A merchant and semi-professional artist, Cornelis Ploos van Amstel assembled an enormous collection of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawings during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The collection numbered thousands of sheets and included important works by all the major artists of the period. In the 1750s, Ploos van Amstel began working to develop a technique to print color facsimiles of his most prized works. His hope was to provide models of excellent draftsmanship to an interested public at lower prices than commanded by actual drawings. (He may also have been bragging about his collection.)

Printing in color was a challenge, as was the creation of a printing technique that could emulate the many different sorts of marks in a drawing: pen and ink, chalk, wash, watercolor. Through an inventive combination of etching, aquatint, and multiple passes through the press (along with selective hand coloring), Ploos van Amstel created what he called “prentekeningen,” or “printed drawings.” The works are a landmark in the development of color printing and were much sought after in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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