Martin Droeshout

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Droeshout was baptised in April 1601, the son of a Flemish engraver family that had crossed the Channel to escape religious persecution. His face is unknown to history, yet his hand produced the one image the whole world recognises: the portrait of William Shakespeare on the title page of the First Folio. That single commission, completed when Droeshout was just twenty-one years old, would define him forever. But who was the young engraver behind it? Why was an artist whose abilities were widely considered limited chosen for the most consequential literary portrait in the English language? And what drove him, years later, to leave London for Madrid and apparently abandon the Protestant faith his family had risked everything to practise?

• 2. A Family of Exiles

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  The Droeshouts came to England because staying in Flanders was dangerous. Protestant belief put them at risk of persecution, and so the family relocated across the North Sea, joining a community of skilled Flemish craftsmen who settled in London. Martin's father, Michael Droeshout, established himself as a well-regarded engraver. His older brother John followed the same trade. An uncle, also named Martin Droeshout and born in the 1560s, became an established painter. The family was, in short, saturated with visual artists working in ink and line.

  The younger Martin's mother, Susanneke van der Ersbeck, had married Michael in 1595 and died in 1606 or 1607. She was the mother of all five of Michael's known children and the first of his four wives. Beyond the record of his baptism, no direct documentation survives about the younger Martin's own life. That absence of records would later fuel a genuine scholarly dispute about which Martin Droeshout actually made the engravings.

• 3. The Identity Problem

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  Lionel Cust, writing in the original Dictionary of National Biography, argued that the younger Martin was the engraver responsible for the body of work attributed to the family name. That became the majority view for generations. Then in 1991, historian Mary Edmund made a sharper argument: the elder Martin Droeshout, the uncle born in the 1560s, may have been both a painter and an engraver, and there was no firm evidence the younger man had ever practised engraving at all. Edmund concluded that the entire oeuvre should be attributed to the elder Martin. Her position was adopted by the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  More recent research by June Schlueter swung back toward the traditional view, reaffirming that the engravings belonged to the younger Droeshout. The difficulty is structural: the same profession, the same given name, and a thin documentary record make the two men exceptionally hard to disentangle. Stylistic analysis and the similarities of signatures and monograms used on the prints have done most of the work in keeping the two identities separate.

• 4. The Shakespeare Commission

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  Shakespeare died when Martin Droeshout was fifteen years old. The playwright never sat for the young engraver, and so the portrait Droeshout produced for the First Folio of 1623, edited by Shakespeare's fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, almost certainly derived from an earlier painting or drawing. Tarnya Cooper has argued that the poor modelling of Shakespeare's doublet and collar points to Droeshout copying a lost work that showed only the head and shoulders. The body below would have been added by Droeshout himself, which was standard practice at the time.

  E. A. J. Honigmann noted an intriguing possibility: since the elder Martin Droeshout was an established painter, he may have made the original image from which the engraving was drawn. That family connection could explain why a twenty-one-year-old with no especially distinguished reputation received one of the most prominent commissions of the era. Whatever the path to the job, the result was an image that critics have never been kind about. Benjamin Roland Lewis wrote that "virtually all of Droeshout's work shows the same artistic defects. He was an engraver after the conventional manner, and not a creative artist."

• 5. Beyond Shakespeare

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  Between 1623 and 1632, Droeshout made at least twenty-four engravings in London. Portrait subjects included John Foxe, John Donne, George Villiers the 1st Duke of Buckingham, and the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus. He also worked on more ambitious allegorical designs. Among the plates he contributed to Thomas Heywood's The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, Droeshout was one of five engravers involved.

  His most elaborate independent print was "Doctor Panurgus", an allegory of the follies of contemporary life. The image shows figures representing Country, Town, and Court being treated by a physician who pours "Wisdome and Understanding" down the throat of an ignorant rustic and smokes the brain of a courtier in an oven to burn away his vanity. The design drew on an earlier print by Matthaeus Greuter, which itself borrowed from emblem book traditions. Droeshout, or possibly an unknown collaborator, added extensive text: English and Latin verses, extra characters, and satirical moral passages of unknown authorship filling the borders.

  An earlier allegorical print, The Spiritual Warfare, depicted the devil's army besieging a stronghold defended by a figure called a "Christian Soldier bold" and guarded by personifications of the Christian virtues. It has been proposed that this design may have influenced John Bunyan when he wrote The Holy War. The print was apparently reprinted in 1697, carried along by the success of Bunyan's books.

• 6. Departure and Conversion

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  Some time between 1632 and 1635, Martin Droeshout left England for Spain and settled in Madrid. Signed engravings from there survive from 1635 through 1640. Art historian Christiaan Schuckman observed that the subjects of those Spanish prints are emphatically Catholic: saints, Catholic symbolism, and Counter-Reformation themes. This represented a dramatic departure from the work Droeshout had been producing in England, where one of his final London projects was an allegory of the theology of the Presbyterian Puritan Alexander Henderson.

  While in Madrid, Droeshout appears to have anglicised his name to "Droeswoode", a change that seems designed to soften its Dutch resonance. The word "hout" in Dutch means "wood", so the substitution was at least partly a translation. Negative attitudes toward the Dutch in Spain at the time would have made the original surname a liability. His earliest Spanish work depicted the coat of arms of Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares, a leading figure in Counter-Reformation Spanish politics. His most explicitly Catholic design was a frontispiece for the Novissimus Librorum Prohibitorum et Expurgatorum Index, showing the Church as a warrior stamping out Heresy, Error, and Temerity.

  The elder Martin Droeshout, his uncle, remained in London throughout his life as a staunch member of the Dutch Protestant community there. The nephew's trajectory ran in the opposite direction. Martin is not mentioned in his brother John's will, dated 1651, which suggests either that he had died before that date or that his family had cut ties with him over his conversion to Catholicism.