(DEVOTION). BOUDT, Cornelius de and Martin BOUCHÉ. ~ [Two devotional prints on the theme of love. Antwerp, late-seventeenth or early eighteenth century].
Two engraved prints on paper (92 × 125 mm), hand-coloured (gouache with gold borders). Slightly thumbed, old manuscript ?captions on verso, obliterated at an early date.
Two attractive devotional cards on the theme of love. Both invoke the imagery of the hunt. One reads: ‘L’amour en forme de veneris / chasse les renards de mon coeur’ [Love in the form of hunters chases the foxes from my heart]; the other: ‘Il advient bien ou plus fin / de chasser pour son voisin’ [it would be better or finer to hunt for one’s neighbour]. Each has its central scene within a polygonal cartouche and is surrounded by elaborate floral borders. De Boudt and Bouché were both active as printmakers in late seventeenth-century Antwerp, the former being the pupil of the latter. De Boudt, in particular, produced many thousands of such small engravings and they continued to be printed well into the following century.