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 ...
French, 19th century, male.
Born 1 January 1836, in Mechelen, to French parents; died 1 April 1894, in Paris.
Engraver (etching/burin).
Abot studied under Gaucherel. He was among the artists retained by the publisher Goupil, whose titles included the journal L'Art and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts...
(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 ...
Flemish School, 19th century, male.
Born 1794, in Bruges; died 1863.
Miniaturist.
This artist was a pupil of Ducq and displayed outstanding ability from the very start of his career. In 1833 he went to Paris, where he collaborated on the Journal des Gens du Monde...
[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...
Flemish School, 17th century, male.
Active in London.
Painter.
Jan van Adam is mentioned in the journal of Turquet de Mayerne, physician to King Charles I of England.
British, 18th century, male.
Engraver (line-engraving).
Francis Adams published a satirical journal in 1773 and penned several portraits in 1774; he received an Arts Society award in 1760.
American, 19th century, male.
Born 1803, in New Germantown (New Jersey); died 1880, in Morristown (New Jersey).
Engraver (wood).
Joseph Alexander Adams worked for several years as a printer and then devoted himself to engraving on wood, which he initially studied alone. He later received advice from the engraver Alexander Anderson. He became a master and, with his pupils and collaborators, undertook the great work that made his reputation, ...
(b Burgess Hill, Sussex, 1849; d London, Aug 17, 1933).
English architect, editor and draughtsman. After completing his articles with H. N. Goulty of Brighton, he became assistant to William Ralph Emerson, and Architect to Brighton Council. Between 1872 and 1923 he was Editor of Building News. He instituted the Building News Designing Club, which enabled young architects to submit designs for his criticism. He contributed largely to the paper’s illustrations, redrawing designs for lithographic reproduction, and covered a wide range of subjects in a skilful and accurate, if somewhat dull, linear style. He also published several architectural books. Through the owner of Building News he obtained his major architectural commissions, notably Camberwell Polytechnic and Art Gallery (1902). He also designed country houses near London, for example Queensmead Cottage, Kings Road, Windsor, Berks (1883), for Reginald Talbot, as well as in Australia (e.g. Bellevue Hill, Double Bay, for Charles B. Fairfax in the mid-1880s) and America, where he designed timber houses in New Jersey for E. S. Wilde in ...
(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, ...
German, 19th century, male.
Born 1780, in Nuremberg.
Engraver (line-engraving).
A pupil of Ambroise Gabler, he specialised in work for printers. Two portraits by him are mentioned, one of Marie Reizammer and one of Nanette Kuhn.
German, 18th century, male.
Active in Breslau (now Wroclaw).
Engraver.
Son of the fabric printer John David Adolph.
Spanish, 18th – 19th century, male.
Painter.
Adriazola was also a mathematician, journalist and soldier.
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....
Russian, 19th century, male.
Active between 1809 and 1826 in Moscow.
Engraver (line-engraving).
This artist belonged to the school of the Moscow printer and collector P.P. Beketov. Under the direction of J. Rosanov, N.Z. Sokolov and A.J. Ossipov, Afanasiev engraved a series of three hundred portraits of famous Russians, published in three volumes between ...
German, 19th century, male.
Engraver (steel).
This artist worked mainly for publisher G. G. Lange in Darmstadt.
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in China and the United States.
Born 18 May 1957, in Beijing, China.
Artist, architect, designer, curator, publisher, activist.
After spending most of his childhood in the provinces of China, Ai Weiwei moved to Beijing in the mid-1970s to attend the city’s film academy. While there, he co-founded the first of the loose collectives of pro-democracy artists to emerge in the city, known as the Stars Group (1979–1983). In 1981, he travelled to the United States, first to Philadelphia before enrolling in New York City’s Parsons School of Design. During his student years, Ai worked at a printing press in the meatpacking district of New York City. In 1993, he returned to Beijing, where he co-founded the Chinese Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW), a non-profit organization and gallery. In Shanghai in 2000, Ai co-curated, with Feng Boyi, the infamous Fuck Off exhibition, which was closed by the authorities at the same time that the first Shanghai Biennial took place. He published a series of books about experimental art in Europe and North America: ...
