Philip Galle - Biography

Biography

He was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands, where he was a pupil of the humanist and engraver Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert. According to the RKD, he married Catharina van Rollant on 9 June 1569. They had five children who later became active as artists; Theodoor, Cornelis, Philips II, Justa (who married the engraver Adriaen Collaert) and Catharina (who married the engraver Karel de Mallery).

In Haarlem he engraved several works of the Haarlem painter Maarten van Heemskerck, and though he worked from 1557 for the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock, he established himself as an independent printer in Haarlem in 1563, where he made prints after Johannes Stradanus, and Maarten de Vos. In 1569 the series of Counts of Holland and Zeeland was published, a series of 6 engravings which he made in Haarlem with Willem Thibaut, just before moving to Antwerp somewhere near the end of 1569 or the start of 1570, probably to avoid the Siege of Haarlem. His first house in Antwerp was most probably a house called Het Gulden Hert (The Golden Deer) opposite the house of the Mapmaker Ortels (also known as Ortelius). He managed Cock's press and succeeded Cock in 1570 and was received as a citizen of Antwerp the following year. The work contains an approbatio, which is a permission by the ecclesiastical (Roman Catholic) authorities to publish. Galle had a difficult relationship with religion and political power during his entire life. He was a friend of the Antwerp printer Christopher Plantin and perhaps part of the secretive humanist circle of the Family of Love, which makes it difficult to place him as Catholic or Protestant during the Dutch Revolt.

Some of his numerous prints made in Antwerp were after: Anthonie van Blocklandt, Hans Bol, Marcus Gheeraerts, Gerard Groening, and Hans Vredeman de Vries. Philip Galle had many pupils who became popular engravers. The map engraver Cornelis de Hooghe, who later died a gruesome death when he was beheaded and quartered in the Hague because of a conspiracy against the State, received his education when Galle still lived in Haarlem, while De Hooghe (or Hogius) already worked for himself at the moment Galle moved to Antwerp. Galle's son Cornelis followed him as an engraver. Early works of Cornelis shows a striking similarity to the work of his father. Philip Galle's press and publishing house was a success; besides his children and De Hooghe, the RKD mentions as pupils Hendrick Goltzius, Jan-Baptist Barbé, Pieter Nagel, the sons of his colleague Hans Collaert Adriaen and Jan, and Karel de Mallery. His sons and sons-in-law carried on the business at Antwerp through the seventeenth century.