The Master of the Small Landscapes, a draftsman who in the mid-sixteenth century penned several dozen rustic views of the countryside surrounding Antwerp, has been identified as both the renowned Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the obscure Joos van Liere, not to mention a considerable number of men between those two extremes. Wisely, Alexandra Onuf does not attempt to add yet another attribution to the pile. Instead, she examines how these images evolved in the nearly hundred years between Hieronymus Cock's 1559 publication of the first set of etchings after the drawings and Johannes Galle's printing of a fourth edition, in approximately 1640. This, of course, spans the period before, during, and after the Dutch Revolt. Although the sources Onuf uses are well known to specialists, the picture that emerges from her examination of them is timely for today's scholarly context.

In her opening pages, Onuf invokes Roland Barthes's seminal essay “The Death of the Author” as a means of focusing not on the intentions of a putative draftsman but on the actions of the earliest “readers” of these designs, whom she identifies as the publishers that issued the subsequent prints over the course of the next century in the Low Countries. And while the significance of these agrarian views for the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape tradition has often been noted, the various editions have not been studied as a continuous phenomenon that reflected—sometimes clearly, sometimes more obliquely—the tumultuous events of those eight decades. Ultimately, this is a study of the role that print publishers played during the Dutch Revolt, as seen through the various editions of the Small Landscapes.

As Onuf points out, when Hieronymus Cock converted the drawings in his possession to etchings, he elevated humble landscape designs from peripheral subject matter to the primary topic. This is what Walter Gibson labeled “the rustic landscape,” the binary opposite of the vast vistas seen from an elevated point of view that were so characteristic of midcentury Antwerp workshops. Cock issued the designs in two separate series, the first a set of eighteen prints, in 1559, and the second a set of twenty-six, in 1561. No artist was identified. That anonymity was fleeting, however. Forty years later, in 1601, Philips Galle reissued the prints as a single series and ascribed them, somewhat surprisingly, to the Italianate printmaker Cornelis Cort. Approximately a decade later his son Theodoor Galle published a third edition, now reducing the total number of prints from forty-eight to twenty-seven. By eliminating both identifiable structures and substantial manor houses, he transformed the series into a generic and modest view of the ideal countryside, which, like his father, he ascribed to Cornelis Cort. But the Flemish countryside was of interest to the inhabitants of the northern Netherlands as well. Apparently unable to acquire the plates, in 1612 Claes Jansz. Visscher of Amsterdam copied and published twenty-three of Cock's set of 1561 and added two more plus a new title page, in which the views are identified as the duchy of Brabant, delineated by “P. Breugelio”—that is, Pieter Bruegel. The last edition Onuf examines, the fourth, was published by Theodoor Galle's son, Johannes, probably in the early 1640s. Like his father and grandfather, he identified Cornelis Cort as the inventor. Into a number of these images that had been bereft of narrative, Johannes Galle inserted active figures that he lifted from Jacques Callot's magisterial 1620 etching of the Fair at Impruneta. Tellingly, he also appropriated figures in violent conflict from Callot's large Miseries of War series of 1633, which provide a forceful contrast to the sheets depicting bucolic images of the ideal countryside of yesteryear.

The reader learns a lot from Onuf's text. But one has to wonder if Barthes's “Death of the Author” is an appropriate model for the early modern period. As the publishers keep signaling, the inventor plays a significant role in this era. Agency matters, in ways it didn't seem to for artists a century earlier. The choices the draftsman made, coupled with the decisions the publisher effected, give us some vision of a (multiple) personality tethered to the countryside during the Eighty Years War. These are individuals we would like to get to know better, with or without a name.