Hendrik van den Keere
Hendrik van den Keere (c. 1540–2 – 1580) was a sixteenth-century punchcutter, or engraver of punches to make metal type, who lived in Ghent in modern Belgium.
Career
Van den Keere was the son of Ghent printer and schoolmaster Hendrik van den Keere the Elder, and his career has sometimes been confused with that of his father.
Both he and his father used the name "Henri du Tour" in French.
Van den Keere's grandfather had taken over the type foundry of .
In 1566 he took over his father's printing firm, but soon gave up printing and began to specialise in punchcutting.
From 1568 he worked particularly for Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, who operated a gigantic printing concern by contemporary standards.
Antwerp was down the River Scheldt from Ghent, where he remained living.
He was Plantin's sole typecaster from 1569 onwards.
Over the course of his career he cut around 30 typefaces.
Types
Van den Keere primarily cut type in the textura style of blackletter, roman type and music type.
The largest roman types cut by van den Keere had very bold proportions, a high x-height and a dense type colour on the page, a style that remained popular in the Netherlands after his death and became called the "Dutch taste".
Hendrik Vervliet has suggested that the goal was to create roman type "comparable for weight with Gothic letters" at a time when blackletter was still very popular for continuous reading.
His Gros canon was used by Plantin in his 1574 Commune sanctorum, a church liturgy song-book intended to be readable at a distance by an entire choir.
John A. Lane comments that his roman types "must be accepted as a major innovation...[they] influenced the seventeenth-century Dutch types that in turn influenced types in England and elsewhere" although Leon Voet felt that they "never quite equaled the elegance of his French models".
As influences on his types, Vervliet suggests an earlier type cut by Maarten de Keyser, and Lane some more recent types by Ameet Tavernier, Robert Granjon and Pierre Haultin.
His body text type in contrast is very similar to earlier types by engravers such as Claude Garamond and Granjon, who also worked for Plantin.
Van den Keere also cut a rotunda gothic type, apparently based on Spanish lettering and intended for a book to be sent to Spain, a Civilité and in Lane's view probably a set of Gothic capitals used as initials with an interlaced (Dutch: gestricte) design.
He is not known to have cut any italic types, which were not popular in the Netherlands during the 1570s.
Besides his own types, he justified matrices (setting their spacing) from other engravers, cut replacement characters for some of Plantin's types with shorter ascenders and descenders to allow tighter linespacing, and in 1572 compiled an inventory for Plantin of the types Plantin owned.
Van den Keere also owned matrices for type by other engravers, at the end of his life owning three roman types by Claude Garamond, two romans by Ameet Tavernier, and six italics and a music type by Robert Granjon.
Legacy
Van den Keere died young between 11 July and October 1580, giving him a mature career of only about 12 years, likely as a result of a leg injury he mentioned in his final letter to Plantin.
Van den Keere's family were Protestants, and with the capture of Ghent in 1584 by Spanish royal forces van den Keere's daughter (or Coletta) and his son Pieter, who became an engraver and mapmaker, lived in London around the period 1584 – 1593.
There in 1587 at the Dutch Church, Austin Friars Collette married Jodocus Hondius, a mapmaker who was probably also a punchcutter.
Pieter sometimes collaborated with him.
All three later returned to the Netherlands; following Hondius's death Collette took over his publishing business.
In 1581, van den Keere's widow sold many of his punches and matrices to Plantin.
Plantin's successors scrupulously preserved the sixteenth-century materials and records of his printing office, which became the Plantin-Moretus Museum, and a large amount of van den Keere's work survives intact there.
Thomas de Vechter, van den Keere's foreman, also acquired many of his materials from his widow, documented in a surviving inventory.
He moved to Antwerp and then Leiden, establishing a type foundry casting many van den Keere types.
De Vechter's foundry was later taken over by Arent Corsz Hogenacker in stages from 1619 – 1623, and on the closure of his type foundry in 1672 his types reached other Dutch foundries.
Matrices for the interlaced capitals ended up owned by the type foundry of Koninklijke Joh. Enschedé although Enschedé's records do not clearly confirm where they came from or when Enschedé acquired them.
Digital fonts
Digital font designers who have designed interpretations of van den Keere's roman type include Kris Sowersby, who describes his work as "dense, sharp and powerful...I love van den Keere’s texturas.
I can feel the influence of them within his roman forms: they’re both narrow, dense and sharp".
Hoefler & Co.'s release notes for its Quarto typeface, by Sara Soskolne and Jonathan Hoefler, describe van den Keere's Two-Line Double Pica display-sized roman (around 42pt) as "an arresting design marked by striking dramatic tensions"; Soskolne has said that she was attracted to "its crispness, its drama".
Dutch Type Library (DTL) have published Flamande by Matthew Carter, a revival of his textura, as well as revivals of his roman types under the names DTL Van den Keere and DTL Gros Canon for a display size.
Fred Smeijers, whose TEFF Renard typeface is based on his work, felt that basing a typeface on his work produced a "solid and sturdy variant of the Garamond style" and that he was "one of the first to make roman display types that were explicitly conceived as such."
DTL's founder received a doctorate on the spacing and proportions of early metal type, including van den Keere's, from Leiden University in 2016.
Credits to the contents of this page go to the authors of the corresponding Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik van den Keere.