Maria De Wilde
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Maria de Wilde (7 January 1682 – 11 April 1729) was a Dutch engraver and playwright of the
Dutch Republic The United Provinces of the Netherlands, commonly referred to in historiography as the Dutch Republic, was a confederation that existed from 1579 until the Batavian Revolution in 1795. It was a predecessor state of the present-day Netherlands ...
. She was born and died in
Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...
, where she played an active part in the upper-class bourgeois world of artists and writers, and gained a reputation by engraving her wealthy father's art collection. Formerly credited also with four plays, modern scholars only ascribe a tragedy and possibly a comedy to her.


Biography

Maria de Wilde was one of eight children of Jacob de Wilde, a high-ranking official (collector-general) in the
Admiralty of Amsterdam The Admiralty of Amsterdam was the largest of the five Dutch admiralties at the time of the Dutch Republic. The administration of the various admiralties was strongly influenced by provincial interests. The territory for which Amsterdam ...
and Hendrina Veen; on her mother's side she was descended from the religious leader
Jacobus Arminius Jacobus Arminius (; Dutch language, Dutch: ''Jakob Hermanszoon'' ; 10 October 1560 – 19 October 1609) was a Dutch Reformed Christianity, Reformed minister and Christian theology, theologian during the Protestant Reformation period whose views ...
, and the family continued the adherence to Remonstrantism. Two of her siblings died young. The family was well-off and for a while rented a house on the
Keizersgracht The Keizersgracht (; "Emperor's canal") is a canal in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It is the second of the three main Amsterdam canals that together form the Grachtengordel, or canal belt, and lies between the inner Herengracht and outer Prinseng ...
canal, before they bought the building and the adjacent homes. De Wilde remained single until relatively late for her period; in 1710, she married Gijsbert de Lange (1677–1758?), also an official with the Admiralty. They had two children, one of whom reached adulthood; the other died shortly after birth. There appears to have been some doubt about her death date: earlier biographies list it as unknown, as does de Jeu's 2000 study of women poets of the
Dutch Republic The United Provinces of the Netherlands, commonly referred to in historiography as the Dutch Republic, was a confederation that existed from 1579 until the Batavian Revolution in 1795. It was a predecessor state of the present-day Netherlands ...
. Van Oostrum's 2013 article for the ''Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland'', however, has 11 April 1729 as a death date; she was laid to rest in the family grave in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. Maria was well-educated and while not much is known of her life, all evidence indicates she was a cultured person with artistic talent; she was praised for her singing voice, her poetry, and her
harpsichord A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a musical keyboard, keyboard. Depressing a key raises its back end within the instrument, which in turn raises a mechanism with a small plectrum made from quill or plastic that plucks one ...
playing. She learned
engraving Engraving is the practice of incising a design on a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a Burin (engraving), burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or Glass engraving, glass ar ...
from Adriaan Schoonebeek. Her father had an impressive art collection which brought many visitors including the Russian tsar
Peter the Great Peter I (, ; – ), better known as Peter the Great, was the Sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince of all Russia, Tsar of all Russia from 1682 and the first Emperor of Russia, Emperor of all Russia from 1721 until his death in 1725. He reigned j ...
, who visited the de Wilde family to admire the collection on 13 December 1697. Maria made an engraving of this meeting between the tsar and her father, which marks "the beginning of the West European classical tradition in Russia". In 1717, on his second visit, she gave him a print of the engraving: he reciprocated by giving her a jewel. She earned a national reputation as an engraver with the work she did for the catalogs of her father's collection. Fifty-five engravings of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures were published in ''Signa antiqua e museo Jacobi de Wilde'' in 1700, and ''Gemma selecta antiqua e museo Jacobi de Wilde'' (1703) contained 188 engravings of coins and
engraved gem An engraved gem, frequently referred to as an intaglio, is a small and usually semi-precious gemstone that has been carved, in the Western tradition normally with images or inscriptions only on one face. The engraving of gemstones was a major lux ...
s. One of her admirers was the German lawyer and poet Andreas Lange, who found her at work in her father's house and became enamored with her. A Latin poem praising her was translated into Dutch. She was also praised in poetry by the scholar, cartographer, and philologist Adriaan Reland.


Drama

De Wilde was formerly often credited with four plays in verse, all translations or adaptations of existing works. Her first play, ''Abradates en Panthea'', was published anonymously with the motto ''Sine Pallade nihil'' ("nothing without Pallas") on the title page, a phrase with which she became associated. While contemporaries (and some modern critics) considered it a translation of François Tristan l'Hermite's ''Penthée'' (1637), it may well be inspired by
Xenophon Xenophon of Athens (; ; 355/354 BC) was a Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian. At the age of 30, he was elected as one of the leaders of the retreating Ancient Greek mercenaries, Greek mercenaries, the Ten Thousand, who had been ...
's ''
Cyropaedia The ''Cyropaedia'', sometimes spelled ''Cyropedia'', is a partly fictional biography of Cyrus the Great, the founder of Persia's Achaemenid Empire. It was written around 370 BC by Xenophon, the Athens, Athenian-born soldier, historian, and studen ...
''. While her name was left off the title page, the dedicatory poems clearly identified her by name. After her marriage she stopped publishing, and while she may have died in 1729, a farce, ''Het zwervende portret'', appeared in 1742 with her name and motto on the title page; the play is an adaptation of Pierre-François Godard de Beauchampss ''Le portrait''. Two further plays published in 1755 have the motto in it: the comedy ''De bekroonde Boere-rijmer'' (possibly a translation of a 1726 German play) and the farce ''Don Domingo Gonzales of de Man in de maan''. Whether the 1742 play is de Wilde's or not is a matter of dispute, with van Oostrum's biography stating that the motto appears in a poem written after de Wilde's death and that spelling variations between the four occurrences also point to different authors. That the other two are hers is currently denied by critics.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilde, Maria de 1682 births 1729 deaths 18th-century Dutch engravers 18th-century Dutch women writers 18th-century Dutch women artists 17th-century Dutch women artists 18th-century Dutch dramatists and playwrights Engravers from Amsterdam Burials at the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam Dutch women dramatists and playwrights Dutch women engravers