" primary name: primary name: Woutneel, Hans
other name: other name: Woutneel, John
Details
individual; publisher/printer; Flemish; British; Male
Life dates
1580 active-1603/8 died between
Biography
Bookseller and print publisher. Born in Antwerp, emigrated as refugee to London after 1585; major figure in Anglo-Flemish book and art trade. Hans Woutneel has reasonably been called 'the earliest known London printseller of any consequence.' Nothing is known about his life prior to his arrival in England in the 1570s, but his continuing connections with the Netherlands show that he must have come from there. He was a protestant, and doubtless one of the many refugees from Alva's persecution.
The first documentary record of Woutneel's presence in England is his admission to the Stationer's Company, listed in the Company Register for February 1580. Earlier evidence which has been adduced is unreliable and due to the confusion caused by the multiplicity of spellings of Woutneel's name (no less than seventeen variations have been found). Given the difficulty of entering the the Stationer's Company, it is certain that he must have lived in London for some years prior to his admission.
During the 1580's Woutneel was a (perhaps the) principal intermediary between the dissident intellectual community in Antwerp, most notably Abraham Ortelius, the prominent map-maker and humanist, and the community of religious exiles in London, centred in Blackfriars. Ortelius's correspondence with his nephew Jacob Cole, a prominent merchant and writer, and the historian Emanuel van Meteren, both in London, contains numerous references to Woutneel, invariably in the context of the receipt or delivery of books, as well as more personal items such as seeds for exotic plants. Woutneel also appears in the records of the Antwerp publishing house of Christophe Plantin, another leading member of the humanist movement in Antwerp. Woutneel was one of two leading London-based distributors of Plantin's products, and is listed as 'Libraire à Londres' in Plantin's records.
Woutneel's connection with the print publishing field resulted from a collaboration with Crispijn de Passe who, although never in England himself, exercised the most pervasive stylistic influence on the early development of printmaking in England. There is no record of how the Woutneel/de Passe relationship was initially established, but it is likely that men such as Ortelius and Jan Moretus (successor to Christophe Plantin's publishing business) played a central role.
In 1592, Woutneel published a de Passe engraving of a portrait of Queen Elizabeth; two further portraits followed in 1596 and 1603. In addition, he published six other loose prints: four maps, a double portrait of Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabella, and Benjamin Wright's Royall Progeny of King James (entered in the Stationer's Register on 19 July 1603 by Edward White). He re-published Hans Blum's 'The booke of five collumnes of architecture' and collaborated with de Passe in producing the collection of botanical prints which has come to be known as the 'Altera Pars'. In 1603 Woutneel effusively proclaimed his loyalty to James I by including a dedication from himself on his publication of William Kip's commemorative map of the British Isles. A dedication from a print publisher (as opposed to an artist or engraver) is most unusual. In 1597 Hendrik Goltzius gave authoirty to a third party to collect a debt of 96 guilders owed to him by Woutneel, presumably for prints that he had taken on consignment (see Larry Nichols in 'Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek', 1993, p.92).
Little is known of Woutneel's personal life. The 1582 List of Strangers shows that had received his denizenage papers, was a member of the English Church, and had a wife, Marie, who remained a member of the Dutch Church. His only known address was a house in St. Paul's Churchyard. Baptismal records of the Dutch Church reveal that he had three children, none of whom appear to have become involved with publishing prints or books. Woutneel died sometime between 1603, the date of his last dated print, and 1608, when a reprint of Blum's treatise appeared with his widow's name at the address in St. Paul's Churchyard." - https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG132381, 29.07.2022
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