The Little Hunchback

Anthonie Waterloo is recorded in primary sources as a painter, but very few paintings by his hand have been identified. The artist worked predominantly as a draftsman and etcher, specializing in landscape scenes. Over the course of his career, he produced several hundred landscapes ranging from highly detailed and topographically accurate views to atmospheric forest interiors.

Waterloo was the son of a Flemish artist who fled to Amsterdam to escape religious persecution; but not many details are known of Waterloo's training there. Having established his career with precise landscapes of Amsterdam and its environs, Waterloo roamed from place to place. Like many of his contemporaries, he traveled along the Rhine River; on his way, Waterloo created large-scale landscape drawings as well as loosely finished sketches. He is known to have visited northern Germany and Poland and may have ventured as far south as Italy. Although Waterloo traveled widely, many of his etched landscapes were probably imagined in the studio and were strongly influenced by the work of contemporary landscape artists like Roelandt Savery.