Tag: engraving

The Tempest

Benjamin Smith, “Act One, Scene One of the Tempest by William Shakespeare”, Untinted Engraving based on the Original Painting by George Romney, September 29, 1797, Published by J & J Boydell at the Shakespeare Gallery, Pall Mall, London

This engraving depicts the destruction of King Alonso’s ship caused by the tempest conjured by Prospero, seen on the right, who sent spirits to create the storm. Prospero caused the tempest in an act of revenge against his brother Antonio, one of the ship’s passengers, who had ursurped Propero’s position as Duke of Milan. Prospero’s daughter Miranda clings to him, begging for the lives of those on the ship. Prospero assured his daughter that he used his magic to prevent anyone from dying.

Benjamin Smith was a British engraver, publisher and print seller who was born in 1754 in London. He studied the art of stippling engraving under Francesco Bartolozzi,  one of the most famous engravers of the 1700s. During his career from 1786 to 1833, Smith engraved many plates from designs by William Hogarth, William Beechley, and George Romney. He also created portraits of the aristocracy such as the Marquis Cornwallis and King George III.

Employed for many years by J & J Boydell Publishing, Benjamin Smith was commissioned to engrave many plates for the Shakespeare Gallery and for the poetical works of John Milton in the years between 1794  and 1797. These are considered his best works and included the image above based on the painting by George Romney. Smith continued his engraving work until five years before his death in 1833, producing many works now in the collections of the British Museum and National Portrait Gallery.

Giovanni Domenico Campiglia

Giovanni Domenico Campiglia, “Bacchus and Ampelos”, Post-1731

This engraving by Campiglia is an image of a Roman Statue in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. This was most likely published in 1734 in the “Museum Florentium”.

Giovanni Domenico Campiglia was an Italian painter and engraver from Florence, active under the patronage of the House of Medici. He initially trained under Tommaso Redi and Lorenzo del Moro, then in Bologna under Giovanni Gioseffo dal Sole, Campiglia worked with Antonio Francesco Gore for over a decade on the “Museum Florentium”, a collection of images of all the famous artists of Florence. His contributions were published in 1734, which induce Pope Clement XII to bring him to Rome, where Campiglia did engravings for  artist Bottari’s multi-volume “Musei Capitolini”.

Gustave Doré

Gustave Doré, “Death of Eleazer”,1866, Engraving for the La Sainte Bible

According tothe Bible, during the Battle of Beit Zechariah, Eleazar identified a war elephant that he believed to carry the Seleucid King Antiochus V, due to the special armor the elephant wore. He decided to endanger his life by attacking the elephant and thrusting a spear into its belly. The dead elephant then collapsed upon Eleazar, killing him as well.

Eleazar’s death was a popular subject for art in the Middle Ages, where it was given significance as prefiguring Christ’s sacrifice of himself for mankind. This illustration by Gustave Doré is from the 1866 La Sainte Bible.

Hendrick Goltzius

Hendrick Goltzius, “Four Studies of Hands”

Hendrick Goitzius was a German-born Dutch printmaker, draftsman and painter. He was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, noted for his sophisticated technique. He arrived in Haarlem at age nineteen. Two years later, he set up a workshop. He left Haarlem only once to visit Germany and Italy in 1590 to 1591, bringing home a more classical, naturalistic art that shifted Dutch artists away from the eccentric Mannerist style. His panoramic, open-air drawings of Holland’s scenery, among the earliest Dutch landscapes, paved the way for younger artists like Rembrandt van Rijn.

Famous for his printmaking, Goltzius worked in secret and never showed an unfinished work. By 1600 he had abandoned the burin for the brush. His eyesight was failing due to years of painstaking work with engraving tools, and, like his contemporaries, he believed painting to be superior to printmaking. He died in 1617, never achieving the same quality on panel as he had on paper.

Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton, “He Foresaw His Pale Body”, 1990, Photo Etching, Aquatint and Engraving on Paper, 51.8 x 37.5 cm, Tate Museum

Richard Hamilton’s project to illustrate “Ulysses” began in the late 1940′s and to date comprises seven etchings and a digital print “The Heaventree of Stars”. In 1981 he made the decision to create one illustration for each of the novel’s eighteen chapters and a nineteenth image of Leopold Bloom destined as a frontispiece.

In this version, which was to form the basis for the final heliogravure print owned by the Tate Museum, the Richard Hamilton inverted and foreshortened Bloom’s body in a pose reminiscent of Andrea Mantegna’s famous image of the “Dead Christ” painted in 1480. As Hamilton explained: ‘The key word “foresaw” demands an interior perspective, foreshortened as though seen from an inner eye’.

‘He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved’ -Joyce, “Ulusses”

The image shows a bath viewed from above and behind, so that the taps are at the top of the page, partially cropped out of the image. Bloom lies in the bath, his naked body extending down the page from his feet, just below the taps, to his upper body and shoulders filling the bath at the bottom of the picture, crowned by an aerial view of his bald head. The area around the bath is dark and empty; the colour is all in the flesh tones of Bloom’s body and the brass yellow of the taps. A round yellow object, half concealed under Bloom’s right knee, recalls the yellow flower with no scent that Bloom receives in the letter from his erotic correspondent Martha Clifford, as described in the ‘Lotus Eaters’ episode of Joyce’s novel.

For this etching, a few adjustments were made to the original composition: a greater part of Bloom’s right hand was raised out of the water; the alignment of the bath taps was reversed and the chain of the bathplug was lengthened so that a section appears to sit on the floor of the bath. By cropping the top of the taps, Hamilton creates a sense of the intimacy of internal contemplation; at the same time the viewer looks down at Bloom’s body from an external position, evoking an out-of-body experience.

Michael Goro

Michael Goro, “La Belle Fenetre”, Etching / Engraving, Date Unknown

“Looking for subject matter I find simple things that we see every day, things that become symbolic once they are taken out of context. I experiment with the juxtaposition of places, faces, and architectural designs that reflect my diverse personal experiences. My story is a vivid illustration of the end of the last century – a time of deconstruction, discontinuity, and dislocation. I find that black-and-white prints convey contradictory images better than any other medium by reducing them to the most basic color contrast. My work provides the full spectrum of techniques ranging from renaissance engraving to digital photogravure.” – Michael Goro

Raphael Sadeler II

Raphael Sadeler II , “Saint Michael the Archangel”, Engraving, 1604

The Sadeler family were  the largest, and probably the most successful of the dynasties of Flemish engravers that were dominant in Northern European printmaking in the later 16th and 17th centuries, as both artists and publishers. As with other dynasties such as the Wierixes and Van de Passe family, the style of family members is very similar, and their work often hard to tell apart in the absence of a signature or date, or evidence of location. Altogether at least ten Sadelers worked as engravers, in the Spanish Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Bohemia and Austria.

Reginald Marsh

Reginald Marsh, “Flying Concellos” , Etching and Engraving, Date of Plate 1936, Edition of 100, 8 x 10 in. Collection of the Art Students League of New York

Reginald Marsh is one of the best known chroniclers of 1930s and 40s New York. It has been said that Marsh was to New York what Daumier was to Paris and Hogarth was to London. His paintings, drawings, and prints capture the aura and pace of the ever-changing city at a particularly exciting time in its history.

Marsh was fascinated with the seedier aspects of New York, and he was an obsessive explorer of the great metropolis. It was in places such as Coney Island, the burlesque parlors and dance halls of Fourteenth Street, the Bowery, the streets, and the subway that the Yale educated, financially comfortable Marsh found the subjects he was looking for – Bowery bums, burlesque queens, musclemen, bathing beauties, and streetwalkers. Marsh returned repeatedly to his favorite locations, usually working on the spot with sketchbooks and taking photographs that were used as the source material for completed works back in his Fourteenth Street studio.

Dan Hiller

Engravings by Dan Hillier

Dan Hillier is a professional artist based in Stoke Newington, England. He produces his own pictures as well as making commissioned artworks for various clients including Neil Gaiman. Most of his work is made from collaging found Victoriana with his own ink drawing, as well as producing original ink drawings using dip-nib pen and ink.

Dan is acclaimed for his black line engravings that embody the ‘Steampunk’ aesthetic, combining Victorian sensibilities with a fascination for animal attributes. His work is characterized by depictions of fantastical human/animal hybrids, spliced together from late-1800s imagery. These beautiful, classically rooted images find their power in their unsettling effect, as they seamlessly blur distinctions normally implied by reality.

Visit his site if you get a chance: http://www.danhillier.com

Crispijn de Passe the Elder

Crispijn de Passe the Elder, “Apollo, Sol”

Crispijn van de Passe the Elder was a Dutch publisher and engraver and founder of a dynasty of engravers comparable to the Wierix family and the Sadelers, though mostly at a more mundane commercial level. Most of their engravings were portraits, book title-pages, and the like, with relatively few grander narrative subjects. As with the other dynasties, their style is very similar, and hard to tell apart in the absence of a signature or date, or evidence of location. Many of the family could produce their own designs, and have left drawings.

Marcantonio Raimondi

 

Marcantonio Raimondi, “The Climbers”, Engraving, 1510

Marcantonio Raimondi,was an Italian engraver, known for being the first important printmaker whose body of work consists mainly of prints copying paintings. He is therefore a key figure in the rise of the reproductive print. He also systematized a technique of engraving that became dominant in Italy and elsewhere.

Around 1510, Marcantonio travelled to Rome and entered the circle of artists surrounding Raphael. This influence began showing up in engravings titled “The Climbers” (in which he reproduced part of Michelangelo’s “Soldiers Surprised Bathing”, also called “Battle of Cascina”). After a reproduction of a work by Raphael, entitled “Lucretia”, Raphael trained and assisted Marcantonio personally.

Around 1524, Marcantonio was briefly imprisoned by Pope Clement VII for making the I modi set of erotic engravings, from the designs of Giulio Romano, which were later accompanied by sonnets written by Pietro Aretino. At the intercession of the Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici, Baccio Bandinelli and Pietro Aretino, he was released, and set to work on his plate of the “Martyrdom of St. Lawrence” after Bandinelli.

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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