Saint Barbara, Seated Before her Tower

Jan van Eyck's painting of St. Barbara of 1437, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, is one of the great masterpieces of fifteenth-century art. The work hovers somewhere between drawing and painting. In 1769, Cornelis van Noorde etched a life-size reproduction of the painting in etching, drypoint, and soft ground, as a facsimile of the painting. The print was commissioned and published by the painting's owner at the time Johannes Enschedé who lived in Haarlem. The print is remarkable for the careful and inventive printmaking that Van Noorde used to approximate Van Eyck's delicate drawing on panel. The artist was working at the same time as Jean-Francois Charpentier and Jean Baptiste LePrince were making their early experiments to reproduce drawings with aquatint in France and at the same time that Cornelis Ploos van Amstel was also experimenting with etching and aquatint to imitate drawings in The Netherlands.


Here, the printmaker employed etching, drypoint, and probably soft-ground etching to simulate Van Eyck's delicate painted strokes. In the sky, the only area in the original that is painted, Van Noorde employed light scratches to gently modulate the space. These scratches could easily be mistaken for the scratches normally left behind in polishing the printing plate were it not for the sun in the upper right corner where the artist has intentionally cleared these scratches away and circled the orb with brief touches of soft-ground etching. This suggests that he intended to keep the remaining scratches that create a light, contrasting tone.This unique work of reproduction is unlike other reproductive prints of the period.