Jan de Bisschop

Sale, New York, Sotheby's, 29 January 1997, lot 179

De Bisschop made many drawings after sculptures of all periods, from the antique to works of his contemporaries.  The artist executed no fewer than a hundred etchings after antique sculpture, which he published in two volumes in 1668 and 1669 as Signorum veterum Icones, but it seems he never actually went to Italy himself and based all these prints on drawings and prints made by other artists.  Although he was an amateur artist, and his main career was as a lawyer in the court at the Hague and secretary to Constantijn Huygens the Younger, his drawings and prints, both after antique and renaissance sculpture and paintings and in the landscape genre, are of the greatest quality and delicacy.  For further information on de Bisschop's copies after Italian and classical models, see the exhibition catalogue, Episcopius. Jan de Bisschop (1628-1671), advocaat en tekenaar.¹

^1.  Amsterdam, Museum het Rembrandthuis, 1992, pp. 38-63