Art Institute of Chicago

Boar Hunt

Gerhard Janssen

Date

1717

Medium

Etching and aquatint on ivory laid paper

Culture

Netherlands

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

A stained-glass painter from Utrecht, Gerhard Janssen was also an experimental etcher, though he produced fewer than a dozen landscapes in total. All of them were deeply etched on iron plates and share an idiosyncratic solarizing effect created by the artist’s reversal of the usual relationship of light and dark. He stopped out the areas that were to remain white before immersing the plates in acid, with the result that his figures glow, almost as if they too were part of a window. The date and Janssen’s signature appear in reverse, another indication of his unfamiliarity with the medium.

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