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Philips Galle, His Descendants,
and Print Workshops in
Antwerp
Karen Bowen, Independent Scholar
Around 1570, Philips Galle, a
respected engraver and print
publisher in Haarlem, moved his
business to Antwerp, then an
important center of print
production. Filling, in part, the
gap in the Antwerp print publishing
world left by the death of
Hieronymus Cock, Galle maintained
his business through the turbulent
war years in Antwerp, up until the
end of the sixteenth century. With
each generation of Philips Galle’s
successors, however, his original,
successful print workshop devoted
to the production and sale of
independent prints broke apart and
devolved into more specialized
types of print workshops. In this
talk, I will examine the changing
array of activities and associated
revenues of the workshops run by
his successors. Due to the familial
bonds that linked them, these
workshops provide especially
telling comparisons. They not only
document the co-existence of
distinct types of print workshops
in seventeenth- century Antwerp,
but also reveal differences in
their social status and economic
standing.
The evidence of these diverging
branches of the Galle family of
engravers and print publishers
stems from the rich archival
records of the Plantin-Moretus
Press, which document the working
relationship between the Galles and
the Moretus family of book
publishers to whom they were
related by marriage. Although these
documents are primarily
transactions concerning the
production of books with engraved
illustrations, they nevertheless
reveal two basic stages in the ever
altering activities taken on by the
Galle print workshops. The first
transition was from Philip Galle’s
general refusal to work on any
print project that he, himself,
would not control, to his sons’s
(Cornelius I’s and Theodore’s)
willingness to assist the Moretuses
regularly with the illustration of
their books: hence, they made and
printed engravings that they would
not control. The second essential
change was the gradual
specialization by the next
generation of Galles (Cornelius I’s
son and grandson Cornelius II and
III and Theodore’s son Jan) in
essentially just one aspect of the
Moretuses’ production of
illustrated books, namely, either
the engraving (and reworking) of
the plates needed to illustrate the
texts, or the printing of them.
They represented, thus, two
distinct types of print workshops:
one run by a trained artist who
(together with his workshop)
actively produced new engravings
(and reworked worn ones), and
another run by a figure of no
particular personal artistic renown
that saw primarily (if not
exclusively) to the printing of
existing copperplates, either from
his own stock for sale via his own
shop, or others’ plates, like a
book publishers’, for publications
beyond the print workshop’s
control.
While this reduction of Philips
Galle’s grandsons’ activities is
also suggested by what is known of
their own production of independent
prints, it is only via the records
of the Plantin-Moretus Press that
one can begin to evaluate the
financial implications of the
decision to specialize in this
manner. On the one hand, these
records reveal that engravers
associated with the independent
type of print workshop could earn a
superior wage that not only kept
pace with general wage increases,
but might also rise beyond that in
accord with the reputation of the
given artist. Those associated with
the service type of print workshop,
on the other hand, appear to have
worked at a low, day laborer’s wage
that did not necessarily keep pace
with general price increases and
was more readily suppressed due to
external forces. The unexpected
paradox suggested by the records of
the Plantin-Moretus Press, however,
is that the superior wage of
skilled, respected engravers did
not necessarily guarantee a
regular, greater annual income.
Consequently, this discussion will
provide a well documented example
of the changing faces of print
workshops that were probably more
common than currently acknowledged –r
the Collaert family of engravers
is, for example, likely another
case in point. It will also provide
rare evidence of the financial
advantages and disadvantages of at
least two types of workshops and
illustrate what various members of
one established family of engravers
and print publishers were willing –
or simply able – to do for family,
fame, or basic economic survival.
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