Bergen in Hennegäw/ Camerich

Title

Bergen in Hennegäw/ Camerich

Description

View of Bergen and Camerich

ca. 1650

Artist

Merian (1593-1650)

Matthäus Merian (1593 – 1650) , born in Basel, learned the art of copperplate engraving in Zurich and subsequently worked and studied in Strasbourg, Nancy, and Paris, before returning to Basel in 1615. The following year he moved to Frankfurt, Germany where he worked for the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry. He married his daughter, Maria Magdalena 1617. In 1620 they moved back to Basel, only to return three years later to Frankfurt, where Merian took over the publishing house of his father-in-law after de Bry's death in 1623. In 1626 he became a citizen of Frankfurt and could henceforth work as an independent publisher. He is the father of Maria Sibylla Merian, who later published her the famous and wellknown studies of flowers, insects and butterflies.

Historical Description

As the province of Belgica - a name introduced by Caesar - what is now Belgium experienced many rulers. From the High Middle Ages to the early modern period, the cities of Flanders with their cloth industries represented one of the two centers of the European economy. Politically, the individual territories came under the House of Burgundy, which was inherited by the Habsburgs in 1477. In 1579 the Catholic Union of Arras and the Calvinist-Protestant Union of Utrecht were formed. The provinces of the Union of Utrecht broke away from Spain in 1581 and founded the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, whose independence was recognized in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 after the end of the Eighty Years War. The provinces of the Union of Arras, Flanders and Brabant were administered as the Spanish Netherlands by a Spanish governor. After the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs (1700) and the resulting War of the Spanish Succession, the Austrian Netherlands came under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs in 1714. As a result of the absolutist-centralistic efforts of the Austrian ruler Joseph II, the Brabant Revolution came in 1789 and the short-lived United Belgian States. Revolutionary France annexed the Austrian Netherlands between 1792 and 1794, followed by incorporation into the French Republic in 1795. At the Congress of Vienna (1815) the provinces were awarded to the Netherlands. After the Belgian Revolution, the country gained independence in 1830.