Hendrik van den Keere
Hendrik van den Keere
Main page

Hendrik van den Keere

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Hendrik van den Keere

Hendrik van den Keere (c. 1540/2 – 1580) was a punchcutter, or cutter of punches used to make metal type, who lived in Ghent in the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium). He is known for his work supplying type to the printing house of Christophe Plantin in Antwerp, one of the largest printing enterprises of the sixteenth century.

Over the course of his career he cut around thirty typefaces, including blackletter, roman type and music type. His large roman types, notable for their bold proportions and dense appearance on the page, influenced later Dutch typography and are associated with the style later described as the "Dutch taste" (goût Hollandois).

Many of van den Keere's punches, matrices and wooden pattern letters were preserved in the Plantin printing office and survive today in the collections of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp.

Hendrik van den Keere was born around 1540 in Ghent, in the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium). He was the son of the Ghent printer and schoolmaster Hendrik van den Keere the Elder. His career has sometimes been confused with that of his father, and both father and son used the French form of their name, "Henri du Tour", in some records.

Van den Keere married Elisabeth van Estelaer. The couple had several children, including Colette van den Keere (born 1568) and Pieter van den Keere (born 1571).

The family were Protestant and, during the religious conflicts in the Spanish Netherlands, moved to London in the early 1580s for religious reasons.

Their daughter Colette later became an engraver and, after her marriage to the cartographer Jodocus Hondius, helped manage the Hondius map-publishing and engraving workshop in Amsterdam. Their son Pieter became an engraver, cartographer, and publisher who worked in England and the Dutch Republic.

Van den Keere's grandfather had taken over the type foundry of Joos Lambrecht. In 1566 he took over his father's printing firm, but soon gave up printing and began to specialise in punchcutting.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.