Category: Prints and Printmaking
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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British Library image trove
The British Library has uploaded to Flickr over one million public domain images from 17th, 18th and 19th century books. Starting next year, they will enlist the participation of the web in describing enough of the images to give the automated cataloguing systems a start. There is an article about the project here. The images…
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Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in new York has a wonderful practice of periodically assembling small, non-blockbuster exhibitions of works on paper from their enormously deep collections. These often go unnoticed in the press, but can surprise and delight visitors to the museum who come across them on their way to something else in the…