Van den Keere was the son of Ghent printer and schoolmaster Hendrik van den Keere the Elder, and his career has sometimes been confused with that of his father. Both he and his father used the name "Henri du Tour" in French. Van den Keere's grandfather had taken over the type foundry of :nl:Joos Lambrecht|Joos Lambrecht. In 1566 took over his father's printing firm, but soon gave it up and began to specialise in punchcutting. From 1568 he worked particularly for Christophe Plantin of Antwerp, down the River Scheldt from Ghent, where he remained living. Over the course of his career he cut around 30 typefaces.
Types
Van den Keere primarily cut type in the textura style of blackletter, roman type and music type. The largest roman types cut by van den Keere were in a style later to be called the "Dutch taste", with bold proportions, a high x-height and a dense colour on the page. Hendrik Vervliet has suggested that the goal was to create a roman type "comparable for weight with Gothic letters" at a time when blackletter was still very popular for continuous reading. It was used by Plantin in his 1574Commune sanctorum, a church liturgy song-book intended to be readable at a distance by an entire choir. His body text type is very similar to earlier types by engravers such as Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon, who also worked for Plantin. Lane comments that his roman types "must be accepted as a major innovation... influenced the seventeenth-century Dutch types that in turn influenced types in England and elsewhere" and Vervliet describes him as "the greatest name of this period, perhaps of the whole century in the Netherlands". As influences on his types, Vervliet suggests an earlier type cut by Maarten de Keyser, and Lane some more recent types by Ameet Tavernier, Granjon and :fr:Pierre Haultin|Pierre Haultin. Van den Keere also cut a rotunda gothic type, apparently based on Spanish lettering and intended for a book to be sent to Spain, a Civilité and in Lane's view probably a set of Gothic capitals used as initials with an interlaced design. He is not known to have cut any italic types, which were not popular in the Netherlands during the 1570s. Besides his own types, he justified matrices from other engravers, cut extra sorts for fonts with shorter ascenders and descenders to allow tighter linespacing, and in 1572 compiled an inventory for Plantin of the types Plantin owned.
Legacy
Van den Keere died young between 11 July and October 1580, giving him a mature career of only about 12 years, likely as a result of a leg injury he mentioned in his final letter to Plantin. Both van den Keere's daughter :nl:Colette van den Keere|Colette and his son Pieter, who became an engraver and mapmaker, lived in London from around 1584-1593. There in 1587 at the Dutch Church, Austin Friars Collette married mapmaker Jodocus Hondius, with whom Pieter collaborated. Hondius seems also to have been a punchcutter and could have worked in van den Keere's foundry as a young man. They later returned to the Netherlands; following Hondius's death Collette took over his publishing business. In 1581, van den Keere's widow sold many of his punches and matrices to Plantin. Plantin and his successors scrupulously preserved the sixteenth-century materials and records of his printing office, which became the Plantin-Moretus Museum, and a large amount of van den Keere's work survives intact there. typefounder Arent Corsz Hogenacker, whose premises are now a shop. In 1630 he commissioned this statue for the building of Laurens Janszoon Coster, subject of the now-debunked Dutch claim to the invention of printing. Thomas de Vechter, van den Keere's foreman, also acquired many of his materials from his widow, documented in a surviving inventory. He moved to Antwerp and then Leiden, establishing a type foundry casting many van den Keere types. De Vechter's foundry was later taken over by Arent Corsz Hogenacker in stages from 1619-1623, and on the closure of his type foundry in 1672 his types reached other Dutch foundries. Matrices for the interlaced capitals ended up owned by the printing firm and type foundry Koninklijke Joh. Enschedé although how and when they reached Enschedé is not certain.
Digital fonts
Digital font designers who have designed interpretations of van den Keere's roman type include Kris Sowersby, who describes his work as "dense, sharp and powerful...I love van den Keere’s texturas. I can feel the influence of them within his roman forms: they’re both narrow, dense and sharp", and Jonathan Hoefler, who described van den Keere's Two-Line Double Pica display roman as "an arresting design marked by striking dramatic tensions". Dutch Type Library have published Flamande by Matthew Carter, a revival of his textura, as well as revivals of his roman types under the names DTL Van den Keere and DTL Gros Canon for a display size. Fred Smeijers, whose TEFF Renard typeface is based on his work, describes him as "one of the first to make roman display types that were explicitly conceived as such." DTL's founder Frank E. Blokland received a doctorate on the spacing and proportions of early metal type, including van den Keere's, from Leiden University in 2016.
