Portret van Jacob Cats 1747 - 1759

This is Jacob Houbraken's portrait of Jacob Cats, made with engraving, a printmaking technique, sometime in the 18th century. Engraving is an intaglio process, meaning the image is incised into a surface, in this case a metal plate. Look closely, and you can see how the lines vary in thickness, creating light and shadow. The artist would have used a tool called a burin to carve these lines, a laborious task demanding great skill. Each line carefully considered to define form and texture. Prints like these were crucial for disseminating images and knowledge in a pre-photographic era, acting as a kind of social media of their time. They allowed for mass production and distribution, making art and information accessible to a wider audience beyond the elite. Consider the immense labor that went into creating the printing plate, the many prints that could be pulled from it, and the work that each of those prints would do circulating through society. This reminds us that every artwork has a life far beyond its creation.