Faith, Hope and Charity

An Amsterdam painter and draftsman, Gerrit Pietersz., moved to Haarlem in about 1588-89, to train with Cornelis Cornelisz., a Mannerist artist whose work had a lasting influence on him. While in Haarlem, he made six prints that are arguably his most innovative and beautiful works. Although Pietrsz. was drawn to printmaking while in Haarlem, he, unlike his contemporaries, eschewed the sharp swelling and tapering lines characteristic of Mannerist engraving and turned to etching instead. In contrast to the hard brilliance of the engravings by Goltzius and his school, Pietersz.’s etchings are loose and exuberant. The lines seem almost to have a life of their own, as we can see in the looping curls of Joseph’s beard and hair in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, or the bunched drapery of St. Cecilia’s sleeve in St. Cecilia Playing the Organ.



Printmaking was something of an experiment for Pietersz. He only executed six etchings during his entire career, five of which are dated 1593. All of his etchings are extremely rare, known only in a handful of impressions. The Met has four of his prints (one in a duplicate impression), more than any institution apart from the Albertina in Vienna and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.



Rather than creating a hieratic image of the Three Theological Virtues, Gerrit Pietersz. depicts them with the same tender approach and much the same compositional arrangement as he does the Holy Family. Charity sits on a bank of clouds with an infant lying in her lap; Faith, holding a tiny cross, peers over Charity’s shoulder looking at the child; and Hope, clutching her emblem, an anchor, looks up at the group with an expression of devotion. In the right background the sun breaks through the clouds, symbolizing God’s omnipresence and emphasizing how central these virtues are to Christianity.




The present work is an apparently unrecorded proof before the first state. Pietersz. has revised the etching in pen and brown ink, adding hatching to lowest left fold of Charity’s dress and her left sleeve and strengthening the outline of her hand – changes that were carried out in the finished version of the print.