscher (c. 1636-before 1712) was a Dutch Golden Age printmaker who became a painter in later life. According to Arnold Houbraken, the great early biographer of Dutch artists, he was an able etcher who made famous prints in his lifetime after the works of Nicolaes Berchem (as here), Jan van Goyen, Adriaen van Ostade and Philips Wouwerman. He became an able pupil of the landscape painter Michiel Carrée at the advanced age of 56. Houbraken spoke to Michiel Carrée personally about his art, who claimed that Visscher became as good as he was at Italianate landscapes a;lthough no paintings by Visscher's hand are known today. Jan de Visscher had two brothers, Cornelis Visscher and Lambert de Visscher. Although he spent his earlier life in Haarlem, he was registered in Amsterdam in 1692. His death was not recorded, and since he is referred to in the past tense when Houbraken was writing, he is assumed to have died before 1712.

This engaving/etching is from the Times of Day, after Nicolaes Berchem. Te Papa owns a complete set of four. The first in the series, it depicts dawn and features an entertaining cast of characters, both human and animal in a countryside setting. A peasant saddles his donkey with a bell around its neck, with a horned cow watching nearby. On the left, a blacksmith struggles to put a shoe on the hind foot of a donkey watched by a peasant woman carrying her child. A cave doubles up as the blacksmith's forge. A group of sheep and a donkey are all seated contentedly in the foreground.

See: Wikipedia, 'Jan de Visscher', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_de_Visscher

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    April 2019