A striking devotional image printed on sturdy, hard-wearing vellum, depicting St Teresa of Avilá touching the side-wound of Christ, with contemporary hand-colour and handsome gold highlights; an unrecorded engraving printed by prolific engraver-publisher Susanna Verbruggen (ca.1684-1752).
Participation of women in the print trade in the Low Countries, and particularly Antwerp in the seventeenth century - as engravers, printers and colorists - was not uncommon, and more is known about Verbruggen’s life and career than many of her peers. A member of the Guild of St Luke, which regulated the trade in engravings, books and prints in the city, from 1710 and the age of just 26, Verbruggen began as a seller of prints and subsequently an engraver, too, specialising principally in devotional prints like this one. She was a successful businesswoman; one contract with a church and pilgrimage site in East Flanders in the 1740s was for over 10 pounds for the delivery of more than 3,000 devotional images - like this one - for use by visiting pilgrims (van Heurck).
She was a ‘klopje’, or spiritual daughter - a woman who, similar to but separate from beguinage, followed a religious life without entering an order or taking vows associated with doing so - and employed a network of women, many of them of the same religious status. On her death she left her extensive stock of plates (some inherited from well-known - male - engravers, Wierix, Galle, and Snyders) and prints to her maids and employees; among their number was Isabella Hertsens (1726-97), who inherited much of Verbruggen’s stock as well as her business premises, ‘De Herpe’. Hertsens made her own name as an engraver, helped no doubt by the plates she inherited; there are rare, extant examples of engravings printed from plates Hertsen inherited from her employer, signed by both women.
Prints such as this one functioned as talismans for private devotion, to be either held or displayed. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries they had many other functions: given as souvenirs of first communion, and as prizes at school; pasted to doors in plague years as a ward against infection (specifically St Rosalia); and rather poignantly, in Mons, cut in half and used to identify children given up by their parents to orphanages and religious institutions, with half kept with the child, and half taken by the parent, which would create a whole image when they were reunited (van Heurck). The use of vellum, rather than paper for this print has assured its survival; more hard-wearing than paper, it would better endure repeated handling and carrying. The colour here, the gold especially, is in exceptional condition considering this use.
E H. van Heurck, ‘Les Images de dévotion Anversoises’ du XVIe au XIX siecle’, De Gulden Passer, Jaargang 8 [1930]
CHECK IF THIS APPLIES HERE: Near-contemporaries of Hertsens’ produced engravings on the same subject and near-identical composition (e.g. Cornelis de Boudt), evidence of the borrowing and copying that characterised the production of early modern vernacular print.
