Woeiriot de Bouzey

Born into a family of goldsmiths, Pierre Woeiriot II turned to engraving, producing book illustrations and engraved portraits. Woeiriot worked mainly in Nancy, for Duke Charles III of Lorraine, and in Lyon, where he settled for a few years around 1554-1555, converting to Protestantism. He is thought to have made several trips to Italy around 1560, during which he came into direct contact with the works of the Renaissance and early Mannerism. In the mid-1560s, he began illustrating the Old Testament in a suite published in 1580 and dedicated to the Duke of Lorraine, followed by the Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes de Georgette de Montenay between 1566 and 1577. In 1562, he inherited his mother Urbaine de Bouzey’s estate and title at Damblain in the Vosges, and settled there. He then added the letters D and B to his monogram to add de Bouzey to Pierre Woeiriot and form PWDB.

Pierre Woeiriot is an artist who is only rarely found on the art market, but whose graphic corpus is beginning to emerge thanks to studies in recent years. An important addition to a rare corpus, our drawing depicts the Hebrews working as slaves for the Egyptians and making the bricks needed to build the temples (Exodus, chapter 1). It is the model for an engraving of which an impression can be found in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Cambridge (fig. 1). Bearing the artist’s full monogram with Lorraine cross,¹ the print must therefore be dated after 1562. Stylistically, our sheet is similar to two drawings in the Louvre: Joseph sold by his brothers (Fig. 2 – Inv. RF 5937) and Moses softening the bitter waters of Mara (Fig. 3 – Inv. RF 5938 and Fig. 4: the engraving in the Louvre), a drawing in the British Museum (Fig. 5 – Inv. 1883.0609.108) and a last one in a private collection. All five works, whose style is, in the words of Dominique Cordellier, “a mixture between the expressive density of a Heemskerk and the fine rectitude of Lambert Suavius”,² relate to a suite of Old Testament illustrations begun in 1561 and published in 1580.³

Initially due to comprise 36 scenes, the series was dedicated to the Duc de Lorraine⁴ and prepared with the financial help of Antoine Go (Inv. Ed. 5. c. Rés).⁵ These five drawings show only minor differences when compared with their respective prints: here, the sole difference is that water is not yet flowing from the tub held by the man in the foreground to the right. Both drawing and print are in the same direction – the same is true for other drawings by Woeiriot, who must have used an intermediate tracing process to transfer his compositions onto the printing plates, thereby preserving the direction of the original drawing.⁶

In addition to these five drawings, five others, of quite different style from ours, are in the Victoria & Albert Museum. With a sixth one in Darmstadt, they form the early preparatory works for the illustration of Pinax Iconicus antiquorum ac variorum in sepulturis rituum (1556). As noted by Paulette Choné:”Beyond his place in the history of printmaking, Woeiriot stands as the foremost introducer in Lorraine of an erudite symbolism – profoundly original, insolent in its subtlest expressive details, perpetually unexpected, and capable of conveying, with an almost absurd grace, points of doctrine of the utmost seriousness.”⁷