Martin Droeshout

Martin Droeshout (/ˈdruːʃaʊt/ DROO-showt; April 1601 – c. 1650) was an English engraver of Flemish descent, who is best known as illustrator of the title portrait for William Shakespeare's collected works, the First Folio of 1623, edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors of the Bard. Nevertheless, Droeshout produced other more ambitious designs in his career.

Droeshout's artistic abilities are typically regarded as limited. The Shakespeare portrait shares many clumsy features with Droeshout's work as a whole. Benjamin Roland Lewis notes that "virtually all of Droeshout's work shows the same artistic defects. He was an engraver after the conventional manner, and not a creative artist."

Droeshout was a member of a Flemish family of engravers who had migrated to England to avoid persecution for their Protestant beliefs. His father, Michael Droeshout, was a well established engraver, and his older brother, John, was also a member of the profession. His mother, Susanneke van der Ersbeck (married 1595, died 1606 or 1607), was his father's first of four wives and the mother of all his five known children. His uncle, also called Martin Droeshout (1560s- c. 1642), was an established painter. No direct documentation survives about the life of Droeshout beyond the record of his baptism.

Because of the multiple family members, including his uncle with the same name, it is difficult to separate out the younger Martin's biography from surviving information. There is little doubt that a number of engravings were made by the same individual, on stylistic grounds and the similarities of the signatures and monograms used.

Though Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare is his earliest dated work, there is reason to believe he was already an established engraver, possibly having already produced the allegorical print The Spiritual Warfare. He made at least twenty four engravings in London between 1623 and 1632. These included portraits and more complex allegorical works, the most elaborate of which was Doctor Panurgus, an adaptation of an earlier engraving by Matthaeus Greuter.

Ever since the identification of the surviving records of the Droeshout family, there has been uncertainty about whether "Martin Droeshout" the engraver was the brother or the son of Michael Droeshout, though Lionel Cust in the original Dictionary of National Biography asserted what became the majority view, that the younger Martin Droeshout was the more likely candidate. In 1991 historian Mary Edmund argued that his uncle, Martin Droeshout the Elder, may have been both a painter and engraver, and that there was no evidence that the younger Droeshout ever worked as an engraver at all. She stated that the Droeshout oeuvre should all be attributed to the elder Martin. Her views were asserted in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. More recent research by June Schlueter reaffirms the traditional attribution of the engravings to the younger Droeshout.

Some time between 1632 and 1635 Droeshout emigrated to Spain, settling in Madrid. This is known because he produced a number of signed engravings there from 1635 to 1640. Art historian Christiaan Schuckman believes that Droeshout's move to Spain must have been caused by, or led to, a conversion to Catholicism, as many of these works depict Catholic saints and use Catholic symbolism. Martin's namesake, Martin the Elder, is known to have remained in London and was a staunch member of the local Dutch Protestant community throughout his life.

While in Spain Droeshout also seems to have anglicised his name to "Droeswoode" ("hout" being Dutch for "wood"), possibly because of negative attitudes to the Dutch in Spain at the time. There are no known records of Droeshout after 1640. Martin is not mentioned in his brother's will, dated 1651, which may mean that he was dead by this date, or that his family had severed links with him due to his Catholicism.