Portrait of Carlos de Columna, Marques de la Espinar

1650. Engraving on cream laid paper, 9 1/4 x 6 3/8 inches (234 x 161 mm), full margins. Water stain throughout bottom, diagonal creases in the area of the bottom right corner, paper tape along top edge on recto. A very well inked impression. Flemish painter and engraver Paulus Pontius was born in Antwerp in 1603, and it was in this city that his full life would unfold. At the young age of 13, he was apprenticed to the still life painter Osias Beert, and subsequently to Lucas Vosterman, who was heavily associated with the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens. Vosterman trained Pontius in the skill of engraving, which he took to immediately, finding he had great skill at recreating paintings. Pontius was able to capture the minutiae of light and shadow found on the canvas, and mastered the ability to accurately render the subtleties of brushwork in this alternate media. His success as an engraver cemented his role in the workshop of Rubens, and in 1624, when Vosterman found himself at odds with Rubens, and left Antwerp for England, Pontius assumed his role as foremost engraver in the workshop. It was in this year that Pontius took up lodgings in Rubens's home, and continued to live there until 1631, when courtship and marriage (the first of three) brought him away. After the death of Rubens in 1640, Pontius embarked on a very successful career engraving reproductions of master works by artists including Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Pieter van Avont, Abraham van Diepenbeeck, Anselm van Hulle, Frans Luycx, Titian and Velázquez, among others. At the time of his death in 1658, Pontius had been admitted as a Master in the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke, had engraved 42 plates after Rubens, 32 plates by Van Dyck (including a portrait of himself), and was father to seven children. Many of his portrait engravings were widely published during his lifetime, including in van Dyck's Iconography (Antwerp, c. 1632-44), Johannes Meyssens' Images de divers hommes, and Anselm van Hulle's Icones legatorum (Antwerp, 1648).