- Also known as
-
Renold Elstrack
-
primary name: Elstrack, Renold
-
other name: Elstracke, Reginald
- Details
- individual; printmaker; British; Male
- Life dates
- 1570-1625?
- Biography
- Elstrack was the most prolific and competent of the few native-born engravers working in London during the reign of James. A few documents relating to his life are known. A return of resident aliens living in Southwark in 1571 records a 'Joselphe Elstrage of Lukeland' (ie. the province of Liège), a glasier who had come to England nineteen years before (ie. in 1552), and who had two sons, one of whom 'Reginold' was ten months old (Huguenot Society, Returns of aliens in the City and suburbs of London 1571-97, vol.X, part ii, p.113). The father was recorded as a member of the Dutch Reformed Church in London in 1582-3 (ibid p.295).
Elstrack's first plates were made in 1598, when he was 28, which suggests that he only turned to this profession after a different apprenticeship (perhaps as a glasier like his father). The 1598 works are five maps in a translation of Linschoten's Voyages, and in this Elstrack collaborated with William Rogers (active 1589-1602/3). Elstrack's style depends on Rogers, the finest of the native Elizabethan engravers, who sometimes signed his plates 'Anglus et Civis Londinensis', and it is very likely that he had been his pupil. He seems to have taken from Rogers something of his talent as a designer. Two late plates were both entered in the Stationers Registers in 1620 (Hind 24 and 97), and his last recorded plate was a map for Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus in 1625 (see Colvin pp.75-84, and A.E.Popham in Thieme-Becker, 1914).
Hind cat.97, Bulchin and Thingut, has been rediscovered in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (see Sheila O'Connell in Print Quarterly, March 1998).
- Bibliography
- Hind II pp.163-214 (99 nos)
