Tag: engraving

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.

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.