RKD STUDIES

Arnold Houbraken’s Groote schouburgh came out in two early editions. The first was published in Amsterdam in 1718, 1719 and 1721 by Houbraken himself and his widow Sara. This version was published by Piet Swillens (1890-1963) [1] in 1943, 1944 and 1953 using reformatted pages and a modern letter type and including a comprehensive index and an ever-useful survey of Houbraken’s sources. Swillens omitted the portrait of Houbraken at the front of the third volume. On the other hand he kept the spelling errors of the original, so that the Hertog van Cel remained the Hartogs van Cel,¹ and the name was corrected only in the index. Note, however, that Swillens changed one ‘Hartog’ to ‘Harog’ on the same page. Fortunately his transcription has at last become redundant, so that there is no need to examine it closely for other such errors. Google Books posted digitized volumes of Houbraken’s first edition, including a complete set of the volumes at the National Library of the Czech Republic in 2016. In November of 2021 we followed Google Books’ good example with Houbraken Translated, which offers the complete original text side by side with an English translation. The translation is illustrated but not annotated in the traditional way. However, the hyperlinks to images, people and sources can serve as a body of notes. They mostly link to records in RKDimages and RKDartists, sometimes to Ecartico, the Biografisch portaal van Nederland and if necessary, to Wikipedia; the publications to which Houbraken refers are mostly linked to the relevant pages in Google Books.

The second early version of Houbraken’s Schouburgh came out in The Hague in 1753. The publishers were Johannes Swart (1685-1759), Cornelis Boucquet (1696-1777) and Mattheus Gaillard (1707-1766), who were all active as booksellers and auctioneers in The Hague and teamed up for this occasion. However, the moving force behind the publication was Houbraken’s good friend Johan van Gool (1685-1763) [2]. This second edition was re-published in 1976 as a photo-engraved reprint by B.M. Israël of Amsterdam. It was posted online in 2009 by the digital library of Dutch letters (dbnl) along with a re-formatted transcription in a modern letter type. This online version was soon followed by several digitized copies in Google Books, including the Israël edition. Regrettably neither the editors of the Israël edition nor those of the dbnl facsimile informed their readers that several introductory and dedicatory pages of the first edition are missing. They include the original title pages of 1718, 1719 and 1721, but also, for 1718 only, a 24 line opening poem ‘op de titelprint’, an 84 line introductory poem by Houbraken himself, and a thirty line laudatory poem by David van Hoogstraten (1658-1724) [3] and, for 1721 only, a portrait of Houbraken engraved by his young son Jacob, with a four-line inscription composed by the mentioned Van Hoogstraten [4]. All these riches made their way into the 1753 edition but, with the exception of the title print, not into the Israël reprint nor, as a consequence, into the online dbnl transcription.

1
Piet Swillens (1890-1963),1934
Photo: F.F. van der Werf
Collection Het Utrechtsch Archief, no. 808181)

2
Jacob Houbraken after Aert Schouman
Portrait of Jan van Gool (1685-1763), 1749 (dated)
The Hague, RKD – Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis (Collectie Iconografisch Bureau)

In addition the 1718 volume has an elaborate two-page dedication to Johan van Schuylenburch (1675-1735) while the 1719 volume is prefaced by a dedication to Pieter de la Court van der Voort (1664-1739). Both Van Schuylenburch and De la Court were important collectors who are discussed by Houbraken and we even have a letter with drawing that Houbraken addressed to De la Court on 16 May 1710.² For those reasons alone the original introductions are here translated. That is also true of the last paragraph of Houbraken’s Part II. The 1719 version announced the eminent appearance of Part III, with a promise of opening biographies of Frans van Mieris (1635-1681) and Jan Steen (1626-1679). This material became redundant with the appearance of Part III and was therefore excised from the 1753 edition.

In short, the second edition is not a reprint of the first one. The portraits, however, were reprinted using the same plates that had been engraved by Arnold’s son Jacob (1698-1780) for the volumes of 1718, 1719 and 1721 and that were no doubt supplied by him in 1753, when he was 55 years old and had become a versatile and successful artist with upper-class pretentions and astonishing technical mastery.³ Access to these plates must have helped make a second edition of De groote schouburgh a financially attractive proposition. What can easily be overlooked, however, is that this was the third time that images based on Jacob’s plates were published, as he must have allowed the publishers of Jacob Campo Weyerman (1677-1747) [5] to use them for De levens-beschryvingen of 1729, although the portraits in Weyerman were embellished with decorative borders for which supplementary plates had to be designed and cut.⁴

The publishers of the 1753 edition noted on their title page that they had corrected numerous printing errors of the 1718 to 1721 version. Such errors are indicative of the great pressure under which Houbraken worked. Because much of the spelling throughout De groote schouburgh looks suspect from today’s point of view, a complete list of wrong letters, missing letters, or omitted words would require a word by word comparison of the two editions. The printing errors that we spotted add up to none for volume 1, 19 for volume 2 and a further 16 for volume 3. The growing numbers likely reflect the increasing pressure under which Houbraken worked after the completion of the first volume.

5
Cornelis Troost
Portrait Jacob Campo Weyerman 1677-1747), dated 1725
Los Angeles (California), Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Houbraken Translated, volume 2 / Houbraken 1753

page 25: Toen hy, behandverst / behandvest
page 57 : Deze overmaas geboren / Overmaas
page 61: by wyle van ven Ram / by wyle van een Ram
page 65: waar na de volgens / volgers
page 91: wat een DIRK / was een DIRK
page 116: om rust te zonken / zoeken
page 153: zdert zig geheel / zedert zig geheel
page 205: na dat hy zes weken had belegerig geweest / bedlegerig
page 206: de deur tot doodslap open / doodslag
page 209: soort / oort
page 272: Oegstmaand 11665 / 1665
page 277: eerst heeft bearogen / bedrogen
page 284: op nieus gekogt / nieuws
page 285: evenwe geld wezen moest / evenwel
page 306: Hartogs van Cels / Hertog van Cel (Hartog also occurs twice)
page 328: voor den braven Konstschilder / door
page 339: om versandig te worden / verstandig
page 351: Rymgraaf / Rijngraaf

Houbraken Translated, volume 3 / Houbraken 1753

page 12: dit laatse slaat / staat
page 37: gereed aan de hadden / gereed aan de hand hadden
page 63: doe heel natuurlijk / die heel natuurlijk
page 145: haar kaagreedenen bestonden / klaagreedenen
page 150 : he gebruik / het gebruik
page 156: slof vinden / stof finden
page 178: wan:t even gelyk / want even gelyk
page 191: Heere en Keizers graft / Heere- en Keizers-gragt
page 197: nieuwe Heeregraft / nieuwe Heeregragt
page 256: zo veel / zo wel
page 313: aa nyn zoon / aan zyn zoon
page 313: als hy kwam te worden / als hy ziek kwam te worden
page 315: Wiens Verf um bloed / uw bloed
page 316: di hy in gunst / dat hy in gunst
page 319: Heeregraft / Heeregragt
page 321: zoost luid dat het de Heer hoorde / zoo luid
page 334: voor den Hr. Schetpen / Scheepen

Virtually all these errors are relatively inconsequential. Rare exceptions are the change from ‘soort’ to ‘oort’ on p. 209 of the second volume and the missing word ‘ziek’ on page 313 of the third tome. Also rare is that an error of the 1719 to 1721 volumes is repeated in the 1753 edition, as with volume 2, p. 132, where Herman van Lin (before 1634-1681) is named ‘van Lint’, or volume 3, p. 347, where an ‘en’ in a Latin poem is not corrected. Other details, such as the blatantly incorrect birth date of 1681 instead of 1618 for Jan Philip van Thielen (1618-1667) (whose sons are said to have been alive in 1660) also escaped the attention of the 1753 editors.⁵ In both editions Arent de Gelder (1645-1722) is to have arrived with Rembrandt in 1645, the year of his birth.⁶ Note also that in both 1718 and 1753 Willem Jacobsz. van Delff (1580-1638) is said to be a brother-in-law of Michiel van Mierevelt (1566-1641) whereas he was in fact his son-in-law. The next sentence corrects the mistake.⁷

An intriguing change occured on page 322 of the third volume with Pieter Peutemans (1641-1692). In the 1721 text Houbraken introduces him as ‘Peuteman’ and ads ‘I have forgotten his first name’. In the 1753 version it is simply ‘the painter Pieter Peuteman’. Both Arnold and his wife Sara were long dead by then, suggesting that someone else, most likely Johan van Gool), perused De groote schouburgh and was prepared to make changes. That same individual must have changed the final sentence on page 328. In 1721 we read ‘By thus ending the biography of this knight, whose portrait we have placed on a page, we believe to have attached a good lock on our work’. Presumably this conclusion was intended to read ‘on a full page’. In any case, things had changed more substantially by 1753: ‘By thus ending the biography of this knight, whose portrait we have placed in Plate O. 30, we believe to have hung a good lock on this volume, which stands soon to be followed by a fourth’. The closing words suggest that Van Gool expected to add another volume to his friend’s great work.

In the balance the second edition of De groote schouburgh is slightly superior to the first, if only because of its correction of printing errors. For that reason we have always consulted the 1753 edition as well while producing Houbraken Translated. For those not fluent in Dutch, the only translation available so far was the 1880 German edition by Alfred von Wurzbach (1846-1915). However, it is Houbraken Translated that has at last opened the way for all others.