VELDE, Jan van de, II

Dutch printmaker, born probably in Delft. He was son of Jan van de Velde I, the famous Antwerp calligrapher who had moved to the northern Netherlands in 1592 to escape religious persecution.

Jan van de Velde II was the pupil of Jacob Matham in Haarlem. he was admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in 1614. In 1636 he settled in Enkhuizen, where he died in 1641.

Jan van de Velde II was one of the group of Dutch artists working in Haarlem during the second decade of the 1600s, who created the distinctive Dutch seventeenth-century landscape. He shows his skill as a printmaker by densely hatching his shadows without allowing the surface of the copper plate to break up in the acid bath. The result resembles a photographic negative, so that etched lines represent blackness, and the scraps of unmarked paper, gleaming like glow-worms in the night, define fields, foliage, clouds and the moon.