Martin Vanden Bogaert Desjardins

This is Martin Vanden Bogaert Desjardins, a print by Gérard Edelinck. It hangs here in the Art Institute of Chicago, and the number on its label is eighteen eighty eight point fifty nine. No date has come down to us for when it was made, so we will not guess at one.

This is a portrait print, likely modest in size, the kind of thing meant to be held and studied up close rather than seen across a room. Check whether it is on the wall today. Prints like this one are often kept out of the light and rotated in and out of view.

What you are looking at is a likeness of a man named Martin Vanden Bogaert Desjardins, made through the printmaker's hand rather than a painter's brush. Desjardins himself was a sculptor, so here is one artist's craft used to preserve the face of another.

Step close first. Look for the fine web of lines that makes the face, the little marks that build up shadow and light, the kind of patience engraving demands. Then step back and let the whole portrait settle into a face, a bearing, a sense of the man's presence.

Here is what is easy to miss. This is not a casual sketch. Engraving like this was slow, exacting work, cut into a metal plate line by line, and every mark you see was a deliberate choice. The stillness of the face hides all that labor.

Edelinck was known in his time as one of the great engravers of portraits, someone whose prints carried the likenesses of notable people to audiences far beyond anyone who could see the person, or the sculpture, in the flesh.

So stand with it a moment. Trace the lines with your eyes the way the burin once traced them in the copper. See if you can find where the engraver worked hardest, where the lines thicken and gather, and let that tell you where he wanted your eye to stay.