Self Portrait (after Gerard Dow)

Henry Wolf

Gerard Dow, or Gerrit Dou, was a Dutch Golden Age painter and student of Rembrandt, known especially for his small-scale trompe l’oeil “niche” paintings and candle lit, nocturnal scenes and portraits. This woodengraving by Wolf was done after Dow’s very early self portrait, an oil on board, done around 1631 when the artist was just eighteen - likely when he was studying with Rembrandt. The strong chiaroscuro of the painting lent itself to Wolf’s particular engraving style, with which he was able to expertly capture the drama of subtle light changes on the block. The original painting now hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

In 1915, the year before his death, Henry Wolf won the Grand Prize for his printmaking at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. The Wolf prints we have were available for sale at the PPIE and many, such as this, were the actual prints exhibited and have the label from the PPIE, with his return address and the edition size and original price of $18.00 noted.