Italian, 16th century, male.
Monogram of an engraver (including copper), print publisher (?). Religious subjects.
A.G. is mentioned by Brulliot, and believed to have been a pupil of Marcantonio Raimondi. He is known for his Virgin Holding the Infant Jesus, and Crowned by Two Angels...
Dutch, 18th century, male.
Active at the beginning of the 18th century.
Engraver, print publisher.
Pieter Boudewyn van der Aa worked in Leiden from 1700 to 1750. He was both an artist and a businessman and published a number of catalogues for his business, notably in ...
(b London, Dec 8, 1904; d New York, Nov 25, 1979).
American publisher and collector. He trained at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York before working in publishing. In 1950 he set up his own publishing company, Harry N. Abrams Inc., one of the first American companies to specialize in art books. In 1968 he founded Abbeville Books. His collecting, which began in the mid-1930s, went through three distinct phases: his first interest was in such contemporary American painters as Milton Avery and Raphael Soyer. He continued to purchase such works into the 1950s, but from the mid-1940s his collecting began to be dominated by works by major 20th-century artists; he acquired, among other works, Marc Chagall’s Clock (1948), Pablo Picasso’s Motherhood (1921) and Georges Rouault’s Miserere (1939).
Abrams’s most notable period as a collector was the 1960s, when he became known as a major collector of new American art. His interest in this area was fuelled by the ...
[Rudolf]
(b Stollberg, Saxony, April 20, 1764; d Finchley, London, March 30, 1834).
English publisher and patron of German birth. He trained as a carriage designer in Paris and moved to England between 1783 and 1786. He established his own business as a carriage maker, undertaking major commissions in London and Dublin. In 1804 he designed Pius VII’s carriage for the coronation of Napoleon and in 1805 the funeral carriage of Horatio, Viscount Nelson. By 1800 Ackermann had built up a unique business at 101 The Strand, London, known as ‘The Repository of Arts’. This encompassed a drawing school with 80 pupils, the sale and loan of Old Master paintings and watercolour drawings, the publication of decorative prints and illustrated books and the manufacture of watercolour paints including a number of new chemical pigments.
In the early 19th century, Ackermann was an important and regular patron of English watercolour painters, employing William Henry Pyne, Augustus Charles Pugin, Thomas Heaphy, Frederick Mackenzie (1787–1854...
(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, ...
Flemish, 16th – 17th century, male.
Born c. 1527, in Brussels; died 1612, in Rome.
Engraver, draughtsman, print publisher.
Flemish School.
Nicolaus van Aelst learned drawing and engraving in his home town of Brussels, then went to Rome where he set up a thriving trade in prints. This was his main activity, although he continued to engrave with a burin. It should be noted, however, that he was only the printer of the engraving of the statue of Henry II, the original artist being Tempesta....
Italian, 16th century, male.
Active in Rome at the end of the 16th century.
Engraver, print publisher.
17th century, male.
Print publisher, engraver (?).
Active in Cologne and, according to Heinecken, in Strasbourg.
Dutch, 17th century, male.
Painter, publisher.
Johan Amelisz. was a member of the Utrecht painters' guild in 1616-1617. He was also a publisher.
Swiss family of collectors of German origin. Johannes Amerbach (b ?Amorbach, c. 1450; d Basle, Dec 25, 1513) gained his MA at the Sorbonne, Paris, and trained as a printer in Nuremberg and Venice. In 1482 he settled in Basle, where in 1484 he founded his own print shop and publishing house. He was in close contact with Albrecht Dürer during the latter’s stay in Basle (1491–2). Apart from works of art for personal use, for example ornamental daggers, he probably owned graphic and print blocks for woodcut illustrations by Dürer. Johannes’s son, Bonifacius Amerbach (b Basle, 11 Oct 1495; d Basle, 24 April 1562), a lawyer, professor at the University of Basle and syndic of the Basle council, was the heir and executor of Erasmus and owned paintings by the Holbein family and important gold and silver pieces, for example the well-known ‘...
French, 16th century, male.
Died after 1587, in Lyons.
Print publisher.
A book publisher, Balthazar Arnoullet published several series of prints by Corneille de la Haye and Reverdy. A monochrome depiction of The Town of Poitiers is attributed to him.
French, 15th – 16th century, male.
Active in Lyons between 1490 and 1510.
Engraver (wood), printer, print publisher.
Lyons School.
(b Monceaux-sous-Paris, 1790; d 1849).
French dealer, print-publisher and collector, of English descent. His father, William Arrowsmith, was an agent for members of the Orléans family. Through his brother-in-law Louis Daguerre, John Arrowsmith was instrumental in negotiating the installation of the Diorama in Park Square East, Regent’s Park, London, opened in 1823 (see Diorama). In 1822, on one of his frequent visits to London, he saw Constable’s The Haywain (1821; London, N.G.) at the British Institution and shortly after began negotiations to buy it in order to exhibit it in Paris. He purchased it in 1824, along with View on the Stour near Dedham (San Marino, CA, Huntington Lib. & A.G.) and a smaller seascape, and in June 1824 exhibited them at his premises at 1, Rue Grange-aux-Belles, Paris. He sent the two larger landscapes to the Salon of 1824, as well as a view of Hampstead Heath. He was one of a small group of dealers attempting to specialize in the sale of works by living artists, and his contacts with England were particularly useful during the 1820s, when an enthusiasm for English literature and art was widespread among young French artists who were part of the Romantic movement. Between ...
Art journal published from 1934 to 1937. In 1934, the Artists’ Union joined with the Artists’ Committee of Action, which had been organized to protest against the destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads in Rockefeller Center, New York, to publish Art Front, a journal of news and opinion for artists. The first issue appeared in November 1934 with an editorial committee consisting of eight members of the Artists’ Committee of Action (Hugo Gellert (1892–1985), Stuart Davis , Zoltan Hecht (1890–1968), Abraham Harriton (1893–1986), Rosa Pringle, Hilda Abel, Jennings Tofel (1891–1959) and Harold Baumbach (1903–2002)) and eight from the Artists’ Union (Ethel Olenikov, Boris Gorelick (1912–84), Robert Jonas (b 1907), Max Spivak (1906–81), Michael Loew (1907–85), Katherine Gridley (1898–1940), Herbert Kruckman (1904–98) and C. Mactarian)). Herman Baron served as the Managing Editor. The opening statement announced: ...
Austrian family of publishers of Italian descent. The family originally came from Blevio, near Como, in northern Italy, and in the mid-18th century worked as itinerant art dealers in Germany and Austria, offering an extensive range of English and French prints to the public. Francesco Artaria (b Blevio, 1744; d Vienna, 1808) and his cousin Carlo Artaria (b Blevio, 1747; d Vienna, 1808) settled in Vienna in the 1760s, establishing the firm Artaria & Co. in 1770. In 1774 they took over a subsidiary firm based in Mainz that had been founded in 1765 by their uncle Giovanni Casimiro Artaria (1725–97). Shortly after 1793, however, this branch relocated to Mannheim, where it eventually became Artaria & Fontaine. In Vienna, Artaria & Co. established its headquarters in the Kohlmarkt and began to specialize in the publication of prints. In 1775–6 it published its first large volume of copper engravings, ...
British, 19th century, male.
Print publisher, engraver.
Robert Ashby was cited by Charles Le Blanc as active in London in 1803. A single engraving is known: H. Ashby, Writing Engraver.
British, 19th century, male.
Active in London.
Engraver (burin), print publisher.
(b Lyon, Aug 2, 1640; d Paris, July 25, 1703).
French draughtsman and engraver, brother of Claude Audran II. He was deservedly the most celebrated member of the family. Even though he first trained with his father, a mediocre artist, he made remarkably rapid progress: thus, in 1666 he engraved, in a very large format, the Triumph of Constantine and the Battle of Constantine against Maxentius after Charles Le Brun. As a consequence, he was sent that same year to Italy, where he perfected his skills, chiefly in Carlo Maratti’s studio. Most particularly, he executed there (1668) prints after Pietro da Cortona’s suites of David and Goliath and the Story of Aeneas, as well as prints after Raphael and Domenichino. On returning to France, Audran was welcomed by Le Brun, who obtained lodgings for him in the Gobelins and set him to reproduce his Battles of Alexander the Great in a large format. Audran carried out this enormous task, which earned him more than 10,000 francs, between ...
(bapt Mechelen, Jan 14, 1600; d Deurne, Antwerp, Nov 1, 1652).
Flemish painter, draughtsman and printmaker . In 1622–3 he became a master in the Guild of St Luke, Antwerp. In 1625–6 he took on Peter van de Cruys (fl 1625–44) as his pupil, who was followed by Frans Wouters in 1629 and Wouters’s brother, Pieter Wouters (1617–after 1632), in 1631–2. In 1631 van Avont became a citizen of Antwerp.
A recurring motif in van Avont’s work is a group of figures dominated by children and putti; these appear in a variety of forms—the Infant Christ, John the Baptist, angels—in van Avont’s many pictures of the Holy Family. The figure groups in these pieces are often of the same type: angels paying tribute to the Virgin and Child. The grouping is identical in several paintings. Van Avont also used figures of children in his bacchanals and in such allegorical scenes as the Four Elements (Basle, Kstmus.) and ...
(Gruenwald, Alfred Emanuel Ferdinand]
(b Stettin, Pomerania [now Szczecin, Poland], Oct 9, 1892; d nr Chamonix, France, 17 or Aug 18, 1927).
German collagist, draughtsman, writer and publisher. Although he came from an upper middle-class family, after serving as a volunteer in World War I he became a pacifist and a supporter of democratic socialism on Soviet lines. In 1918 he began a political career as a committee member of the mid-Rhine district of the Independent Social-Democratic Party, a Marxist party that had split from the Social-Democratic Party of Germany. The short-lived journal he edited, Der Ventilator, which published six issues in Cologne in February and March 1919, was a satirical magazine directed against the Social Democrat government in Berlin.
Having discovered the work of de Chirico and come under the influence of Dada, in autumn 1919 Baargeld became an opponent of tradition and convention in art as well, setting himself particularly against Expressionism. In November 1919 he and Max Ernst, who together can be said to have founded the Cologne branch of ...
