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(b Edinburgh, 1749; d Leith, Sept 5, 1787).

Scottish draughtsman and printmaker. He was the son of a goldsmith and watchmaker, and studied at the Trustees’ Academy, Edinburgh, before moving to Rome in 1769 to join his friend Alexander Runciman. He produced small-scale or miniature works, using pencil, pen and wash. For his Scottish employers, William Townley and Sir William Young, he drew antiquities, landscapes and archaeological ruins in Italy and Sicily, such as the Basilica of Constantine and Maxentius (c. 1774–6; Edinburgh, N.G.). Among the more personal works that survive from his 11 years in Italy are a number of strange little genre scenes, such as Two Men in Conversation (c. 1775–80; U. London, Courtauld Inst. Gals), which clearly show the influence of another friend, Henry Fuseli. Brown’s reputation rests principally on his great skill as a portrait draughtsman. He returned to Scotland in 1780, and spent his later years executing fine pencil and pen portraits of various dignitaries, such as ...

(b Zohor, nr Bratislava, Dec 25, 1935; d Jan 20, 1997).

Slovak printmaker, painter and illustrator. From 1951 to 1955 he studied at the Central School of Industrial Art at Bratislava and at the School of Fine Arts, Bratislava, from 1956 to 1961, completing his training there in 1963–6. In 1967 he was put in charge of the book production department; in 1981 he was appointed professor. His early work as printmaker and illustrator derived its inspiration from the imaginative tradition of Slovak art, which he interpreted in his own version of neo-Surrealism. In 1964 Klee, Kandinsky and Miró began to influence his work, and his illustrations were clearly inspired by Chagall. He gradually developed his own version of Mannerism and adapted his artistic language accordingly, aiming, in his graphic work, at the precise technical mastery of lithography, etching etc. Among his first works with Mannerist traits is Honour to Arcimboldo (1965; see Peterajová, no. 18), and the style is fully developed in the cycle ...

(b c. 1706; d 1753).

English engraver, designer of trade cards and furniture designer. In 1746 he published A New Book of Ornaments, and subsequently collaborated with Matthias Lock on a second edition (1752). The New Book contains designs for side-tables, torchères, clocks, frames, pier-glasses and fireplaces, very much in the Rococo idiom but also including such chinoiserie motifs as ho-ho birds and oriental figures. Copland also provided plates for the ...

(b Blois, May 5, 1661; d London, Jan 18, 1733).

French engraver, active in England. He was a Huguenot from a family of engravers and watchmakers. By 1681 he had moved to London and was admitted to the Clockmakers Company in 1686, possibly because of work he did for them engraving watchcases. He engraved other silver objects such as salvers and snuff boxes (e.g. a silver-gilt comfit box, c. 1690; London, V&A). He published two books of prints intended as pattern books for his fellow craftsmen—A Book of Severall Ornaments (London, 1682; O’Connell, no. 1) and A Book of Ornaments Usefull to Jewellers Watchmakers and All Other Artists (London, 1697; o’c 2). These were derived from the work of earlier French designers, including Jean Berain I and Jean Vaquer (1621–1686). In 1707 Gribelin was the first engraver to reproduce the Raphael Cartoons (o’c 7), then on display at Hampton Court (British Royal Col., on loan to London, V&A). These prints had a significant influence on the development of printmaking in England. In response to them a group of noblemen brought ...

(b Sept 28, 1884; d Adelaide, Oct 22, 1972).

Australian painter, printmaker and commercial artist. Henty studied in Adelaide at the School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts with H. P Gill (1855–1916) and Archibald Collins (1853–1922) and at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts taking life classes with Marie Tuck (1866–1947). Henty exhibited with the Australian Academy of Art, the New South Wales Watercolour Institute, the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), Group 9 and the Royal South Australian Society of Arts (RSASA).

Henty is a relatively unacknowledged Adelaide modernist, who chafed under the conservatism of its art world. As a young woman she worked full-time as a ticket-writer and designer. She was a member of Archibald Collins’ Adelaide Drawing and Sketch Club in the 1920s and contributed line drawings to its magazine The High Light. Around 1924, after the club closed, Henty went to Sydney, again working as a commercial artist, but hoping for artistic inspiration from Sydney exhibitions. However, inspiration came in ...

(b Zurich, June 12, 1917).

Swiss painter, sculptor and printmaker. He studied (1932) at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich, and first worked as a designer (1933–6). From the age of 20 he concentrated on graphic and commercial art, and it was not until 1957, with the creation of his first ‘tableau-relief’, that his career really began. Painting abstract works influenced by Zurich Concrete art and by contemporary American painting from 1950 onwards, Honegger developed as an artist during his stay in New York (1958–60) where his first exhibition was held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960. Honegger settled in Paris in 1961, where he continued to experiment in painting and sculpture. His pictures were composed following a system and use simple, geometric forms in relief, executed in monochrome but with particular attention to technique and surface presentation. His shapes (squares, circles) are placed inside an orthogonal frame, following a pattern established beforehand and always based on numerical calculation. The paintings are made up of sharp-edged cardboard pieces placed, with strengthened backing, on to canvas and covered with several layers of paint. In this manner, the artist obtained a relief effect on the surface that catches the light and gives the composition a changeable quality (e.g. ...

(b The Hague, Dec 18, 1863; d The Hague, Aug 28, 1917).

Dutch painter, lithographer and designer. He trained at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague. He worked as a draughtsman at the Zoological Museum in Leiden and illustrated scientific studies, for instance On a New Collection of Birds from S. W. Africa by J. Büttikofer (1889) and Zoölogische Ergebnisse einer Reise in Niederl. Ost-Indiën, von dr. Max Weber (1890). Apart from paintings such as Two Arabian Vultures (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.), he made many watercolours and drawings of plants and animals, which clearly reveal his appreciation of Japanese prints: he often outlined the separate areas of flat colour in ink, in imitation of such prints, and he could describe the characteristic attitudes of animals with a masterly economy of line. Van Hoytema compiled and published two portfolios of prints of related subjects, Dierstudies [Animal studies] (1898) and Bloemstudies [Flower studies] (1905). His powerful, decorative compositions show an unmatched technical perfection....

(b Paris, March 19, 1715; d St Petersburg, March 24, 1759).

French painter, furniture designer, architect and engraver. He studied with Jacques Dumont and won the Grand Prix de Peinture in 1739. He remained for eight years in Rome, where his architectural designs for the temporary centrepiece of the annual Chinea festival (1745, 1746 and 1747) are early examples of Neo-classicism, displaying a simple architectonic use of the orders that indicates his association with Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the circle of students of the Académie de France in Rome, who were highly influential in French architecture from the 1760s onwards. On his return to Paris in 1747, Le Lorrain enjoyed the patronage of the Comte de Caylus, for whom he executed engravings of ancient paintings and revived the technique of encaustic. Through de Caylus he obtained a commission from Count Carl Gustav Tessin to design quadratura representations of columns and niches for the dining-room walls of his country house at Åkerö, Sweden, in ...

(b Cologne, 1731; d Oxford, Dec 12, 1812).

English painter and printmaker of German birth. The son of a watchmaker, he moved to England c. 1754 and taught music and drawing in London, Lewes and Bristol before settling in Oxford as a drawing-master and leader of the band at the city’s Music Room. In 1763 he published 12 etchings of views near Oxford; further sets of etchings followed in 1771 and 1772. His only Royal Academy exhibit was a watercolour landscape, shown in 1773 when he was listed as an honorary exhibitor. There is no evidence that he sold his work. Nearly 500 drawings by Malchair are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; these include unpretentious cottage subjects and panoramic views of the city (e.g. Oxford in Flood Time, from Shotover Hill, 1791) characterized by an atmospheric haziness achieved through blurred pencil lines and grey or pastel wash. Visits to north Wales in 1789, 1791 and 1795 encouraged him to use bolder grey washes, strong pencil lines and vertiginous mountain compositions as, for example, in ...

(b nr Paisley, Ont., Jan 8, 1882; d Bancroft, Ont., Dec 26, 1953).

Canadian painter and printmaker. He studied at the Art Students League in New York (1903–5), supporting himself as a commercial artist. His voracious appetite for the avant-garde led him to examine all that was available in New York, particularly the French modernists at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. His strong and personal style incorporated aspects of the work of the American and French Impressionists, Whistler, Cézanne, Maurice Prendergast and the Fauves. Milne exhibited his works in watercolour societies in New York and Philadelphia from 1909 to 1916. He was one of two Canadians represented in the Armory Show (1913) and he won a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915, San Francisco). The chief work of his New York period is Billboard (1912; Ottawa, N.G.)

Milne moved to rural Boston Corners, NY, in 1916. Working with a more limited palette and looser, fluid brushwork, he began to depict the same landscape subjects in oil and watercolour under varying climatic conditions. In early ...

(b Helsinki, Aug 19, 1924).

Finnish painter, sculptor and printmaker. He studied at the Central School of Industrial Arts in Helsinki (1946–9) and practised drawing at the Free Art School. His earliest work consisted mostly of figure drawings and still-lifes (e.g. the coloured wood engraving Chair Still-life, 1946; see 1982 exh. cat., no. 1). He was drawn to Synthetic Cubism in the spirit of Juan Gris and to faces and masks similar to those in the works of Picasso or in non-Western art. These representations soon gave way to the purely abstract. Nordström first exhibited in 1947 at Nuorten näyttely (‘Exhibition by young artists’; Helsinki, A. Exh. Hall). Two years later he held his first one-man exhibition. It was the first in Finland that consisted entirely of paintings influenced by Constructivism. Nordström developed his abstract programme in a very short time at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. It was then that the foundation of his painting was laid, both technically and formally. This also applied to the prints and three-dimensional constructions, which were small at first (e.g. the coloured wood engraving ...

(b Leith, nr Edinburgh, March 7, 1924; d London, April 22, 2005).

British sculptor, collagist, printmaker, film maker and writer. Born of Italian parents, he attended Edinburgh College of Art in 1943 with a view to becoming a commercial artist. After brief military service, in 1944 he attended St Martin’s School of Art in London, and from 1945 to 1947 he studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art (then based in Oxford). While in Oxford he saw ethnographic sculpture at the Pitt Rivers Museum and also became friendly with William Turnbull and Nigel Henderson. The influence of art from non-Western cultures is evident in such early works as Fisherman and Wife (ink, wash and collage, 1946; London, Tate). In 1947 he had his first one-man show at The Mayor Gallery Ltd in London, and in the summer of that year he moved to Paris. He remained there until 1949, meeting artists such as Arp, Braque, Brancusi, Giacometti, Jean Hélion, Léger and Tristan Tzara. He was attracted to Surrealist art and ideas and was also impressed by the ...

(b Světec u Bíliny, July 31, 1873; d Dachau, June 11, 1944).

Czech printmaker, designer, illustrator, painter, and teacher, active also in the USA. From 1892 he studied at the School of Applied Industrial Art in Prague (in Friedrich Ohmann’s Decorative Architecture workshop). In 1897 he left for Paris, where in 1898 he worked for Alphonse Mucha, familiarized himself with graphic techniques, worked in applied graphics, and experimented with lettering and design, and photography. His early, Secessionist, work was influenced by Japanese art and Symbolism. After his return to Prague in 1903 he devoted himself to illustration, publishing an album, Coloured Etchings in the Graphic Art Atelier at Vinohrady, Prague (New York, 1906), and the book Barevný lept a barevná rytina [Coloured etching and coloured engraving], and founding the periodical Česká grafika. Preissig lived in the USA from 1910, gaining a reputation as an innovator in the field of book and advertising graphic design, typography, and illustration, in which fields he introduced the linocut and other special graphic techniques. He taught at art schools in New York, and from ...

(b Lock Haven, PA, Aug 2, 1871; d Hanover, NH, Sept 7, 1951).

American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Pollock Anshutz from 1892 to 1894 and worked as a commercial artist, first with the newspaper the Philadelphia Inquirer (1892–5) and then the Philadelphia Press (1895–1903). He first gained national recognition for his illustrations in the turn-of-the-century poster style, for example Atlantic City Beach (Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 Aug 1894). He earned his living through magazine illustrations until 1916.

Through his association with Robert Henri and the group of young Philadelphia artists around him, Sloan began c. 1897 to paint in oil and became interested in depicting city life. In 1904, he followed Henri to New York, where he stayed for the rest of his life. In 1908, he participated with seven other artists in an exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery to protest the conservative taste of the National Academy of Design. The group was dubbed ...

(b Mesa, AZ, Nov 15, 1920).

American painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. While still studying at Long Beach Polytechnic High School he worked briefly at the Walt Disney Studios in Los Angeles (1936–7). In 1938 he studied commercial art at the Frank Wiggins Trade School in Los Angeles and then worked in Long Beach as a cartoonist. After World War II he attended San Jose State College (1949–50) and California State College at Sacramento (1950–53), majoring in art. While working as an art instructor at Sacramento Junior College from 1951 to 1960 he experimented with various styles of painting, but after meeting Abstract Expressionist painters in New York in 1956–7 he produced such works as The Sea Rolls In (1958; Sacramento, CA, Crocker A. Mus.) under their influence.

In 1960 Thiebaud began teaching in the Art Department of the University of California at Davis. He began in that year to paint still-lifes of items of food such as pies and cakes, for example ...

(b Durham, bapt Feb 20, 1718; d London, May 17, 1765).

English architect, engraver and furniture designer. The son of a gardener, he was appointed Clerk of the Works at the Queen’s House, Greenwich, in 1736 and was clerk at a succession of royal buildings, notably at the London palaces of Whitehall, Westminster and St James’s (1746–54). In this capacity he became closely associated with William Kent, whose Horse Guards scheme he was responsible for executing and possibly modifying (1750–59). He engraved and published a number of Kent’s designs (notably in Some Designs of Mr Inigo Jones and Mr William Kent, 1744). Not surprisingly, Kent’s influence is strongly felt in Vardy’s own work, such as the ‘New Stone Building’ adjoining Westminster Hall (begun 1755; destr. 1883) and the unexecuted scheme (1754) for a building for the new British Museum in Old Palace Yard, Westminster.

Vardy’s private commissions included the remodelling (1761–3) of Hackwood Park (destr. in later alterations, ...

(b Bremen, April 15, 1900; d Stuttgart, May 28, 1990).

German industrial designer and printmaker. He began his artistic training as an apprentice in the design office of a Bremen silverware factory (1914–18) and attended lessons in script and drawing at the local Kunstgewerbeschule (1916–19). A grant enabled him to continue his studies at the famous Zeichenakademie in Hanau (1919–22), where he received a varied training including silversmithing, engraving, design and modelling. The graphic works that he produced in 1920–23 were probably made during a short stay in Bremen and at the Worpswede artists’ colony; they are mostly woodcuts and engravings with religious themes, for example Death and the Virgin (woodcut, 1921; Bremen, Focke-Mus.), motifs from everyday life and the world of work. These are mostly in a brittle style, expressing themes of destruction, hunger, pain, suffering and death. By 1923 the themes became more optimistic and were depicted with a soft voluminosity.

In ...