Born 27 March 1813 in Roxbury, Massachusetts; died 1888 in New York City.
Lithographer, printer, publisher.
Currier & Ives (firm).
At the age of 15 Currier was apprenticed to the Boston lithographic firm of William S. & John Pendleton. In 1833 he worked for the engraver and printer M.E.D. Brown in Philadelphia before going to New York and publishing his own lithographs in ...
(b Veracruz, Mar 13, 1880; d Stamford, CT, Jan 10, 1961).
Mexican illustrator, writer, gallery owner, and publisher, active in the USA. He was the son of a wealthy Mexican lawyer and publisher. De Zayas started his career as an artist by providing drawings for his father’s newspaper in Veracruz. In 1906 he moved on to Mexico City’s leading newspaper, El Diario, but a year later, after the ascension of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whom the newspaper had opposed, he fled to the USA. There he landed a position making caricatures for the New York Evening World. Shortly after his arrival in the USA, he came into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, who staged solo shows of De Zayas’s caricatures at his gallery Gallery 291 in 1909 and 1910, both of which proved to be huge popular successes.
In 1910 De Zayas traveled to Paris, where he stayed almost a year, scouting out adventurous forms of modern art for Stieglitz, notably the cubist work of Picasso and African sculpture. On his return, equipped with knowledge of European modern art and inspired by the work of the French modernist ...
French family of typographers, printers, publishers and collectors. The first to settle in Paris was Denis Didot (2nd half of 17th century), whose son François Didot (1689–1759) founded in 1713 the family publishing business. His sons François-Ambroise Didot (1730–1804) and Pierre-François Didot (1731–93) developed the business, adding a type foundry and a paper-mill. The elegance of their publications brought them the patronage of the brothers of Louis XVI: Monsieur (later Louis XVIII) and the Comte d’Artois (later Charles X). The sons of François-Ambroise included Pierre Didot, a publisher, among whose illustrators were some of the most distinguished artists of the day, and Firmin Didot (1764–1836), who designed the Didot typeface for his brother’s use. Firmin Didot’s son Ambroise Firmin-Didot was a notable collector of prints. The cadet branch of the family, Didot Jeune, the descendants of Pierre-François Didot, included Saint Marc Didot, who assembled a fine collection of paintings....
(b Mexico City, ?1820; d Mexico City, 1897).
Mexican illustrator and printmaker. He probably began his career in 1847 in the workshop of the Murguía publishing house. In 1854, in collaboration with Andrés Campillo, he created an outstanding series of illustrations for the book Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos, in which he portrayed character types (e.g. Great Poet, lithograph) in the manner of Honoré Daumier. In 1855 he founded the firm Litografía de Iriarte y Compañía. The following year he published portraits of famous personalities in the weekly review El Panorama. He was a co-founder in 1861 of the political fortnightly La Orquesta, on which he worked for more than ten years as an illustrator and eventually as a caricaturist and as editor. Iriarte continued to contribute to a number of periodicals, including El Renacimiento, and his firm also published the weekly San Baltazar (1869–1870). He collaborated with Santiago Hernández on numerous illustrations for, among others, ...
German, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 2 October 1865, in Münster; died 8 October 1937, in Raron (Valais, Switzerland).
Painter (including glass), pastellist, illustrator, draughtsman, decorative designer, graphic designer, writer, publisher.
Melchior Lechter was initially apprenticed to a painter of cartoons for stained-glass windows in Münster, before enrolling at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin in ...
(b Walthamstow [now in London], March 24, 1834; d London, Oct 3, 1896).
English designer, writer and activist. His importance as both a designer and propagandist for the arts cannot easily be overestimated, and his influence has continued to be felt throughout the 20th century. He was a committed Socialist whose aim was that, as in the Middle Ages, art should be for the people and by the people, a view expressed in several of his writings. After abandoning his training as an architect, he studied painting among members of the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1861 he founded his own firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (from 1875 Morris & Co.), which produced stained glass, furniture, wallpaper and fabrics (see §3 below). Morris’s interests constantly led him into new activities such as his last enterprise, the Kelmscott Press (see §5 below). In 1950 his home at Walthamstow became the William Morris Gallery. The William Morris Society was founded in 1956, and it publishes a biannual journal and quarterly newsletter....
German family of painters, draughtsmen, and engravers. Georg Philipp Rugendas I, an esteemed painter and graphic artist in Augsburg, established a print publishing house there in 1735. His sons Georg Philipp Rugendas II (1701–74), Christian Rugendas (1708–81), and Jeremias Gottlob Rugendas (1710–72) helped with this business, as did their descendants, including Georg Philipp II’s grandson, the engraver ...
English family of engravers, illustrators and publishers. Isaac Taylor (i) (b Worcester, 13 Dec 1730; d Edmonton, 17 Oct 1807) worked initially for the London map publisher Thomas Jeffreys (fl 1732; d 1771). He engraved some plates of Old Master pictures for John Boydell and exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1765–80. He was a capable artist, much in demand for book illustrations, which he both designed and engraved, for example a vignette (1765) retained for many editions of Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village and frontispieces (1780) for each of the seven volumes of Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. He also engraved architectural plates and in the 1770s he took over the business of Henry Webley of Holborn, the leading publisher of architectural books. From about 1775 he traded as I. & J. Taylor, at first with his brother James Taylor (...
(b Veracruz, 1848; d Tacubaya, Mexico City, Feb 14, 1904).
Mexican illustrator and lithographer. He began his career in 1869, making prints for the weekly La ilustración potosina in San Luis Potosí. He collaborated with Alejandro Casarín and Jesús Alamilla on illustrations using engravings colored with pen for the novel Ensalada de pollos by José Tomás de Cuéllar. In these the use of a schematic design accentuated the appearance of the figures portrayed. He created caricatures (1872–1873) for La orquesta and other periodicals, but he established his reputation with caricatures (1874–1876) of government figures for the weekly Hijo Ahuizote. Villasana was a member of the political party of President Porfirio Díaz and in 1880 published ferocious caricatures of Díaz’s opponents in El coyote emplumado. He was co-publisher in 1883, with Ireneo Paz, of La patria ilustrada and in 1888 he founded his own weekly, México y sus costumbres; in both periodicals he published his own caricatures of public figures. In ...
