Saskya

About Saskya

While I was in Boston in 2014, I visited the Museum of Fine Arts and an exhibit of etchings by Rembrandt, one of my favorite artists. As to be expected, many were simply gorgeous, but one especially caught my eye. It was an etching of a priest (Jan Cornelis Sylvius, Preacher) with an extensive amount of writing in Latin. While I'm not certain that it was Rembrandt's own hand, the script was beautiful and I was fascinated by it because it had to be written on the etching plate in reverse. I snapped a few photos using my phone and later found other editions on line. I was so taken by the script that it begged me to create a modern typeface from it. The result is Saskya, named after Rembrandt's wife Saskia.

There were many ligatures and glyph variants in the print, of which I captured many of them and made them accessible via OpenType features. The complete alphabet was not present in the sample, however, I discovered some other source material to sensitively fill in those gaps, with a remaining last few that I created myself.

A truly romantic hand, Saskya will work well for invitations of many sorts, and when you're looking for that 'old thyme' scripty feeling in your graphics.