It’s unfortunate that Jacques de Gheyn II is not widely known beyond Dutch specialists. He exemplifies the richness of his immediate cultural context and, more broadly, of the period surrounding 1600, when so many paradigms of European art began to change dramatically. New literature on his work is most welcome. The primary book on the de Gheyn family, I. Q. Van Regteren Altena’s Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983), was based on the author’s dissertation research in the 1930s. Although full of valuable insights and providing a useful catalogue of works by the de Gheyn family, this three-volume publication is difficult to use, not widely available, and out of date. J. Richard Judson’s The Drawings of Jacob de Gheyn II (New York: Grossman, 1973) is similarly dated.

Since these earlier publications, both of which show a keen appreciation of de Gheyn’s remarkable oeuvre, his bibliography has been sporadic, but Claudia Swan’s articles have appeared recently with new insights. Her current, concise study, organized around the polar relationship of naturalism and fantasy in de Gheyn’s work, lacks a comprehensive scope but admirably fulfills its more circumscribed aims.

Swan’s understanding of early modern art theory, in particular the northern example of Karel van Mander, and of early modern science (her prior work centers on scientific, especially botanical, imagery) gives her the methodological framework to deal substantively and convincingly with de Gheyn’s art. Her approach allows us to see de Gheyn as more than a spectacularly skilled draughtsman; rather, his work embodies both the epistemological shift in early modern thought and a crucial moment in artistic theory and practice, when artists were struggling to resolve the problem of fantasy’s role in image-making. The terms of this uneasy resolution are evident in Swan’s analysis. By threading contemporary scientific and art-theoretical concerns through a number of de Gheyn’s ostensibly divergent works, she brings to light the kinship between theories of artistic imagination and the epistemology of early modern science.

Her book is divided into two parts. The first situates de Gheyn’s naturalistic images within the scientific and scholarly milieu of his friends, patrons, and colleagues at the University of Leiden; the second situates his images of witches within early seventeenth-century Dutch debates about the nature of witchcraft and its appropriate remedies.

Swan’s first chapter discusses the context surrounding the art-theoretical phrase “naer het leven,” or “from life,” and adds to an ongoing discussion of this topic by Svetlana Alpers, Walter Melion, Hessel Miedema, and others. Swan observes that the designation of a work as drawn “from life” had both economic and social cachet: it increased value and operated as an international “password” in early modern scientific circles, signaling the writer’s participation in the dual project of questioning ancient authority and gathering the evidence that would create a new natural history. Through his images, de Gheyn aligned himself with this project. However, in her second chapter on the artist’s Lugt album, comprising nearly two dozen exquisite watercolors of natural specimens, Swan teases out de Gheyn’s insistent “authorial presence” from the transparent objectivity implied by working naer het leven, concluding that even as the Lugt album watercolors appear to present unmediated nature, they also declare de Gheyn’s artistry and reinforce that claim by devices like framing and signing. Thus, the tension between naturalism and artistic intervention remains unresolved—a remnant, she argues, of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature—but both carried social significance within the circle of friends, scholars, and patrons that de Gheyn cultivated.

In her third chapter, Swan explores early modern attempts to order nature through classification systems based largely on visually apprehensible morphological and quantitative properties: those traits recorded in de Gheyn’s drawings and watercolors of natural specimens. When de Gheyn shifted his attention to painting, an upward move in terms of artistic status, he produced early examples of the floral still life that were shaped, Swan argues, not only by a sense of wonder but also by the tabular or grid-like means of classification employed by early modern science—for example, in the design of the garden at the University of Leiden. Having further complicated the notion of “drawn from life,” Swan proceeds to de Gheyn’s images of witchcraft, which she analyses in terms of contrasting, gendered concepts of melancholy—one for the male artist and one for the female witch—and their respective constructive and destructive uses of fantasy.

It is gratifying to me to see that part 2 of Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland parallels my simultaneous interpretation of de Gheyn’s witchcraft images in chapter 5 of The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). De Gheyn’s attitude toward witches has been hard to decipher (see Hults, 145 and 288, notes 1–3, for an overview of opinions and citations). Van Regteren Altena suggested that de Gheyn was influenced by the Dutch tradition—inspired by Johann Wier (or Weyer) and Reginald Scot—of skepticism and judicial restraint when it came to witchcraft. In contrast, Judson, in keeping with the now-discredited idea that early modern witches practiced a surviving pagan religion, wrote that de Gheyn visited witches’ gatherings in a spirit of scientific observation. The artist’s images have also been read in limited iconographic terms that do not reveal any particular view of witchcraft. In contrast, both Swan and I see de Gheyn’s familial ties to the Bassons, who published the Dutch translation of Scot, and his affinity with Dutch intellectuals, who carefully considered the problem of witchcraft to arrive at a reasoned and humane approach, as decisive evidence. Read contextually, de Gheyn’s images, Swan argues, were pictorial manifestations of current debates about the reality of witchcraft and presented it as a product of deluded imaginations (174).

The linchpin of Swan’s analysis, and important to my study as well, is the concept of melancholy that figured so heavily in Wier and Scot’s understanding of witchcraft. Both of us build on Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) to interpret de Gheyn’s images in terms of the female pathology of melancholy versus the productive melancholy of the male artist. One of Swan’s concluding remarks about the parallelism of demonological theory and artistic theory echoes the premise of my own, broader study of early modern witchcraft images: “The parallelism has allowed me to posit that de Gheyn and other artists maintained an interest in the representation of witchcraft, even where it was hardly accepted as a credible phenomenon, precisely because generating such images literally constituted an exercise of the imagination” (195).

My main criticism of Swan’s book is her uneven and reticent attention to gender, confined almost entirely to the second part of her book despite the fact that gender has long been an important category of analysis for the history of science: see, for example, Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 33–42 and Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 69–96. Admittedly, as a feminist scholar, I come at this subject with different rhetorical aims; however, such studies would have provided Swan with another way to relate the naturalistic and imaginative aspects of de Gheyn’s oeuvre. When she questions how male artists might be implicated in the witch-hunts through their production of images, she concludes that the question is “thorny” (193). For me, it is all too clear that images of witches were highly instrumental in male artists’ efforts at self-fashioning and self-promotion in a period when women artists were few and far between, partly because of the masculine terms in which art was theorized and practiced and partly because of women’s broader social and economic oppression. Science, too, was instrumental for men, affirming and sustaining ideas of male intellectual and moral superiority and control over women as well as a feminized nature.

In conclusion, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland is an important addition to the literature on de Gheyn and an informative and engaging read. Although it is fully and intelligently theorized in the areas of demonology, science, and art theory, readers may find its treatment of gender partial. Nevertheless, it is an essential book for academic art history collections. I hope that the interest in de Gheyn it sparks will lead to a fuller discussion of his oeuvre, which includes, after all, a range of subjects not fully encompassed under the conceptual umbrella Swan and I chose in our recent investigations.