JOHANNES LUTMA THE YOUNGER

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• Posteritati Ianus Lutma ca. 1681
  
  punchwork engraving (opus mallei); 304 x 210 mm
  
  with an old pen-and-ink annotation below Orfèvre hollandais vivant en 1650 (Dutch goldsmith active in 1650)
  
  Hollstein 6 first state (of two)

  WATERMARK
  letters RC

  A very good impression of the first state; in untreated condition with some pale foxing; small margins all round.

  In the second state the inscription “OBIIT MDCLXIX // AETATIS LXXXV” (he died in 1669 at the age of 85) was added in the upper corners of the plate. The word “Posteritati” (posterity) and the decision to depict Lutma’s likeness in the noble form of an ancestral bust make clear that the print was meant as a memorial image created by the son for his deceased father – and as a pendant to a self-portrait in the same compositional form that is dated 1681 (Hollstein 4).

  Lutma the younger had etched a portrait of his father before in 1656. The earlier print copied the posture of the sitter (in reverse) after Rembrandt’s celebrated portrait print of the same year and did already display some punchwork technique. The much grander memorial print is executed nearly exclusively in what the artist himself refers to as opus mallei (literally “hammer work”) – mechanical punch work created through the use of spiked wheels and the roulette.