Werner Jacobsz. van den Valckert

1580 – 1627

Dutch painter, etcher, woodcutter, draughtsman and writer. In 1605 he married Jannetje Cornelis, the daughter of Cornelis Sybertsz. Monicx van Montvoort, a stained-glass painter from The Hague. He received his first artistic training from his father-in-law and probably not during the journey he is supposed to have made to Italy. Between 1600 and 1605 he was registered at the Guild of St Luke in The Hague, in 1612 as a master. During this period he probably made all but two of his etchings, a woodcut of the Inspiration of St Jerome (1613) and a painting of Venus as Temptress (private collection). Despite his skilled etching technique, evident in his refined use of hatching, cross-hatching and dots, and his experiments with plate tone, van den Valckert applied himself almost exclusively to painting after 1613. His history paintings are similar in their academic formalism to those of Adriaen van Nieulandt and Pieter Isaacsz., two of the artist's rivals in Amsterdam, while his idealized, historicizing portraits resemble those of Cornelis van der Voort (c. 1576-1624). His patrons were mainly Amsterdam Remonstrants and Catholics but also included Christian IV of Denmark and presumably also the Stadholder, Prince Frederick Henry of Orange Nassau. The only known piece of writing by the artist is an exhortation written for St Luke's Day in 1618 and illustrated with one of his etchings. A similar moralizing tone underlies his painting of the Goat as an Unsuitable Leader of the Young (1616; untraced), which bears the initials of members of Amsterdam's Guild of St Luke.

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