Maria de Wilde (7 January 1682 – 11 April 1729) was a Dutch engraver and playwright of the

Dutch Republic The United Provinces of the Netherlands, also known as the (Seven) United Provinces, officially as the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands (Dutch: ''Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden''), and commonly referred to in historiography ...

. She was born and died in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

, where she played an active part in the upper-class bourgeois world of artists and writers, and gained a reputation by engraving her wealthy father's art collection. Formerly credited also with four plays, modern scholars only ascribe a tragedy and possibly a comedy to her.

Biography

Maria de Wilde was one of eight children of Jacob de Wilde, a high-ranking official (collector-general) in the

Admiralty of Amsterdam The Admiralty of Amsterdam was the largest of the five Dutch admiralties at the time of the Dutch Republic. The administration of the various admiralties was strongly influenced by provincial interests. The territory for which Amsterdam ...

and Hendrina Veen; on her mother's side she was descended from the religious leader

Jacobus Arminius Jacobus Arminius (10 October 1560 – 19 October 1609), the Latinized name of Jakob Hermanszoon, was a Dutch theologian during the Protestant Reformation period whose views became the basis of Arminianism and the Dutch Remonstrant movement. H ...

, and the family continued the adherence to Remonstrantism. Two of her siblings died young. The family was well-off and for a while rented a house on the

Keizersgracht The Keizersgracht (; "Emperor's canal") is a canal in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It is the second of the three main Amsterdam canals that together form the Grachtengordel, or canal belt, and lies between the inner Herengracht and outer Prinsengr ...

canal, before they bought the building and the adjacent homes. De Wilde remained single until relatively late for her period; in 1710, she married Gijsbert de Lange (1677–1758?), also an official with the Admiralty. They had two children, one of whom reached adulthood; the other died shortly after birth. There appears to have been some doubt about her death date: earlier biographies list it as unknown, as does de Jeu's 2000 study of women poets of the

. Van Oostrum's 2013 article for the ''Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland'', however, has 11 April 1729 as a death date; she was laid to rest in the family grave in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. Collection of Jacob de Wilde

Maria was well-educated and while not much is known of her life, all evidence indicates she was a cultured person with artistic talent; she was praised for her singing voice, her poetry, and her harpsichord playing. She learned

engraving Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an in ...

from Adriaan Schoonebeek. Her father had an impressive art collection which brought many visitors including the Russian tsar Peter the Great, who visited the de Wilde family to admire the collection on 13 December 1697. Maria made an engraving of this meeting between the tsar and her father, which marks "the beginning of the West European classical tradition in Russia". In 1717, on his second visit, she gave him a print of the engraving: he reciprocated by giving her a jewel. She earned a national reputation as an engraver with the work she did for the catalogs of her father's collection. Fifty-five engravings of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures were published in ''Signa antiqua e museo Jacobi de Wilde'' in 1700, and ''Gemma selecta antiqua e museo Jacobi de Wilde'' (1703) contained 188 engravings of coins and

engraved gem An engraved gem, frequently referred to as an intaglio, is a small and usually semi-precious gemstone that has been carved, in the Western tradition normally with images or inscriptions only on one face. The engraving of gemstones was a major lux ...

s. One of her admirers was the German lawyer and poet Andreas Lange, who found her at work in her father's house and became enamored with her. A Latin poem praising her was translated into Dutch. She was also praised in poetry by the scholar, cartographer, and philologist

Adriaan Reland Adriaan Reland (also known as ''Adriaen Reeland/Reelant'', ''Hadrianus Relandus'') (17 July 1676, De Rijp, North Holland5 February 1718, UtrechtJohn Gorton, ''A General Biographical Dictionary'', 1838, Whittaker & Co.) was a noted Dutch Oriental ...

Drama

De Wilde was formerly often credited with four plays in verse, all translations or adaptations of existing works. Her first play, ''Abradates en Panthea'', was published anonymously with the motto ''Sine Pallade nihil'' ("nothing without Pallas") on the title page, a phrase with which she became associated. While contemporaries (and some modern critics) considered it a translation of

François Tristan l'Hermite François l'Hermite (c. 16017 September 1655) was a French dramatist who wrote under the name Tristan l'Hermite. He was born at the Château de Soliers in the Haute Marche. Life His adventures began early, for he killed his enemy in a due ...

's ''Penthée'' (1637), it may well be inspired by

Xenophon Xenophon of Athens (; grc, Ξενοφῶν ; – probably 355 or 354 BC) was a Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian, born in Athens. At the age of 30, Xenophon was elected commander of one of the biggest Greek mercenary armies o ...

's ''

Cyropaedia The ''Cyropaedia'', sometimes spelled ''Cyropedia'', is a partly fictional biography of Cyrus the Great, the founder of Persia's Achaemenid Empire. It was written around 370 BC by Xenophon, the Athenian-born soldier, historian, and student of Soc ...

''. While her name was left off the title page, the dedicatory poems clearly identified her by name. After her marriage she stopped publishing, and while she may have died in 1729, a farce, ''Het zwervende portret'', appeared in 1742 with her name and motto on the title page; the play is an adaptation of

Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps, born in 1689 in Paris, where he died on March 12, 1761, was a playwright, theater historian, libertine novelist and French translator. In his youth he was the secretary of François de Neufville, duc de Vill ...

s ''Le portrait''. Two further plays published in 1755 have the motto in it: the comedy ''De bekroonde Boere-rijmer'' (possibly a translation of a 1726 German play) and the farce ''Don Domingo Gonzales of de Man in de maan''. Whether the 1742 play is de Wilde's or not is a matter of dispute, with van Oostrum's biography stating that the motto appears in a poem written after de Wilde's death and that spelling variations between the four occurrences also point to different authors. That the other two are hers is currently denied by critics.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilde, Maria de 1682 births 1729 deaths 18th-century engravers 18th-century Dutch women writers 18th-century Dutch women artists 17th-century women artists 18th-century Dutch dramatists and playwrights Engravers from Amsterdam Burials at the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam Dutch women dramatists and playwrights Women engravers