Philip Galle

Philip (or Philips) Galle (1537 – March 1612) was a Dutch publisher, best known for publishing old master prints, which he also produced as designer and engraver. He is especially known for his reproductive engravings of paintings.

Galle was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands, where he was a pupil of the humanist and engraver Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert. According to the RKD, he married Catharina van Rollant on 9 June 1569. They had five children who later became active as artists: Theodoor, Cornelis, Philips II, Justa (who married the engraver Adriaen Collaert) and Catharina (who married the engraver Karel de Mallery).

In Haarlem he engraved several works of the Haarlem painter Maarten van Heemskerck. Even while he worked from 1557 for the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock, he established himself as an independent printer in Haarlem in 1563, where he made prints after Johannes Stradanus and Maerten de Vos. In 1569 the series of Counts of Holland and Zeeland was published, a series of six engravings which he made in Haarlem with Willem Thibaut, just before moving to Antwerp somewhere near the end of 1569 or the start of 1570, probably to avoid the Siege of Haarlem.

His first house in Antwerp was most probably a house called Het Gulden Hert (The Golden Deer), opposite the house of the mapmaker Ortels (also known as Ortelius). He managed Cock's press and succeeded Cock in 1570 and was received as a citizen of Antwerp the following year. The work contains an approbatio, or permission from the ecclesiastical (Roman Catholic) authorities to publish. Galle had a difficult relationship with religion and political power during his entire life. He was a friend of the Antwerp printer Christopher Plantin and perhaps part of the secretive humanist circle of the Familia Caritatis (Family of Love), which makes it difficult to place him as Catholic or Protestant during the Dutch Revolt.

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