Portrait of Theodore Blevet, Calligrapher

The art of calligraphy flourished in Holland during the first half of the seventeenth century. Theodore Blevet (1598-1661) was a calligrapher and French schoolmaster who established a French boarding school in a town near Haarlem. The elaborate calligraphic border that surrounds this print was no doubt based on a design by Blevet.
One puzzling aspect of this print are the two inscriptions: S van Hoogstraaten fecit ("made by S. van Hoogstraaten"), which suggests that the Dutch painter Samuel van Hoogstraten made either the print or the original portrait from which the print was created; and Aet 29, which indicates that the sitter's age is twenty-nine. Hoogstraten was born the year that Blevet turned twenty-nine; thus the inscriptions do not make sense together and may have resulted from a misunderstanding on the part of the print's engraver.