Spring

Adriaen van de Venne was one of the most talented book illustrators working in the Dutch Republic. This smallscale, jewel-like drawing served as a preliminary study for an illustration to Jacob Cats’s sensationally popular poem Houwelick (Marriage). Published in 1625, Cats’s volume was a kind of domestic treatise, outlining the principles of appropriate female behavior, from courtship to widowhood. In the text and the illustrations, both Cats and Van de Venne drew analogies between different stages of a woman’s life and the seasons of the year. Entitled Spring, this drawing depicts an elegant young lady presenting her companion with a fragrant bloom during a walk in the Dutch countryside. While on the one hand the sheet celebrates female powers of seduction and the enchantments of young love, the inclusion in the foreground of symbols of fidelity—a pair of dogs and a thistle plant—underscores the more didactic aspects of Cats’s poem.