Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/382

372 In 1630, a new portrait of Coster was published by Adrien Rooman, with Latin and Dutch verses attached. Boxhorn mentioned this engraving in such a manner that strangers were led to believe it was a statue that had been erected to Coster.

Jacob Van Campen was induced to make another painting of the grim features in a more truly artistic style. His idealized head of Coster was engraved by Cornelis Koning, whose reproduction of the painter's fancy has ever since been accepted as an authentic portrait. Van der Linde tells a curious story about Hollandish credulity: The most amusing imitation was that of an amateur artist of the last century, C. Van den Berg, who wished to play the collector J. Marcus a trick. He engraved a small wood-cut after the portrait of Van Campen, with the name Laur' Jassoe, in old-fashioned style, underneath. With a little soot and dirt, he gave the copies an antique appearance, and made Marcus happy for a few weeks. The poet Langendijk, the type-founder Enschedé, and other amateurs, each got a copy. Van den Berg was too honest to mean anything more than fun; he told afterward to Marcus himself the value of that antique wood-cut. Although every investigator could and ought to have known these things, yet Jacobus Koning was bold enough, in the second nomenclature of his collection of rare books and manuscripts, to describe a copy of this portrait as "printed by, or at the time of, Lourens Janszoon Koster." …… The Haarlem painter L. Van der Vinne, in his youth, painted, in the beginning of the former century, a study, after a drawing of Van Campen. But lo! in 1762, this picture is offered for sale by Van Damme at Amsterdam (the same who produced the false inscriptions respecting the imaginary Corsellis of Oxford), provided at the back with a very old inscription, Lours Jans to Harlem, and the monogram A O, which was explained to mean Albert Van Oudewater. Excellent discovery! Here was a genuine contemporaneous portrait by a painter of the fifteenth century! A trifle, however, was wanted to make the joy perfect. Albert Van Oudewater, who had painted the celebrated inventor of printing in 1433, w as born in 1444! This history is full of despairing irony from beginning to end. Just as the sheriff Lourens Janszoon invents the art of printing after his death; just as Cornelis works at Donatuses before his birth; just as the chandler Lourens Janszoon Koster entirely forgets his invention during his lifetime; so the painter Albert Van Oudewater becomes a zealous Costerian long before he was born." Van der Linde, The Haarlem Legend, p. 145. The round cap, the furred