print;
satirical print
- Museum number
- 1850,1109.11
- Title
- Object: Fanatick Madg
- Description
-
Satire with an owl wearing spectacles standing on a closed book, beside him a candle rests on an open book (after a print by Cornelis Bloemaert, Roethlisberger H5)
Engraving
- Production date
- 1685-1688
- Dimensions
-
Height: 214 millimetres
-
Width: 167 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Stephens suggests that the print was published about 1647 as a satire on the Independents who had formed an Association in East Anglia in that year; he compared the verse to lines in Quarles' "Shepherd's Eclogue" (1644). However, the quality of the engraving, and especially of the lettering, is higher than anything else known at that date and it is more likely that the print was made in the 1680s in order to associate the campaign to oust James II with the popular movements of the Civil War period; the earliest known works of J Collins date from the mid 1670s.
M.Jones 'The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight', New Haven and London, 2010, pp.169-171, especially footnotes 34 and 35.
Jones supports a late seventeenth-century publication date stating that a notice of what sounds very like a copy of Henrik Bloemaert's painting at sales held on 21st June 1689, where 'A Droll of an Owl reading by a Candle' is recorded as lot 45, and on 24th March 1691, where lot 268 is listed as 'a piece of an Owl a reading'.
For the original print by Bloemaert and its meaning, see Eddy de Jongh & Ger Luijten 'Mirror of everyday life, Genreprints in the Netherlands 1550-1700', Rijksmuseum 1997, p.192.
Roethlisberger dates Bloemaert's print to c.1625.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1850
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1850,1109.11
