Category: engraving

Powder Horn of Abel Scott

Powder Horn of Abel Scott

New Englander Abel Scott of Whately, Massachusetts served in five military campaigns during the American War of Independence, first marching the day after the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Scott or a fellow soldier engraved this detailed view of British occupied Boston as British and New England forces eyed one another across the fortifications and harbor encircling the town.

British troops and royalists refuges were forced to evacuate Boston after American troops constructed fortifications and placed artillery on Dorchester Heights on the night of March 4, 1776.

Antonio Pollatoli

Antonio Pollatoli, “Battle of the Nudes”, circa 1470-75, Engraving, 42.4 x 60.9 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

“The Battle of the Nudes” or “Battle of the Naked Men”, circa 1465–1475, is an engraving, one of the most significant old master prints of the Italian Renaissance, executed by the Florentine goldsmith and sculptor Antonio del Pollaiuolo, also known as Antonio Pollatoli. The engraving is large at 42.4 x 60.9 cm and depicts five men wearing headbands and five men without, who are fighting in pairs with weapons, pictured in front of a dense background of vegetation.

All the figures are posed in different strained and athletic positions; in this aspect, the print is advanced for this period of the Renaissance. The style is classical; although, the figures are shown grimacing fiercely and their musculature of their bodies is strongly emphasized. An effective and largely original return-stroke engraving technique was employed to model the bodies, which resulted in a delicate and subtle effect.

Paul Landacre

Wood Engraving Landscapes by Paul Landacre

Although he took some life-drawing classes at the Otis Art Institute between 1923 and 1925, Paul Landacre largely taught himself the art of printmaking. He experimented with the technically demanding art of carving linoleum blocks and, eventually, woodblocks for both wood engravings and woodcuts. Landacre’s fascination with printmaking and his ambition to make a place for himself in the world of fine art coalesced in the late 1920s when he met Jake Zeitlin.

Zeitlin’s antiquarian bookshop in Los Angeles, a cultural hub that survived into the 1980s. included a small gallery space for the showing of artworks, primarily prints and drawings. It is there in 1930 that Landacre was given his first significant solo exhibition. Zeitlin’s ever-widening circle of artists came to include Edward Weston, a photographer who shared the modernist vision that so captivated Landacre. Well-connected to the New York art scene, Zeitlin associated himself with the circle of artists represented by Carl Zigrosser, director of the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan and, later, curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

By 1936 Zigrosser considered Landacre to be “one of the few graphic artists worth watching” in America, and included him among his portraits of 24 contemporary American printmakers in his seminal work, “The Artist in America” (Knopf 1942). Elected a member of the National Academy in 1946, Landacre was honored in 1947 with a solo exhibition of his wood engravings at the Smithsonian Museum, its graphic arts division under the curatorial leadership of Jacob Kainen.

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John Pierre Simon

John Pierre Simon, Lithograph, “Angels” from “Paradise Lost”, 1794 Publishing Date

Born in London, it is believed Jean Pierre Simon studied stippling techniques under Francesco Bartolozzi. Early in his career he engraved plates for Worlidge’s, Antique Gems. By 1790 Jean Pierre Simon had established himself as one of England’s finest stipple engravers and was commissioned to create engravings after such contemporary artists as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Fuseli and Wheatley. Jean Pierre Simon’s abilities to capture strong tonal values and contrasts placed his art in great demand and John Boydell frequently commissioned him to produce engravings for both his ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Milton’ sets.

“The Poetical Works of John Milton” was published in three parts in 1794, 1795 and 1797. Sparing no expense, Boydell commissioned George Romney to design a portrait plate and Richard Westall to design images illustrating each part of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as well as the more famous individual poems. The engravers included Richard Earlom, Thomas Kirk, J. P. Simon, Benjamin Smith, M. Haughton, Dutterau and John Ogborne.

The Milton prints were constructed almost solely in the stipple technique. Stippling reached its golden age in late eighteenth century England. The technique was promoted and taught by Francesco Bartolozzi (Venice, 1727 – London, 1815). Briefly, stippling was a tonal method where the image was created not with solid lines but with a multitude of dots or flicks. Under a master’s hand, stippling magnificently captured tonal values by contrasting areas of light and shade. Unfortunately it was most laborious and quickly became extinct with advances in aquatint engraving in the early nineteenth century. Yet to this day some of the most subtle and sensual engravings in the history of British art belong to the stipple engravers of the late eighteenth century.

Sascha Schneider

Sascha Schneider “Mammon and His Slave”, 1896, Wood Engraving, 24 x 32 cm, Private Collection of Hans-Gerd Röder

Born on September 21, 1870, in St. Petersburg, Sascha Schneider was a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He enrolled in the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1889, and in 1903 he met Karl May, the popular author of Western novels featuring Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, which led to Schneider becoming the cover illustrator for many of May’s books.

In 1904 Schneider became professor at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School . When his partner, the painter Hellmuth Jahn, threatened to expose his homosexuality, at that time a criminal offense, in an attempt to blackmail him, Schneider fled to Italy, where homosexuality was not a crime. After traveling through the Caucasus and living in Leipzig for a short time, he went back to Italy to live in Florence, returning to Germany upon the outbreak of World War I. He later co-founded a body-building institute called Kraft-Kunst, where some of the models for his work trained. He died of complications from diabetes in 1927 in Swinemünde.

Schneider knew Czech poet and writer Jiří Karásek from Berlin and Prague, where he taught on occasion. While Freud’s idea of anxiety being rooted in the repressed unconscious was one source of inspiration, no doubt Schneider’s greatest influence was the symbolist artist Max Klinger, whose work Schneider recast into his own original conception of Decadence. All but forgotten for decades, the past few years have seen a revival of interest in his work, with a major exhibition held in the US in 2013.

Macbeth

Artist Unknown, “Macbeth, Banquo, and the Three Witches”, 1803, Published by John and Josiah Boydell, London

In 1789, the publisher John Boydell opened the Shakespeare Gallery, an exhibition space in London’s Pall Mall showcasing paintings that exclusively represented scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The Gallery was a bid to revive historical painting in contemporary British art, a genre thought to be of great public benefit because of its morally instructive messages. The works of Shakespeare had become very popular and integral to British identity by the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Gallery opened in May 1789 with an exhibition of thirty-four canvases by eighteen British artists. By 1796 there were eighty-four canvases exhibited, along with dozens of smaller paintings. Once the exhibition was mounted, reproductive engravings of the paintings produced by an in-house team of forty-six printmakers were available to purchase, either as a large portfolio of ninety prints or as a luxurious illustrated edition of the plays.

The above “Macbeth, Banquo, and the Three Witches” was an illustration from a bound 1803 portfolio by Boydell Publishers entitled “A Collection of Prints, from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, by the Artists of Great Britain”.

Clare Leighton

Clare Leighton “Cutting” 1931, Wood Engraving, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Clare Leighton’s “Cutting” is an image from her Canadian Lumber Camp series. In this wood-engraving, the strength of the working men is conveyed through the curves of the black silhouettes, with a minimal use of white line, seen against the snowy backdrop. The landscape and figures are successfully bound together.

A particularly striking feature of this series is Clare Leighton’s depiction of the magical light of snow in the forest. This is achieved through her use of the multiple tool, which enables the gouging of several lines with a single stroke, that she began using in 1930.