John Dryden
Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom
In office 13 April 1668 – January 1688
Monarch	Charles II
Preceded by	Inaugural holder
Succeeded by	Thomas Shadwell
Personal details
Born	19 August 1631 Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, England
Died	12 May 1700 (aged 68) London, England
Spouse(s)	Lady Elizabeth Howard
Children	Charles, John, and Erasmus Henry
Alma mater	Westminster School  Trinity College, Cambridge
Occupation	Poet, literary critic, playwright, librettist

John Dryden (/ˈdraɪdən/; 19 August [O.S. 9 August] 1631 – 12 May  [O.S. 1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was appointed England's first Poet Laureate in 1668.^[1]

He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John".^[2]

Early life[edit]

Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Baronet (1553–1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. He was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy, Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, where it is likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Westminster School as a King's Scholar where his headmaster was Dr. Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and severe disciplinarian.^[3] Having been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced a very different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism. Whatever Dryden's response to this was, he clearly respected the headmaster and would later send two of his sons to school at Westminster.

As a humanist public school, Westminster maintained a curriculum which trained pupils in the art of rhetoric and the presentation of arguments for both sides of a given issue. This is a skill which would remain with Dryden and influence his later writing and thinking, as much of it displays these dialectical patterns. The Westminster curriculum included weekly translation assignments which developed Dryden's capacity for assimilation. This was also to be exhibited in his later works. His years at Westminster were not uneventful, and his first published poem, an elegy with a strong royalist feel on the death of his schoolmate Henry, Lord Hastings from smallpox, alludes to the execution of King Charles I, which took place on 30 January 1649, very near the school where Dr. Busby had first prayed for the King and then locked in his schoolboys to prevent their attending the spectacle.

In 1650 Dryden went up to Trinity College, Cambridge.^[4] Here he would have experienced a return to the religious and political ethos of his childhood: the Master of Trinity was a Puritan preacher by the name of Thomas Hill who had been a rector in Dryden's home village.^[5] Though there is little specific information on Dryden's undergraduate years, he would most certainly have followed the standard curriculum of classics, rhetoric, and mathematics. In 1654 he obtained his BA, graduating top of the list for Trinity that year. In June of the same year Dryden's father died, leaving him some land which generated a little income, but not enough to live on.^[6]

Returning to London during the Protectorate, Dryden obtained work with Oliver Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe. This appointment may have been the result of influence exercised on his behalf by his cousin the Lord Chamberlain, Sir Gilbert Pickering. At Cromwell's funeral on 23 November 1658 Dryden processed with the Puritan poets John Miltonand Andrew Marvell. Shortly thereafter he published his first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), a eulogy on Cromwell's death which is cautious and prudent in its emotional display. In 1660 Dryden celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. In this work the interregnum is illustrated as a time of chaos, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order.

Later life and career[edit]

After the Restoration, as Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day, he transferred his allegiances to the new government. Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden welcomed the new regime with two more panegyrics: To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662) and To My Lord Chancellor (1662). These poems suggest that Dryden was looking to court a possible patron, but he was to instead make a living in writing for publishers, not for the aristocracy, and thus ultimately for the reading public. These, and his other nondramatic poems, are occasional—that is, they celebrate public events. Thus they are written for the nation rather than the self, and the Poet Laureate(as he would later become) is obliged to write a certain number of these per annum.^[7] In November 1662 Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society, and he was elected an early fellow. However, Dryden was inactive in Society affairs and in 1666 was expelled for non-payment of his dues.

Dryden, by John Michael Wright, 1668

Dryden, by James Maubert, c. 1695

On 1 December 1663 Dryden married the royalist sister of Sir Robert Howard—Lady Elizabeth. Dryden's works occasionally contain outbursts against the married state but also celebrations of the same. Thus, little is known of the intimate side of his marriage. Lady Elizabeth bore three sons and outlived her husband.

With the reopening of the theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, Dryden began writing plays. His first play The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663, and was not successful, but was still promising, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he became a shareholder. During the 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known work being Marriage à la Mode (1673), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678). Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670).

When the Great Plague of London closed the theatres in 1665, Dryden retreated to Wiltshire where he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), arguably the best of his unsystematic prefaces and essays. Dryden constantly defended his own literary practice, and Of Dramatick Poesie, the longest of his critical works, takes the form of a dialogue in which four characters—each based on a prominent contemporary, with Dryden himself as 'Neander'—debate the merits of classical, French and English drama. The greater part of his critical works introduce problems which he is eager to discuss, and show the work of a writer of independent mind who feels strongly about his own ideas, ideas which demonstrate the breadth of his reading. He felt strongly about the relation of the poet to tradition and the creative process, and his best heroic play Aureng-zebe (1675) has a prologue which denounces the use of rhyme in serious drama. His play All for Love (1678) was written in blank verse, and was to immediately follow Aureng-Zebe.

At around 8pm on 18 December 1679, Dryden was attacked in Rose Alley behind the Lamb & Flag pub, near his home in Covent Garden, by thugs hired by the Earl of Rochester,^[8][9] with whom he had a long-standing conflict.^[10] The pub was notorious for staging bare-knuckle prize fights, earning the nickname "The Bucket of Blood."^[11] Dryden's poem, "An Essay upon Satire," contained a number of attacks on King Charles II, his mistresses and courtiers, but most pointedly on the Earl of Rochester, a notorious womaniser.^[12] Rochester responded by hiring thugs who attacked Dryden whilst walking back from Will's Coffee House (a popular London coffee house where the Wits gathered to gossip, drink and conduct their business) back to his house on Gerrard Street.^[13] Dryden survived the attack, offering £50 for the identity of the thugs placed in the London Gazette, and a Royal Pardon if one of them would confess. No one claimed the reward.^[12]

Dryden's greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic Mac Flecknoe, a more personal product of his laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell. Dryden's main goal in the work is to "satirize Shadwell, ostensibly for his offenses against literature but more immediately we may suppose for his habitual badgering of him on the stage and in print."^[14] It is not a belittling form of satire, but rather one which makes his object great in ways which are unexpected, transferring the ridiculous into poetry.^[15] This line of satire continued with Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682). His other major works from this period are the religious poems Religio Laici (1682), written from the position of a member of the Church of England; his 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the word biography to English readers; and The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Frontispiece and title page, vol. II, 1716 edition, Works of Virgiltranslated by Dryden

He wrote Britannia Rediviva celebrating the birth of a son and heir to the Catholic King and Queen on 10 June 1688.^[16] When later in the same year James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, Dryden's refusal to take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary, left him out of favour at court. Thomas Shadwell succeeded him as Poet Laureate, and he was forced to give up his public offices and live by the proceeds of his pen. Dryden translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus, a task which he found far more satisfying than writing for the stage. In 1694 he began work on what would be his most ambitious and defining work as translator, The Works of Virgil(1697), which was published by subscription. The publication of the translation of Virgil was a national event and brought Dryden the sum of £1,400.^[17] His final translations appeared in the volume Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), a series of episodes from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, as well as modernised adaptations from Geoffrey Chaucer interspersed with Dryden's own poems. As a translator, he made great literary works in the older languages available to readers of English.

Dryden died on 12 May 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later.^[18] He was the subject of poetic eulogies, such as Luctus Brittannici: or the Tears of the British Muses; for the Death of John Dryden, Esq. (London, 1700), and The Nine Muses. A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque commemorates Dryden at 43 Gerrard Street in London's Chinatown.^[19] He lived at 137 Long Acre from 1682 to 1686 and at 43 Gerrard Street from 1686 until his death.^[20]

In his will, he left The George Inn at Northampton to trustees, to form a school for the children of the poor of the town. This became John Dryden's School, later The Orange School.^[21]

Reputation and influence[edit]

Dryden near end of his life

Dryden was the dominant literary figure and influence of his age. He established the heroic couplet as a standard form of English poetry by writing successful satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams, compliments, prologues, and plays with it; he also introduced the alexandrineand triplet into the form. In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet—Audenreferred to him as "the master of the middle style"^[22]—that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. The considerable loss felt by the English literary community at his death was evident in the elegies written about him.^[23] Dryden's heroic couplet became the dominant poetic form of the 18th century. Alexander Pope was heavily influenced by Dryden and often borrowed from him; other writers were equally influenced by Dryden and Pope. Pope famously praised Dryden's versification in his imitation of Horace's Epistle II.i: "Dryden taught to join / The varying pause, the full resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy divine." Samuel Johnson^[24]summed up the general attitude with his remark that "the veneration with which his name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry." His poems were very widely read, and are often quoted, for instance, in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Johnson's essays.

Johnson also noted, however, that "He is, therefore, with all his variety of excellence, not often pathetic; and had so little sensibility of the power of effusions purely natural, that he did not esteem them in others. Simplicity gave him no pleasure." Readers in the first half of the 18th century did not mind this too much, but later generations considered Dryden's absence of sensibility a fault.

One of the first attacks on Dryden's reputation was by William Wordsworth, who complained that Dryden's descriptions of natural objects in his translations from Virgil were much inferior to the originals. However, several of Wordsworth's contemporaries, such as George Crabbe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott (who edited Dryden's works), were still keen admirers of Dryden. Besides, Wordsworth did admire many of Dryden's poems, and his famous "Intimations of Immortality" ode owes something stylistically to Dryden's "Alexander's Feast." John Keats admired the "Fables," and imitated them in his poem Lamia. Later 19th-century writers had little use for verse satire, Pope, or Dryden; Matthew Arnold famously dismissed them as "classics of our prose." He did have a committed admirer in George Saintsbury, and was a prominent figure in quotation books such as Bartlett's, but the next major poet to take an interest in Dryden was T. S. Eliot, who wrote that he was "the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the eighteenth century," and that "we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden."^[25] However, in the same essay, Eliot accused Dryden of having a "commonplace mind." Critical interest in Dryden has increased recently, but, as a relatively straightforward writer (William Empson, another modern admirer of Dryden, compared his "flat" use of language with Donne's interest in the "echoes and recesses of words"^[26]), his work has not occasioned as much interest as Andrew Marvell's, John Donne's or Pope's.^[27]

Dryden

Dryden is believed to be the first person to posit that English sentences should not end in prepositions because Latin sentences cannot end in prepositions.^[28][29] Dryden created the proscription against preposition stranding in 1672 when he objected to Ben Jonson's 1611 phrase, "the bodies that those souls were frighted from," though he did not provide the rationale for his preference.^[30] Dryden often translated his writing into Latin, to check whether his writing was concise and elegant, Latin being considered an elegant and long-lived language with which to compare; then Dryden translated his writing back to English according to Latin-grammar usage. As Latin does not have sentences ending in prepositions, Dryden may have applied Latin grammar to English, thus forming the rule of no sentence-ending prepositions, subsequently adopted by other writers.^[31]

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WENCESLAUS HOLLAR

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Wenceslaus Hollar
Portrait of Wenceslaus Hollar by Jan Meyssens(with Prague Castle in the background).
Born	Wenzel Hollar 23 July 1607 Prague, Kingdom of Bohemia, Holy Roman Empire
Died	25 March 1677 (aged 69) London, Kingdom of England
Nationality	Bohemian
Known for	Etching
Movement	Baroque

Wenceslaus Hollar (23 July 1607 – 25 March 1677) was a prolific and accomplished Bohemian graphic artist of the 17th century, who spent much of his life in England. He is known to German speakers as Wenzel Hollar; and to Czech speakers as Václav Hollar Czech: [ˈvaːtslav ˈɦolar]. He is particularly noted for his engravings and etchings. He was born in Prague, died in London, and was buried at St Margaret's Church, Westminster.^[1]

Contents

Early life[edit]

After his family was ruined by the Sack of Prague in the Thirty Years' War, the young Hollar, who had been destined for the legal profession, decided to become an artist. The earliest of his works that have come down to us are dated 1625 and 1626; they are small plates, and one of them is a copy of a "Virgin and Child" by Dürer, whose influence upon Hollar's work was always great. In 1627 he was in Frankfurt where he was apprenticed to the renowned engraver Matthäus Merian.^[1] In 1630 he lived in Strasbourg, Mainz and Koblenz, where Hollar portrayed the towns, castles, and landscapes of the Middle Rhine Valley. In 1633 he moved to Cologne.^[2][3]

It was in 1636 that he attracted the notice of the famous nobleman and art collector Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel, then on a diplomatic mission to the imperial court of Emperor Ferdinand II. Employed as a draftsman, he travelled with Arundel to Vienna and Prague.^[1] In Cologne in 1635, Hollar published his first book. In 1637 he went with Arundel to England, where he remained in the earl's household for many years.

Panorama of Prague in 1636

Life in England[edit]

Allegory on the Death of the Earl of Arundel

Though he remained an artist in service of Lord Arundel, he seems not to have worked exclusively for him, and after the earl's death in Padua in 1646, Hollar earned his living by working for various authors and publishers, which was afterwards his primary means of distribution. After Lord Arundel's death in 1646, probably at the request of Hendrik van der Borcht, he etched a commemorative print done after a design by Cornelius Schut in Arundel's honour, dedicated to his widow Aletheia. Arundel is seated in melancholy mode on his tomb in front of an obelisk (perhaps commemorating the obelisk of Domitian which he tried to import from Rome), and surrounded by works of art and their personifications.

In 1745, George Vertue paid homage to their association in the vignette he published on page one of his Description of the Works of the Ingenious Delineator and Engraver Wenceslaus Hollar. It featured a bust of Arundel in front of a pyramid, symbolizing immortality, surrounded by illustrated books and the instruments of Hollar's trade.^[4]

During his first year in England he created "View of Greenwich", later issued by Peter Stent, the print-seller. Nearly 3 feet (0.9 m) long, he received thirty shillings for the plate, a small fraction of its present value. Afterwards he fixed the price of his work at fourpence an hour, and measured his time by a sand-glass. On 4 July 1641 Hollar married a lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Norfolk. Her name was Tracy; they had two children. Arundel had left England by 1642, and Hollar passed into the service of the Duke of York, taking with him his young family.^[1]

English Civil War[edit]

Hollar continued to produce works prolifically throughout the English Civil War, but it adversely affected his income. With other royalist artists, notably Inigo Jones and William Faithorne the engraver, he stood the long and eventful siege of Basing House, and as there were some hundred plates from his hand dated during the years 1643 and 1644 he must have turned his enforced leisure to good purpose.^[1] An etching dated 1643 and entitled civilis seditio epitomizes the war with a snake with a head at each end pulling in opposite directions in front of the Giza pyramids and sphinx. Hollar took his setting, presumably symbolizing longer term values, directly from an engraving published in George Sandys' Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom 1610.^[5]

Long View of London from Bankside, 1647

Hollar's depiction of the Mary Roseengagement

Hollar joined the Royalist Regiment and was captured by parliamentary forces in 1645 during the siege of Basing House. After a short time he managed to escape. In Antwerp in 1646, he again met with the Earl of Arundel. During this period of the unrest of the Civil Wars, he worked in Antwerp, where he produced many of his most renowned works, including Dutch cityscapes, seascapes, depictions of nature, his "muffs" and "shells". In 1652 he returned to London, and lived for a time with Faithorne near Temple Bar.^[1]

In the following years, many books were published which he illustrated: Ogilby's Virgil and Homer, Stapylton's Juvenal, and Dugdale's Warwickshire, St Paul's and Monasticon (part one). However, his work for the booksellers was poorly paid, and Hollar's commissions declined as the Court no longer purchased his works after the Restoration. During this time he also lost his young son, who was reputed to have artistic ability, to the plague.^[1]

After the Great Fire of London he produced some of his famous "Views of London"; and it may have been the success of these plates and other cityscapes such as his 1649 Great View of Prague which induced the king to send him, in 1668, to Tangier, to draw the town and forts.^[6] During his return to England a desperate and successful engagement was fought by his ship, the Mary Rose, under Captain John Kempthorne, against seven Algerian men-of-war; a battle which Hollar etched for Ogilby's Africa,^[1] published in 1670.^[7]

He lived eight years after his return, still producing illustrations for booksellers, and continuing to produce well-regarded works until his death, for example a large plate of Edinburgh dated 1670. He died in extreme poverty, his last recorded words being a request to the bailiffs that they would not carry away the bed on which he was dying.^[1] Hollar was laid to rest in a tomb in St Margaret's Church, Westminster.

Cathedral of Our Lady of Antwerp

Works[edit]

Hollar was one of the best and most prolific artists of his time. His work includes some 400 drawings and 3000 etchings. Hollar produced a variety of works. His plates number some 2740, and include views, portraits, ships, religious subjects, heraldic subjects, landscapes, and still life in many different forms. Examples of the complexity and scale of his projects include the eight-plate Portuguese Genealogy and 12-plate series of insects published as Muscarum Scarabeorum Vermiumque varie figure.^[8] His architectural drawings, such as those of Antwerp and Strasbourg cathedrals, and his views of towns, are to scale, but are intended as pictures as well. He reproduced decorative works of other artists, as in the famous chalice after Mantegna's drawing.^[1]

Siege of Landrecies

One of Hollar's most famous etchings is a picture of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Antwerp, dated 1649. The work's lively figural decoration, typical of Hollar's style, includes a procession towards the entrance of the cathedral, a horse-drawn coach, and passers-by and dogs in a square in front of the church. The picture of the Antwerp cathedral was on display in 2013 at the Lobkowicz Palace during the Lobkowicz Library exhibition "Architecture in the Work of Peter Paul Rubens and Vaclav Hollar".

Hollar was known for his topographical works and his maps. These were often made after designs by other artists. He made a few maps of military engagements which were drawn by the Flemish artist and cartographer Jacob van Werden. An example is the Siege of Landrecies dated 1648, which is an etching on four plates on four conjoined sheets of paper. It comprises a plan of the city of Landrecies, with the Bois de Mourinal in the upper right, while it is under siege by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria in 1647. Some of the Duke's troops are shown under a tree in the foreground, with carts and guns. The print also offers a schematic view of the various regiments and forces under several commanders and their positions around the city. In the left foreground the French army can be seen approaching to attack the Archduke's forces.^[9]

Peony

Collections of Hollar's work are kept in the British Museum in London, the print room at Windsor Castle, the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, and the National Gallery in Prague. Hollar's works were first catalogued in 1745 by George Vertue, with a second edition in 1759. The prints were subsequently catalogued in 1853 by Gustav Parthey and in 1982 by Richard Pennington. A new complete illustrated catalogue has been published in the New Hollstein German series. Much of Hollar's work is available online from the University of Toronto in its Wenceslaus Hollar digital collection.^[10] The Folger Shakespeare Library also holds some 2000 prints, drawings, and other works by Hollar.

A very rare original copper plate produced by Hollar has survived, an engraving of the city of Kingston upon Hull in Yorkshire, and is held in the British Library.^[11]

Hollar engraved a costume book entitled Livre curieux contenant la naifve representation des habits des femmes des diverses parties du monde comme elles s'habillent a present (Entertaining book containing the simple depiction of the clothes of women from different parts of the world as they dress now}}^[12] The book includes a series of 28 plates representing the attire of common women, mostly from European countries, from the 17th century. The book was published in 1662 in Paris by Baltazar Moncornet.

Legacy[edit]

The Výtvarná škola Václava Hollara [cs] (Wenceslaus Hollar Secondary School of Art), a High School of Arts and Higher Art School in Prague, is named after him.

Francis Cleyn

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Francis Cleyn (or Francesco Cleyn or Clein; also Frantz or Franz Klein) (c. 1582 – 1658) was a German-born painter and tapestry designer who lived and worked in England.

Life and career[edit]

Francis Cleyn was born in Rostock in Germany, and while a youth displayed such abilities that he was retained in the service of Christian IV of Denmark. During this time he painted, in 1611, a half-length portrait of Christian, now in the gallery of Copenhagen, and executed decorative works in the castle of Rosenborg and other places. Here, too, he met Sir Robert Anstruther, then ambassador extraordinary from England to the court of Denmark.^[1]

He was sent to Italy to study, and remained there four years, studying at Rome and Venice; at Venice he was introduced to Sir Henry Wotton, then English ambassador to the republic. After returning to Denmark, he proceeded to England with letters of introduction from Anstruther and Wotton to Charles, prince of Wales. He found Charles away on his expedition with Buckingham to Spain, but was warmly received by James I, who saw in him the very man he wanted for the Mortlake Tapestry Works, the new tapestry manufactory which he had recently set up under Sir Francis Crane at Mortlake, London.^[1]

Perseus and Andromeda (1635–1645) by Francis Cleyn

So anxious was he to obtain Cleyn's services that he wrote in person to the king of Denmark, requesting that Cleyn, who had to return to Denmark to finish some work for the king, might be allowed to return to England, and offering to pay all expenses. The request was granted, and Cleyn returned to England to enter the service of Prince Charles, and was immediately employed at Mortlake.^[1]

On the accession of Charles I to the throne in 1625, he rewarded Cleyn by granting him denization and a pension for life of £100 per annum. He also built for him at Mortlake a residence near the tapestry manufactory. Here Cleyn settled with his family, and superintended the copying of cartoons, and designed the frames in which the subjects were enclosed in the tapestry.^[1]

Charles sent down five out of the seven original cartoons of Raphael from the Acts of the Apostles, then recently acquired, to be copied and reproduced in tapestry under Cleyn's direction. Copies of these were made by Cleyn's sons, Francis and John, and they were worked into tapestry at Mortlake. These and the other productions of the Mortlake manufactory were held in high estimation, especially in France, and dispersed over the continent.^[1]

Tapestries depicting the story of Hero and Leander designed by Cleyn and woven in the 1630s at the Mortlake Tapestry Works on display at the Primate's Palace in Bratislava, Slovakia

A set of six pieces, representing the history of Hero and Leander from Cleyn's designs were at the Louvre in Paris; and there are some fine pieces of grotesque at Petworth House. The grotesques and other ornaments in these works, a line in which Cleyn appears to have been unrivalled, have always been greatly admired, and some modern authorities have had no hesitation in ascribing them to the hand of Anthony van Dyck or some more famous painter, ignoring the fact that Cleyn was spoken of at the time as a second Titian, and as "il famosissimo pittore, miracolo del secolo". Cleyn was also largely employed by the nobility to decorate their mansions. Samples of his work in this line were to be seen at Somerset House, Carew House, Parson's Green, Hanworth Palace, Wimbledon Palace, Stone Park, Northamptonshire, Bolsover Castle, and the Gilt Room at Holland House, London.^[1]

With the civil war there came a check to Cleyn's prosperity, and he was chiefly employed in etching and designing illustrations for books; in 1632 he had already provided the illustrations (engraved by Pierre Lombart and S. Savery) to Sandys's edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, of which an edition was published in Paris in 1637. He designed the illustrations, ornamental head-pieces, and so on, to the editions of the classics published by John Ogilby, namely Æsop's Fables (1651), Virgil (English edition 1654, Latin 1658), and Homer, (1660). His designs were engraved by Pierre Lombart, William Faithorne, and Wenceslaus Hollar, and were so much admired that the king of France had those for Virgil copied in a special edition of his own. Cleyn etched title-pages for E. Montagu's Lacrymæ Musarum (1650), Thomas Fuller's A Pisgah-sight of Palestine (1650), a frontispiece to Lysis, or the Extravagant Shepherd, and perhaps the etchings in the 1654 and 1660 editions of that work. He published in the form of grotesques some sets of original etchings, namely Septem Liberates Artes (1645), Varii Zophori Figuris Animalium ornati (1645), Quinque Sensuum Descriptio (1646); and a friend and contemporary artist, a Mr. English, etched some grotesques (1654), and a humorous piece from Cleyn's designs.^[1]

There are other etchings in the print room at the British Museum, attributed with great probability to Cleyn. Although he retained his house at Mortlake, he resided for some time in Covent Garden, and died in London in 1658 at an advanced age.^[1]

Family[edit]

A 17th– or 18th-century drawing of Cleyn by George Vertue, possibly based on a 1646 portrait

On his death, Cleyn left three sons, Francis, John (both mentioned above), and Charles; and three daughters, Sarah, Magdalen, and Penelope. Francis Cleyn the younger was born in 1625, and was buried at Covent Garden on 21 October 1650. With his brother John he followed his father's profession, and they both attained repute as draughtsmen and miniature painters.^[1]

It is difficult to distinguish their work from that of their father. A series of drawings of the cartoons of Raphael were found at Kensington Palace; they bear the dates 1640–1646, are executed on a large scale, and highly finished; some are signed by John Cleyn, and were evidently executed by him and his brother at Mortlake. They were seen by John Evelyn, who states that the brothers were then both dead. Penelope Cleyn appears to have been also a miniature painter, and to her have been ascribed two miniatures of Cecil, Lord Roos (1677), and Dorothea, daughter of Richard Cromwell (1668), signed P.C.^[1]

Francis Cleyn
Frantz or Franz Klein
Cleyn in an 18th-century (1762?) etching by Thomas Chambars
Born	c. 1582 Rostock, Germany
Died	1658 (aged 75–76) London, England
Known for	designing tapestries at the Mortlake Tapestry Works, Mortlake, London
Patron(s)	Christian IV of Denmark, Charles I of England