Maria de Wilde
Maria de Wilde (7 January 1682 – 11 April 1729) was a Dutch poet, playwright, and engraver.
Biography
Maria de Wilde was one of eight children of Jacob de Wilde, a high-ranking official in the Admiralty of Amsterdam and Hendrina Veen;[1] on her mother's side she was descended of Jacobus Arminius, and the family continued the adherece to Remonstrantism. Two of her siblings died young. The family was well-off and for a while rented on the Keizersgracht, before they bought the building and the adjacent homes. De Wilde remained single until relatively late for her time period; in 1710, she married Gijsbert de Lange (1677-1758?), also an official with the Admiralty. They had two children, one of which reached adulthood; the other died shortly after birth.[2]
Maria was well-educated and while not much is known of her life, the evidence we have indicates she was a cultured person with artistic talent; she was praised for her singing voice, her poetry, and her harpsichord play. Her father had an impressive art collection which brought many visitors including Peter the Great; the engraving she made of his first visit (in 1697) became widely known and when, on his second visit, she gave him a copy of the engraving he reciprocated by giving her a jewel.[2]
She earned a national reputation as an engraver with the work she did on the catalogs of her father's collection. 55 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. 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 in Dutch.[2] She was praised in poetry also by scholar, cartographer and philologist Adriaan Reland.[3]
Drama
De Wilde is often credited with four plays,[4] all translations.[5] Her first play, Abradates en Panthea, was published anonymously with the slogan Sine Pallade nihil ("nothing without Pallas") on the title page, a phrase with which she became associated.[2][6] While contemporaries (and some modern critics[5]) considered it a translation of François Tristan l'Hermite's Penthée (1637), it may well be inspired by Xenophon's Cyropaedia.[2] While her name was left off the title page, the dedicatory poems clearly identified her by name.[5]
After her marriage she stopped publishing, and she died, possibly, in 1729. Still, in 1742 a farce appeared, Het zwervende portret, with her name and her slogan on the title page; the play is an adaptation of Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps's Le portrait.[5] Two further plays published in 1755 have the slogan 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, one scholar saying that the slogan appears in a poem written after de Wilde's death, and that spelling variations between the four occurrences also point to different authors.[2] That the other two are not hers is denied by critics.[2][5]
References
- ^ P.C. Molhuysen, ed. (1918). "Wilde, Maria de". Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek. Vol. 4. P.J. Blok. Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff. p. 1457.
- ^ a b c d e f g Oostrum, W. R. D. van (26 February 2013). "Wilde, Maria de (1682-1729)". 1001 Vrouwen uit de Nederlandse geschiedenis (in Dutch). Retrieved 22 April 2013.
- ^ P. G. Witsen Geysbeek, ed. (1827). "Maria de Wilde". Biographisch anthologisch en critisch woordenboek der Nederduitsche dichters. Vol. 6. Amsterdam: C. L. Schleijer. pp. 502–503.
- ^ J. G. Frederiks, ed. (1888—1891). Biographisch woordenboek der Noord- en Zuidnederlandsche letterkunde. F. Jos. van den Branden. Amsterdam: L. J. Veen. p. 886.
{{cite book}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ a b c d e Jeu, A. de (2000). 't Spoor der dichteressen: netwerken en publicatiemogelijkheden van schrijvende vrouwen in de Republiek (1600-1750). Verloren. pp. 223–24. ISBN 9789065506122.
- ^ Haeghen, Ferdinand François E. van der (1876). Dictionnaire des devises des hommes de lettres, imprimeurs, libraires, bibliphiles, chambres de rhetorique, sociétés littéraires et dramatiques. Belgique & Holland, par F.V.H. F. J. Olivier. p. 79.