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(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

(b New York, March 17, 1822; d New York, Aug 11, 1904)

American wood-engraver, art dealer, collector and philanthropist. Avery’s career as a wood-engraver and his involvement with the New York publishing trade began in the early 1840s. He worked for, among others, Appleton’s, the New York Herald and Harper’s and produced illustrations for trade cards, religious tracts, adventure stories and children’s books. By the early 1850s Avery had begun compiling humorous books and commissioning drawings from such artist-illustrators as Felix Octavius Carr Darley, John Whetten Ehninger, Augustus Hoppin (1827–96), Tompkins Harrison Matteson and John McLenan (1827–66). His business contacts led to close relationships with such artists as Frederick Church, John F. Kensett and William Trost Richards.

By the late 1850s Avery had begun to collect drawings and small cabinet pictures by local artists. Other art collectors, notably William T. Walters, asked Avery’s advice when commissioning works of art. In 1864 he turned his engraving practice over to ...

[Dazaincourt]

(b Paris, June 6, 1719; d Paris, May 31, 1794).

French patron, collector, amateur engraver and soldier . He was the only son of the collector Augustin Blondel de Gagny and joined the army at 15, being awarded the Croix de St Louis in 1745. He retired from the army in 1753, having married a great heiress, Catherine Edmée de la Haye des Fosses; they divided their time between hôtels particuliers in the Rue de Vendôme and the Rue Nazareth, Paris, and an elegant château at Bonneuil. Azincourt was an honorary member of the Académie Royale in Paris and the academy of Marseille. In 1776 he helped to arrange the acquisition by the Maison du Roi of the Cabinet de l’Amour from the Hôtel Lambert, Paris. In La Première Idée de la curiosité (1749), he described the principles of collecting and offered advice on display. His eclectic collection ranged from Italian, Northern European and French works to curiosities of natural history. After ...

(b Kilbride, Co. Carlow, June 5, 1723; d London, Dec 22, 1810).

Irish printmaker and art dealer . He joined the British Army around 1742, serving until 1761 and reaching the rank of Captain. His earliest dated print, a portrait of John Golding (Meyer, no. 28) is from 1753. On another (m 81), undated, he acknowledged art instruction from Nathaniel Hone (i). Baillie exhibited prints at the Society of Artists from 1762 and visited The Hague in 1763 to purchase paintings for James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale (1736–1802). Many of his prints reproduce Dutch 17th-century drawings or paintings in his own, or aristocratic collections. He also specialized in prints of Rembrandt’s graphic works. Baillie etched a reversed copy of Rembrandt’s print Three Trees (m 80), adding fork lightning. He owned three Rembrandt plates, including that for the Hundred Guilder Print, which he reworked in 1775. His collected prints went through eight editions between 1776 and 1824.

Italian, 18th century, male.

Born c. 1675, in Rome; died c. 1730.

Engraver (burin), art dealer. Religious subjects, architectural views.

Worked initially under the tutelage of his father, Pietro Santo Bartoli. It is probable that this is the same artist as F. Bartoli who produced coloured drawings based on religious works in St Peter's in Rome on behalf of the English art collector John Talman. The volume containing these engraved illustrations has been in the British Museum in London since ...

(b Paris, Oct 23, 1723; d ?Paris, Jan 12, 1797).

French engraver, print-seller and dealer . His father was Claude-Pierre Basan, a wine merchant in Paris. Pierre-François received his first lessons in drawing and engraving from his cousin Etienne Fessard (1714–77); he then studied under Jean Daullé. From 1747 he worked for the print-seller Michel Odieuvre (1687–1756), for whom he engraved 58 portraits. Between 1750 and 1754 he contributed to the engraving of the paintings in the Saxon royal collection in Dresden (Galerie royale de Dresde, 1753–7) and in the collection of Heinrich, Graf von Brühl (Galerie … [du] Comte de Brühl, 1754). He also engraved 14 illustrations for the Histoire naturelle of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1749–67; Paris, Bib. N. cat. nos 272–85).

However, it is as a print-seller rather than as an engraver that Basan is best remembered. By his own admission, he had too much ‘vivacité de caractère’ for the exacting task of the engraver, and in ...

French, 18th century, male.

Active in Paris during the second half of the 18th century.

Engraver, art dealer.

[Simon-René]

(b Paris, Dec 11, 1715; d Paris, 1797).

French soldier, amateur printmaker and collector. He was sometimes called ‘Comte’, probably an assumed title. He was raised by his grandfather Jean Baudouin des Pacauds (d 1722), a tobacco merchant and collector of maps and mathematical instruments, whose wealth he inherited. In 1736 Baudouin joined a regiment of the Gardes Françaises as a gentilhomme à drapeau. He was an amateur printmaker of limited technical skill; in 1757 he published L’Exercice de l’infanterie française, a book of 62 prints. He presented it to Louis XV and was rewarded with 20,000 francs. The book was republished in 1759, with the plates re-engraved by Augustin de Saint-Aubin. Baudouin was a considerable collector, particularly of Dutch and Flemish paintings, which served as models for many of his prints. In 1779 he sold 115 paintings from his collection to Catherine the Great, having had copies made of 92 of them. Many of the works he sold, including ...

Italian family of typographers, engravers, publishers and print dealers. Members of the family were active in Venice and Padua in the 16th century and the early 17th. Most notable among them were Luca Bertelli (fl Venice, c. 1560; fl Padua, 1594), Orazio Bertelli (fl Venice, 1562–88), who was possibly Luca’s brother, and Ferdinando (Ferrando, Ferrante) Bertelli (fl Venice, 1561–72). It is difficult to determine the extent of Luca Bertelli’s participation in the execution of the prints he published; they were mainly historical, religious and mythological. Orazio Bertelli probably encouraged Agostino Carracci’s visit to Venice in 1582. Orazio’s engravings included the works of Federico Barocci, Domenico Tibaldi and Paolo Veronese, notably a Pietà (De Grazia, p. 125, no. 102). Ferdinando Bertelli was best known for his publication of a vast number of maps, by both Italian and foreign cartographers.

(b Amsterdam, bapt Dec 2, 1640; d Amsterdam, bur Jan 20, 1690).

Dutch engraver, draughtsman and printseller. He was the son of a shopkeeper and the pupil and eventual heir of Cornelis van Dalen (1636–64). His dated prints commenced in 1665, and, as well as portraits, they include biblical, mythological and genre subjects, as well as six views of Amsterdam after Jacob van Ruisdael, and two of the Jewish burial-ground there (1670; also after van Ruisdael). During this period he produced many exceptional line-engravings, such as his sensitive portrait of Govaert Flinck and the equestrian Pieter Schout Muylman (see Hollstein, pp. 167, 179). Blooteling went to London in 1672, probably at the suggestion of David Loggan, whose plumbago miniatures he emulated in such works as the signed Noah Bridges (London, BM). He met Peter Lely and Mary Beale and engraved portraits after them. During his stay he became increasingly involved in mezzotint engraving and, in collaboration with his brother-in-law ...

Swiss, 17th – 18th century, male.

Born 1664 or 1673, in Augsburg; died 1758 or 1766, in Augsburg.

Draughtsman, engraver, picture dealer. Historical subjects, figures, landscapes.

Gabriel Bodenehr the Elder painted historical figures and views, some of which were collected under the title: The Glory and Might of Europe...

(b Venice, 1605; d Venice, Jan 1, 1681).

Italian art critic, dealer, engraver, restorer and painter. His place in history rests firmly on the hyperbolic 681-page poem La carta del navegar pitoresco (Venice, 1660), whose title and subtitle may be translated as ‘The map of pictorial navigation. Dialogue between a dilettante Venetian senator and a professor of painting, under the names of Ecelenza and Compare; divided into eight winds which lead the Venetian boat across the high seas of painting as the dominant power of that sea to the confusion of him who does not understand compasses’. It is an intensely patriotic and polemical defence of Venetian painting written in Venetian dialect and directed against those Roman and Tuscan standards represented by Giorgio Vasari. As the full title suggests, Boschini is enamoured with Giambattista Marino’s metaphoric language and frankly espouses a personal reading of art history from the perspective of an artist (he who ‘understands compasses’). The apparently unstructured exposition rejects objective, comprehensive and logically organized theories of art in favour of an eccentric art criticism that attempts to capture the immediacy and pleasure of vision itself....

(b Arcisate di Como, 1727; d Parma, Nov 4, 1792).

Italian stuccoist, printmaker, painter and collector. Before studying anything else he learned stucco decoration from his father Pietro Luigi (d 1754), who worked in Germany from 1743 until his death. Stucco work always remained Bossi’s main activity, alongside that of printmaking, especially etching. His experiments in the latter field followed in the tradition of the great Venetian printmakers. He was encouraged by Charles-François Hutin, who was in Dresden from 1753 to 1757 and whom he followed to Milan and Parma. His first etching, based on a work by Bartolomeo Nazari (1693–1758), was done in Milan in 1758. From 1759 on he was in Parma, where he produced some plates for the Iconologie tirée de divers auteurs (1759) by Jean-Baptiste Boudard, and where he executed the stucco trophy decoration for the attic of S Pietro, the construction of which began in 1761. From this date Bossi also collaborated with the designer ...

(b Dorrington, Salop, Jan 19, 1719; d London, Dec 12, 1804).

English engraver and print-seller. The son of a land surveyor, Boydell at first pursued his father’s occupation. In 1731 the family moved to Hawarden in Flintshire (now Clwyd), Wales, where he began making copies of book illustrations. He saw an engraving of Hawarden Castle (c. 1740) by William Henry Toms (c. 1700–c. 1750) that induced him to go to London in 1740 to become Toms’s apprentice. He also enrolled in the St Martin’s Lane Academy. In 1746 he established himself as an independent engraver with a shop on the Strand, where he produced inexpensive topographical prints and published his first collection of engravings, The Bridge Book (c. 1747). In 1751 he moved to a larger shop in Cheapside, where he began to import landscape prints after Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa. Boydell paid unprecedented sums to William Woollett to engrave Claude’s Temple of Apollo...

British, 20th century, female.

Born 30 August 1911, in Norwood (London); died 1991, in Hampstead (London).

Painter, illustrator, muralist, lithographer, collector. Still-lifes, figures, landscapes, nature.

East London Group, London Group.

Phyllis Bray was the daughter of William de Bray, attaché to the mother of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Her first husband was the painter John Cooper, and her second was Eric Phillips. She studied on a scholarship at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where her tutor was Henry Tonks. She was a leading figure in the formation of the ...

(b Paris, Feb 11, 1830; d Parays, Tarn-et-Garonne, June 3, 1890).

French critic, collector and etcher. He studied drawing and painting before becoming art critic of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1859. His extensive articles examined such issues as the etching revival (see Etching, §II, 4), modernization of the industrial arts, the cult of Japonisme and Impressionism. With his notices in the newspaper Le Rappel (1869–71) and the avant-garde journal La Renaissance littéraire et artistique (1871–2), the periodical of the emerging Symbolist poets, Burty passionately espoused the taste for Japanese art and culture and coined the term Japonisme in 1872. His apartment, which contained a vast collection of Japanese works of art, attracted many collectors also fascinated by Japan, including Edmond de Goncourt, Félix Bracquemond and Edgar Degas. Burty’s meetings and his collection and staunch advocacy of Japonisme influenced many, including his Impressionist friends, in whose compositions the subtle assimilation of Japanese print design is evident. The marriage of Burty’s daughter Madeleine to the entrepreneur ...

Flemish School, 19th century, male.

Born 13 September 1814, in Sept-Fontaines, near Luxembourg; died 19 February 1853, in Ghent.

Engraver, collector.

Dutch, 18th century, male.

Born 22 January 1701, in Amsterdam; died 1781, in Amsterdam.

Draughtsman, engraver, collector.

(bapt Amsterdam, Jan 25, 1626; bur Amsterdam, Dec 22, 1679).

Dutch businessman, collector, painter, draughtsman and etcher. Though now considered the outstanding marine painter of 17th-century Holland, he was not a professional artist nor a member of the Amsterdam Guild of St Luke. His father owned a successful dye-works in Amsterdam, in which both Jan and his brother Louis were active. Their father enjoyed a long life and probably managed the firm until close to his death in 1674, when Jan inherited it. This left Jan with plenty of spare time to pursue his hobby, painting. He married Annetje Jansdr. (Anna Grotingh) before 1653. He died a widower, survived by his seven children, who inherited his considerable fortune. His last will shows that in addition to the dye-works and immense cash assets, van de Cappelle owned extensive properties and an art collection that must be rated among the most important of his time.

Apart from his involvement with the arts, Jan shared his countrymen’s love of ships and sailing. He owned a pleasure yacht, moored in the ‘oude yacht haven’, which must have taken him on many trips along the Dutch coast and rivers, giving him an opportunity to sketch and draw from nature....

(b Lyon, May 28, 1699; d Paris, April 14, 1771).

French printmaker, print publisher and print-seller. Early in his life his family removed to Paris. His father, Jean-François Cars (1661–1730), an engraver and publisher, was his first teacher. He next studied painting under Joseph Christophe (1662–1748) and François Lemoyne and then completed his studies in engraving under Nicolas-Henry Tardieu. In 1729 he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale and on 31 December 1733 was received (reçu), on presentation of the engraved portraits of Michel Anguier after Gabriel Revel and of Sébastien Bourdon after Hyacinthe Rigaud. From 1750 he gradually abandoned engraving in favour of print-selling, particularly those of his father’s collection. In 1757 he was appointed a Conseiller. His work included nearly 190 prints; he engraved portraits, historical and mythological subjects after Lemoyne, such as Hercules and Omphale and the Bath of Iris, and genre subjects after Watteau, such as Figures de différents caractères...