Doctr. Panurgus [graphic] / MD [monogram] sculpsit.

[London], [1620-30 (first state)].
[London] : Sould by P. Stent : Sould by I. Ouerton at the white horse without Newgate neere [th]e fountaine taverne [1672 (this state)].

1 print : engraving, 35 x 41 cm

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272977

From dealer's description: "Doctor Panurgus adapted and Improved for the English Market. Droeshout (Martin the younger or Michael). [Doctor Panurgus]. To this grave doctor millions doe resorte, | both from ye cvntry, citty, & ye covrt, | whence though they com as thicke as raine can fall, | svch is his skill) as he can cvre them all, | for by his waters drvggs, conserves & potions | he pvrgeth fancies, follies, idle motions. A fine impression and the third known example of one of the rarest, most enigmatic, most discussed, and most reproduced of all early stuart genre and medical prints. Third state (of three) with John Hinde’s (fl. 1635-44) imprint erased, leaving faint traces (his surname being just legible]; with “sould by PStent” added (bottom centre) and “Sould by I. Oue^r^ton at the white horse without Newgate neere ye fountaine taverne” added (bottom left over the erased imprint). Oblong royal sheet of laid paper (with a fleur-de-lis watermark (under the doctor). Image size to the threadlines: approx. 410 x 343 mm. Sheet size: approx. 414 x 350 mm. [London: c. 1620-30], reprinted by Peter Stent [c. 1643-67] and reprinted by John Overton [c. October 1672]. State 1 – with John Hinde’s imprint [fl. 1635-44] “at the Black Bull at Cornhill near the Royal Exchange” or similar - no example known. A number of Hinde’s older copper plates were sold to Peter Stent sometime in the 1640s (Globe, Peter Stent, p.29). Considering the dating to the 1620s (see below) Hinde was not the original publisher. Like Stent, he also acquired many earlier copper plates, including a number published by Compton Holland (fl. 1616-d.1621), printseller at the sign of the Globe in Cornhill. State 2 - with Hinde’s imprint erased (not visible in reproductions of the only known example or in the British Museum example of State 3) and Peter Stent’s imprint “sould by PStent” added [c. 1643-67 (advertised in 1662 “one plat of Dr. Pennargus”)]. Known only in the example at the Wellcome Collection, London (15851i) [cut to or within the thread-line and mounted; no provenance given but acquired from Grosvenor Prints c. 2000]. This is probably the example of this state that was in the “Stowe Granger” auction (a vast collection of British portrait prints collected by the Duke of Buckingham (1776-1839) to extra-illustrate a set of James Granger’s Biographical History of England); Stowe sale, Sotheby, 5+/3/1849, lot 418 (“an extraordinarily rare, and probably unique engraving”). State 3 – with John Overton’s imprint added [c. 1672]. Known only in this example and the one at the British Museum (1854,1113.154) which has an ink note in the lower margin by Sir Roger L’Estrange “Licensed October. 28. 1672 | Ro L’Estrange”; the BM example was purchased from Henry Graves & Co., 1854 and was previously in the collection of Thomas Lloyd (c.1757-1843), sale by George Jones, 1/8/1825, lot 92. As Antony Griffiths noted, the British Museum example is, “one of a group of five [recte six] such licenses which have so far been recorded. The others are the set of the Twelve Months by Robert Vaughan in the British Museum (169.b.1; Globe 548); a set of satires on marriage in the Folger Library (Globe 456); a portrait of Mother Louse in the British Museum (BMSat 797); and Hollar's titleplate for 'A new book of flowers and fishes' in Robert Harding's collection (Pennington 2063). All bear the same date, 28 October 1672, and all are publications by John Overton. Clearly Overton had submitted a pile of impressions from his old stock for approval on the same day, presumably in preparation for publishing his broadsheet catalogue which came out shortly afterwards (see Globe p.172). That so many survive implies that they all remained together in some archive for many years.” (The Print in Stuart Britain, no. 91). To these five examples can be added The Common Weales Canker Wormes (Globe 504) with Stent’s imprint and Lestrange's license with the same date now in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds and formerly in the Britwell Court library (see Provenance below). This combination of a long printing history and absolute rarity is “entirely typical of early British printmaking”, as Antony Griffiths noted of an English satirical print attributed to Renold Elstrack datable to 1607, when it was entered in the Stationers’ Register as 'A picture of the Ridinge of the Asse', but reprinted in the late 17th Century and known in only two examples at the British Museum & Harvard. (The Print in Stuart Britain, no. 90). Condition: Slightly uneven margins outside the thread-line on all sides with the plate-mark preserved in a few places. Central vertical fold. Old guard attached to verso of the left edge. There is an old repair to two short closed tears about 10mm long from the top edge to the medicine bottles labelled ‘Reason’ and ‘Councell’ and a short closed tear about 10mm long from the top edge to the medicine bottle labelled “Charity” has been recently repaired; there are a couple of very short nicks in the upper margin; there are two minute holes either side of the central fold in the text below the image of the two clergymen and in the text below the brazier (only visible with light from behind). A small diagonal area of damage across the top-right corner is a contemporary defect on the copper plate which is replicated in the other two examples. THE IMAGE – A SATIRE ON “THE FOLLIES OF DISSOLUTE YOUTH” (Malcom Jones) The complicated imagery is based on an earlier French print with the title “Le medecin guarissant Phantasie purgeant aussi par drogues la folie” [The doctor curing fantasies, and also purging folly with drugs]. which was also copied in Germany with the title “Doctor Wurmbrandt, der im gantzen Land, überall bekannt” [Doctor Worm-burner, known throughout the whole land]. That print itself was loosely derived from an earlier emblem Johann Theodore de Bry’s Proscenium humanae vitae sive emblemaata saecularie (1596/7). Emblem LXV, “Stultorum Medicus” [Doctor of Fools], depicts a doctor examining a urine bottle in the centre with a seated patient having follies purged from a gaping hole in his distended stomach at left and a patient kneeling in a steam bath with follies being distilled from a glass vessel over his head at right. This English version has considerable changes to both the image and the text – most notably the doctor’s assistant, who was feeding the (now more fashionably-dressed) young man’s (now visible) head into the furnace, has been removed and a fashionable couple have been added in the centre, a smaller furnace has replaced the pestle and mortar in the centre, a small tablet depicting two pluralist clergyman weighed down by churches has been inset at the foot and the physician is now named “DOCT PANVRGVS”. In addition the follies emerging from the young man’s head have been added to with a more English emphasis – such as the tobacco pipes, a bear being baited, a horse being taught tricks (presumably William Bankes (d. 1641)and his horse Marocco (fl. 1586-1606) and a man descending on a rope from a miniature St Paul’s Cathedral – and a man milking an ass has been added to the excrement purged from the countryman seated at the left. A large amount of original explanatory verse in English has also been added and is unique to this print. Malcolm Jones has discussed the imagery and its context several times, most recently in The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight (New Haven & London, 2010) where he introduced his “notes towards an explication” with these introductory comments: “It is certainly possible to see the subject of this sheet as a satire on the universality of folly in which a tripartite division of the realm into ‘Cvntry, Citty & ye Covrt’ is symbolized, respectively, by ‘rude Rusticall, spruce master Cittzsinne, [and] Gallant’ (i.e., the gallant is the courtier). But since the young man, prey to multifarious follies and devoted to fashionable fads and fancies, had long been the target of moralists’ especial wrath, and the saeva indignatio of the satirists, the follies of dissolute youth are what I take to be the principal subject of this puzzling sheet, which, as [Antony] Griffiths notes, ‘has a complicated ancestry’. It is signed with the monogram of the engraver Martin Droeshout (b. 1601) [but see below], who was active by the early 1620s and worked in England on into the early 1630s, but the earliest state of the present sheet to survive was probably issued in the 1650s, and is held in the Wellcome Institute collection in London, bearing [Peter] Stent’s imprint alone. ... “Naming the wonder-working doctor ‘Panvrgvs’ seems to have been Droeshout’s innovation. Why? It is unlikely that Droeshout had read Rabelais [Panurge is a foolish character in Gargantua and Pantagruel] - most English intellectuals knew only the author’s name, which they used like those of Aretino and Machiavelli, merely as a hate word. Prescott notes that Panourgia is a medical term, and that Galen uses it for ‘adulterated or false drugs’, and that, although the etymological sense of the name is neutrally ‘all-work’, later English usage similarly tended to interpret the term pejoratively as ‘ready to do anything’, that is, including illegal things, as a criminal would be. Notwithstanding this, there is no doubt that in our print Dr Panurgus is a positive figure, able to cure his patients, who come from all ranks of society – as the verses and the figures themselves make clear – of their manifold follies. Significantly, for dating purposes, the Latinate form of the name, which by itself is sufficient to suggest independence of Rabelais’s creation, is known to have been used by two English writers in 1619 and 1623 only, and perhaps strengthens the case for an origin in the 1620s.” (The Print in Early Modern Britain, Chapter Nine, “Sinful Pleasures, I”, pp. 193-4. MICHAEL DROESHOUT OR MARTIN THE YOUNGER? Although it is only signed “MD sculpsit” Doctor Panurgus has long been ascribed to Martin Droeshout the Younger, most famous for engraving the portrait of William Shakespeare which adorns the First Folio edition of his plays (1623) but this has recently been questioned. June Schlueter, in particular, has given much attention to the multiple forms of signatures and monograms with which the Droeshout family signed their prints, and has drawn the conclusion that Doctor Panurgus was probably engraved by Michael Droeshout (c.1578-1638) rather than his son Martin the Younger (1601-in or after 1640) although it has long been attributed to the latter with the consequence that it could not be dated before the 1620s. See the Bibliography below. Oddly, no consideration seems to have been given to the varied scripts which embellish prints by the father and son. The script here is even and without obvious eccentricities but the oddly thickened terminal blobs at the tips to the ascenders and descenders of many of the lower-case letters might indicate that Schlueter may be right in her suggestion, but this needs more expert attention. Schlueter’s suggested revision would allow an earlier date than is usually given to the print as it removes the necessity to date it after 1620 at the very earliest as Martin Droeshout the Younger, would have been too young. This later dating has led modern scholars to dismiss older attributions of the radically adapted imagery unique to this English version to the scandal of the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower in September 1613 and the subsequent trials in 1615/16 of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset and his mistress/wife Frances Howard, former Countess of Essex, and their accomplices for murder with the scene set in the late astrologer and medical practitioner Simon Forman’s (1552-1611) laboratory. Nonetheless, the added texts do not relate to that story at all and most of the added topical references,as Malcolm Jones noted, are appropriate to the 1620s. However, there may a simpler solution: Could it be that the “MD” monogram hides a joint production by father (Michael) and son (Martin) – the first who had engraved only one known print (The Powder Treason) since in the middle years of the first decade of the century and would not make another until A Plan of the Battle of Leipzig (1632) and the second who was barely of age and of little experience when he engraved the famous portrait of Shakespeare. It was not unusual, for example, for the lettering to be added to a copper plate by another hand to the figures. WHO COULD HAVE REDESIGNED THE IMAGERY FOR THE ENGLISH MARKET AND ADDED THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH VERSE INSCRIPTIONS? Although signed only with its ambiguous “MD sculpsit” monogram it is likely that there was an unknown English third-party intellect guiding the hand/s of the engraver/s in adapting the imagery for an English market and providing the explanatory verses, especially as it seems that the Droeshout family did not assimilate very deeply into English society – Michael married four times in London but in each case to an exiled Protestant Flemish woman and worshipped at the Dutch Reformed Church in London where Martin was baptized in 1601. There are no records of Martin’s life in London before he emigrated to Spain (and presumably converted to Catholicism) c. 1635 where he died in or around 1640. A clear mis-reading of “grimine Vsarar” for “grimme Vsurer” in the fourth line text below the pluralistic clergymen suggests an unfamiliarity with another party’s handwriting. Michael Droeshout’s large print The Powder Treason (undated but 1610-20), which survives in a unique impression at the British Museum, also has extensive engraved explanatory texts for its complicated imagery and it bears, along with Droeshout’s signature, the note “Rich: Smith: Excogitavit” in the credit line. As Antony Griffiths put it, Smith “thought up the composition in words, leaving Droeshout to visualise it as a design.” (The Print in Stuart Britain, p. 154). June Schlueter has suggested that the otherwise unidentified Richard Smith could have been the Dutch Protestant printer Richard Schilders, chief printer to the States of Zeeland from 1583 to 1618 (“Was Richard Smith Richard Schilders?”). Martin Droeshout the Younger’s large print, The Spiritual Warfare (1623 [but printed c. 1680]), which survives in a unique impression at the University of Alberta Library, Edmonton, has, as well as Droeshout’s signature the inscription “Ric: Cotes inuentor”, presumably the publisher and printer Richard Cotes (fl. 1627-52), one of the partners in the publication of the Second Folio of Shakespeare in 1632. The lengthy text, however, is printed in letterpress with upper-case captions identifying the images being the only lettering on the plate. (Jones, “English Broadsides – I", fig. 142). Another political print with an independent designer was The Double Deliverance (Amsterdam, 1621), which celebrates England’s deliverance from the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot – it was engraved by an anonymous Dutch artist but was “Invented by Samuel Ward preacher of Ipswich” (Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, no. 95). Samuel Ward (1577-1640), the puritan town preacher of Ipswich was imprisoned in the Fleet in 1621 on a complaint from the Spanish ambassador Gondomar. Like Doctor Panurgus, this plate was later reprinted in the 1650s by Peter Stent who retitled it The Papists Powder Treason and by John Overton in the 1670s. Richard Dey, a Cambridge graduate (plausibly identified by Malcolm Jones as Richard Day, (d. 1650), a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and and vicar of Prescot, Lancashire, in 1642, was credited as the designer “(perhaps in the sense of translator of intellectual content)” (British Museum website) of six large emblematic prints produced in the late 1630s. PROVENANCE: THE BRITWELL COURT LIBRARY William Henry Miller (1789-1849), M.P. (Tory) for Newcastle-under-Lyme (1831-41), of Britwell Court, Burnham, Buckinghamshire; famous for his collection of 16th & 17th Century English printed books. By descent to his cousin Samuel Christy, afterwards Christie-Miller (d. 1889); to his nephew Wakefield Christie-Miller, formerly Christy (1835-1898); to his son Sydney Richardson Christie-Miller (1874-1931); probably unnamed in a lot in the Britwell Court sale, Sotheby, 28/3-4/4/1927, Catalogue of the final portion of the Renowned Library formerly at Britwell Court, Burnham, Bucks. The Property of S. R. Christie-Miller, Esq. Lots 309-14 contained 41 “Broadsides with Engravings” comprising 16 named items and 25 others unnamed. Lot 309 was sold to Pickering & Chatto for £10, lot 310 to ?Francis Edwards for £5/5/-, lot 311 to Dobell for £5, lot 312 to Dobell for £4, lot 313 to Dobell for £9, lot 314 to Maggs for £8. However, according to the Maggs priced copy, lots 310-14 were all taken in the post-sale knockout or ring settlement by Pickering & Chatto (for £8, £8/15/-, £8, £15 and £13) while lot 309 was presumably held by them at the auction-room price of £10. Pickering & Chatto Catalogue 246 The Book Lovers’ Leaflet. A Collection of Old and Rare Books of (with some exceptions) English Literature Addenda (Hey-Oxf) Being Books acquired too late to appear Alphabetically in the former Catalogues, including our extensive purchases from THE BRITWELL COURT LIBRARY Sale. (1928). The six catalogues of addenda (Nos. 243-48) to their main series of English Literature catalogues contain broadside engravings purchased by the firm at the Britwell sales as items 11569, 11573-610a, 11631-640b, 11642a-650, including no. 11580 (5 guineas), The Common Weales Canker Wormes also dating from the mid-1620s but surviving only in a later state published by John Overton c. 1672 and known in only in the example with Sir Roger Lestrange's manuscript note “Licensed October 28, 1672” now in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds and one in the Sutherland Collection at the Ashmolean Museum. Doctor Panurgus was included in the catalogue’s Medical section as part of item 12983 (9 guineas), a group of six medical-related broadsides with engravings, The Infallible Mountebank (c. 1720), The Quack-Doctor Outwitted (c. 1730), Pharmacopola Circumforaneus (n.d.), The History of Sir Sidrophel, and his Man Whaccum (c. 1730), The Infallible Doctor (c. 1720) and To this grave Doctor Millions doe resorte [i.e. Doctor Panurgus] (c. 1670). The group remained together for almost a century and they were sold (now framed) at Bonham’s, 20/3/2024, lot 13 (“A collection of six scarce seventeenth- and eighteenth-century broadsides relating to medicine and quack doctors”) to Maggs Bros." Ordered from Maggs, D9764, 2024-08-28, email quote

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