Philip Fruytiers

He contributed texts in Latin, French and Dutch to an emblem book published in 1627 by that college at the Joannes Cnobbaert imprint in Antwerp under the title Typus mundi in quo ejus calamitates et pericula nec non divini, humanique amoris antipathia, emblematice proponuntur.

[7] The accepted view of Philip Fruytiers as principally a miniaturist and watercolorist was based partially on the descriptions in the early biographical works by Cornelis de Bie and Arnold Houbraken.

In the 1960s this view had to be revised, however, when three large paintings of saints dated 1652 with the monogram "PHF" (in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp), which were previously attributed to a hypothetical painter PH Franck, were identified as being by the hand of Fruytiers.

[2] The same signature was subsequently discovered on another altarpiece in the parish church in Zundert, North Brabant, which had been purchased from the inventory of the dissolved Antwerp St Michael's Abbey in 1802.

[3] An expressive portrait drawing of the Jesuit Jan de Tollenaere (Johannes Tollenarius) (Morgan Library & Museum) was a study for an engraving made by Jacob Neefs.

Fruytiers was an accomplished engraver and produced several portrait etchings such as those of the Capuchin Innocentius de Caltagirone and the Flemish mathematician and astronomer Govaert Wendelen.

He made designs for the frontispiece and illustrations for devotional books and other religious prints by Antwerp engravers such as Cornelis Galle the Younger and Conraad Lauwers.