Attractive design in black ink with grey washes by Jan Gerard Waldorp, for the frontispiece of Betje Wolff's pedagogical essay Proeve over de opvoeding (1779). The drawing shows a lady entering a room where a mother is sitting with a baby, a cradle beside her, and several other children in the room reading and playing, with a bookcase in the background, with a globe on top. Noach van der Meer the younger engraved the frontispiece after this drawing, and Allart in Amsterdam published the book jointly with Isaac van Cleef in The Hague in 1779. The essay is the only pedagogical work of the important eighteenth-century Dutch women writers duo Wolff and Deken. Wolff (1738-1804) discusses the importance of the mothers role in raising children: a mother should read a lot to educate her children in a broad range of subjects and she should not tell, or let her children read, foolish folk tales, but instead present them with stories from the Bible, classical antiquity and Dutch history.
Waldorp (1740-1806) was a contemporary of Jacobus Buijs and Reinier Vinkeles. He was director of the Drawing Academy in Haarlem, and from 1779 to 1781 director of the Drawing Academy in Amsterdam, and later conservator of the national gallery (predecessor of the Rijksmuseum) in The Hague. He also designed stage sets for the new theatre in Amsterdam. The present drawing is very interesting for its vivid design of the interior as well as the clothing of a Dutch middle-class family in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
In very good condition. For the book: Buijnsters, Bibl. Wolff & Deken 50; Heimeriks & Toorn, De hele Bibelebontse berg, pp. 216-217 ; for Waldorp: Scheen II, p. 560; Thieme & Becker XXXV, p. 79; Waller, p. 354; Wurzbach II, p. 839.