Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/383

Rh robe, and the matrix in the extended hand, are the features of the Scriverius portrait; but the head is that of another man. The stony face which Scriverius presented as the image of Coster was somewhat softened by the pencil of Van Campen, but after he had exhausted upon it all the resources of his art, it still remained a grim and unsatisfactory head, a head without any expression of genius or even of culture—the head of a hard innkeeper, but not of an inventor. It was a biting satire upon the story of Junius, all the more offensive because the portrait had as strong claim to authenticity as the legend.

Meerman refused to accept this head as a faithful portrait He produced a new likeness of the inventor, and claimed for it a superior truthfulness. In the same year, 1765, Van Osten de Bruyn published an engraving of the same head, with this explanation: " Laurens Janszoon, sheriff, of the town of Haarlem, inventor of the noble art of printing … after an old picture bought from William Corneliszoon Croon, the last descendant of Laurens Janszoon, who died, unmarried, at Haarlem in 1724." We find no vouchers for the authenticity of this portrait Croon was the man by