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Overview
Anthonie Waterloo (1609–1690) was a Dutch Golden Age landscape etcher and painter. He is thought to have been born in Ryssel, the Flemish name for the modern day city of Lille near the France-Belgium border. As no records of any formal training as an artist have been discovered, he may have been self-taught. Although registered as a painter, he had little success in selling his own canvases and supported himself through his activities as an art dealer in addition to sales of his drawings and prints.
In 1640 he married in Amsterdam and in 1653 he left for Leeuwarden, before moving to Maarssen in 1655 where he lived until 1676. According to Arnold Houbraken (1660–1719), the Dutch painter and writer, Waterloo was good friends with the painter Jan Weenix (1640–1719). Weenix told Houbraken that he often visited Waterloo at his house between Maarssen and Breukelen, to decorate his landscapes with animals and other objects.
Waterloo’s art dealership exposed him to the work of a number of leading landscape artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–1682), Simon de Vlieger (1601–1653), Roelant Roghman (1627–1692) and Caesar van Everdingen (1616–1678), from whom he absorbed a variety of influences.
Waterloo was among the first artists to have established a reputation almost entirely based upon his work as a draftsman. He also produced many etchings which increased his popularity and extended his influence into the 18th century and beyond. Waterloo was active in Amsterdam, Leeuwarden and Utrecht, where he died in 1690.
Te Papa currently has 44 works by Anthonie Waterloo in its collection. The huge majority – all apart from a more recently acquired print and drawing – were presented to the Colonial Museum by Bishop Ditlev Monrad in 1869.
This etching comes from the series known as Six large upright landscapes with scenes from the Old Testament. The biblical episode depicted here relates to the circumcision of Moses and Zipporah's son, when they are travelling from Midian to Egypt:- On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the LORD met him and tried to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, and touched his feet with it, and said, "Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!" So he let him alone. (Exodus 4:24-26)
The standard interpretation of the passage is that God wanted to kill Moses for neglecting the rite of circumcision of his son. Zipporah averts disaster by reacting quickly and hastily performing the rite, thus saving her husband from God's anger. In the etching, an angel wielding a sword is God's emissary; he holds the astonished and frightened Mose's arm. Unlike the arid Holy Land setting of the original story, Waterloo treats us once again to his signature lush, tree-studded landscape, with a charming old fam building and stone bridge providing the backcloth.
Sources:
British Museum Collection online, https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1627927&partId=1&searchTex t=waterloo+zipporah&page=1
Wikipedia, ‘Anthonie Waterloo’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonie_Waterloo
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2018