Category: Prints and Printmaking
-
Eye Candy for Today: Whistler etching
The Traghetto No. 2, James McNeill Whistler Etching and drypoint; eighth state of nine, roughly 9×12 inches (23x30cm). In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like Rembrandt, Whistler never fails to amaze me with how casual he makes his drawing process look in his etchings, and yet how powerful and subtle is the…
-
Architectural alphabet, Antonio Basoli
Though perhaps not as clever and imaginative as the Landscape alphabet by L.E.M. Jones — that I recently highlighted here on Lines and Colors — this architectural alphabet by Italian artist Antonio Basoli is nonetheless well done and amusing. Basoli published his Pictorial Alphabet, or, a collection of pictorial thoughts composed of objects beginning with…
-
Landscape alphabet, L.E.M. Jones
This wonderful alphabet, composed of landscape images, was created in the early 19th century. If I understand correctly, it was designed and drawn by an artist named L.E.M. Jones, and then printed by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, who may have made the lithographic drawings from which the prints were pulled. Full set is in the British…
-
Eye Candy for today: Rembrandt’s Good Samaritan
The Good Samaritan, Rembrandt van Rijn OK, so the defecating dog was a source of some amusement back in art school, but once you get past that, this etching is just mind-bogglingly superb — a tour-de-force of drawing and the mediums of etching and drypoint. This was made after one of Rembrandt’s own paintings (though…
-
Ohara Koson
Ohara Koson was a Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker who was active during the shin-hanga, or “new prints” movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was noted for his prints of animal subjects, and in particular, birds, which he conveyed with a combination of visual poetry and Audubon-like attention to their natural…
-
Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons at Princeton University Art Museum
Carceri (“Prisons”) is a series of 14 (in a later state, 16) copperplate etchings by the 18th century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. These are wonderfully detailed architectural fantasies, full of the suggestion of dramatic scale and lavished with fascinating details. What appears to be a complete set of the 16 plates in their later…