The rat catcher

The city of Haarlem prospered in the 1600s and fostered an important and diverse artistic community. Cornelis Visscher was one of the city's most celebrated and prolific portrait draftsmen and printmakers. His portraits were ambitious: Visscher frequently worked on a large scale and created highly finished likenesses in black chalk on luxurious vellum. This distinctive, polished approach to portraiture influenced many of Visscher's Haarlem colleagues including Dirk Helmbreker and Cornelis Bega, the latter also represented in Te Papa's collection.

Visscher was only active as an artist for about a decade. He probably studied with Pieter Soutman, a pupil of Rubens, and in 1649 he made numerous portrait engravings, which Soutman supervised. A year later, Visscher is believed to have set up on his own and several years later, he joined Haarlem's Guild of St. Luke. Although he died in his early thirties, Visscher created nearly two hundred prints and a large number of drawings. Many of these works are portraits, but Visscher did not limit himself to a single genre and produced accomplished animal studies - as here - landscapes, and allegorical scenes based on his own designs or inspired by the work of other artists.

The rat catcher is evidently an original low-life genre work drawn and engraved by Visscher, which was sufficiently memorable and popular to be reprinted as a mezzotint by Richard Houston in London just over a century later. The Latin inscription can be idiomatically translated by using its English counterpart in Houston's print: 'Observe the subtle blade with aspect grimm/ Which is the grimmest pray - his dog or him?/ His drole assistant too surveys with glee/ Then say - which is the oddest of the three?'

Sources:

British Museum Collection Online, 'The rat catcher', https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3349636&partId=1&subject=16345&page=1

Getty Museum, 'Cornelis Visscher', http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/19002/cornelis-visscher-dutch-about-1629-1658/

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   March 2019