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Abrams, Harry N(athan)  

A. Deirdre Robson

(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 ...

Article

Ackermann, Rudolph  

John Ford

[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...

Article

Adams, Tate  

(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, ...

Article

Amerbach family  

Elisabeth Landolt

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 ‘...

Article

Arrowsmith, John  

Linda Whiteley

(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 ...

Article

Art Front  

Patricia Hills

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: ...

Article

Artaria  

G. Tobias Natter

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, ...

Article

Audran, Girard  

Maxime Préaud

(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 ...

Article

Avont, Pieter van  

Jetty E. van der Sterre

(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 ...

Article

Baargeld, Johannes Theodor  

Walter Vitt

(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 ...

Article

Baltens [Balten; Balthazarszoon; Custodis], Peeter  

Jan Van der Stock

[Pieter]

(b Antwerp, c. 1526–28; d Antwerp, 1584).

South Netherlandish painter, draughtsman, engraver and publisher. He was the son of the sculptor Balten Janszoon de Costere (fl 1524). In 1550 he became a master in the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp and in 1569 its dean. Primarily on the authority of van Mander, Baltens was long considered to be an inferior imitator of Bruegel family, §1 the elder. Baltens’s best-known work, the signed St Martin’s Day Kermis (e.g. versions Amsterdam, Rijksmus.; Antwerp, Kon. Mus. S. Kst.), was formerly thought to be a free copy after Bruegel’s treatment of the subject, known through an engraving and the Gift of St Martin, a fragment on cloth (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). The relationship between Baltens and Bruegel is, however, more complicated. In 1551 they collaborated on an altarpiece (destr.) for the Mechelen Glovemakers. Baltens’s other works, for example the Ecce homo (Antwerp, Kon. Acad. S. Kst.), reveal that the two artists were closely associated: a group from the ...

Article

Bämler, Johannes  

Sheila Edmunds

[Baemler, JohannBemler, Hans]

(fl 1453–1504).

German illuminator and printer. He is listed in the Augsburg tax rolls from 1453 as a scribe and from 1477 as a printer. Bämler belonged to the guild of painters, glassmakers, woodcut-makers and goldbeaters, eventually achieving the rank of Zwollfer (director). Examples of his youthful work are two signed miniatures dated 1457 (New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib., MS. M.45) and a signed historiated initial on a detached Antiphonal leaf (Philadelphia, PA, Free Lib., Lewis M 67:3). Between 1466 and 1468 he rubricated and decorated with calligraphic and painted ornament four books printed in Strasbourg: a Latin Bible (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bib., Bibel-S.2°155), a copy of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica (Munich, Bayer Staatsbib., 2° Inc. s.a.1146a) and two copies of St Augustine’s City of God (Chantilly, Mus. Condé, XXII.D.11, and Manchester, John Rylands U. Lib., no. 3218, Inc. 3A8).

Bämler’s knowledge of printing was probably acquired in Augsburg, in the shop of ...

Article

Baskerville, John  

Laura Suffield

(b Sion Hill, Worcs, Jan 28, 1706; d Birmingham, Jan 8, 1775).

English printer and publisher . He developed skills in calligraphy and monumental inscription–cutting apparently without an apprenticeship. Aged 19 he went to Birmingham to teach writing and bookkeeping and also to cut tombstones. Around 1740 he entered into business as a manufacturer of japanned goods, at which he proved highly successful. The proceeds enabled him to purchase a large house outside Birmingham and to start experimenting with type-founding c. 1750. Baskerville entered into partnership with the London bookseller Robert Dodsley (1733–64), and he published an edition of the works of Virgil as his first book in 1757; it met with praise but also with the criticism that was to follow him throughout much of his career: the print was too dazzling, the strokes too narrow and the paper too glossy. Baskerville’s types achieved their effect by his modification of the stress nearer the vertical; the transition between thick and thin strokes was more pronounced than in previous types, and the general effect was of greater precision. He may not have set up his own paper mill, as has been suggested, but he certainly exploited the properties of the newly developed wove paper and pressed it to achieve a crisp finish (...

Article

Beauvarlet family  

Véronique Meyer

French family of printmakers and print-publishers. Jacques-Firmin Beauvarlet (b Abbeville, 25 Sept 1731; d Paris, 7 Dec 1797) was an etcher, engraver and print-publisher. He came to Paris in 1750 and trained in turn with Robert Hecquet (1693–1775), Charles Dupuis and Laurent Cars. In 1762 he was appointed Graveur du Roi and in the same year was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale, although he was not made a member (reçu) until 1776; his morceau de réception was a portrait of Edme Bouchardon after the painting by François-Hubert Drouais (Paris, Louvre). In 1761 Beauvarlet married Catherine-Françoise Deschamps (b Paris, 1737; d Paris, 7 July 1769), an engraver and etcher. Her small body of work (around 15 pieces) was mostly published by her husband between 1761 and 1769. She engraved genre scenes after Greuze, such as the Coal Merchant and the ...

Article

Benalio [Benali; Benalius], Bernardino  

Feliciano Benvenuti

(b Bergamo, c. 1458; fl Venice, 1543).

Italian printer and publisher of books and prints. He settled in Venice c. 1480 and in 1483 was running a bookshop at the sign of St Jerome in the Merceria and published the Supplementum chronicarum of Jacobus Philippus Foresti (Bergomensis; 1434–1520). Between then and 1543, the year of the publication of Girolamo Savonarola’s Trattato dell’amor di Gesù, he published (alone or with other publishers) over 100 texts of Classical and contemporary authors, treatises on law and medicine, as well as several books of a religious nature, mostly in Latin. Among the most famous illustrated works are those of Dante Alighieri (1491) and Ovid (1493–4). After c. 1500 Benalio’s publishing activity declined (c. 40 post-1500 publications are known), perhaps pushed into second place by his new interest, the publication and marketing of prints. For this purpose he opened a branch at Padua, entrusting its management to a relative, ...

Article

Bernheim-Jeune  

Linda Whiteley

[Bernheim]

French family of dealers and publishers. Joseph Bernheim (b Besançon; bapt 31 March 1790; d 1859) was a colourman and artists’ supplier in Besançon. His son Alexandre Bernheim-Jeune (b Besançon, 3 April 1839; d Paris, 2 March 1915) moved to Paris in 1863 and two years later set up a gallery there in the Rue Laffitte, apparently on the advice of Courbet, who was, like himself, a native of the Franche-Comté region. Bernheim-Jeune knew Delacroix and Corot and was at first particularly associated with the Barbizon school and with Théodule Ribot, exhibiting the latter’s work in 1887 and 1890. Part of the family’s business was established in Brussels as early as 1867 and the family presumably moved there—as did several other dealers—during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). Alexandre’s two sons, Joseph (‘Josse’) Bernheim-Jeune [Bernheim d’Auberville] (b 2 Jan 1870; d Paris, 5 July 1941...

Article

Bertelli family  

Feliciano Benvenuti

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.

DBI; Thieme–Becker D. De Grazia: Le stampe dei Carracci...

Article

Bierbaum, Otto Julius  

Iain Boyd Whyte

(b Grüneberg, June 28, 1865; d Dresden, Feb 1, 1910).

German writer and publisher. From 1892 to 1894 he edited the Freie Bühne (later renamed Neue deutsche Rundschau), the Berlin-based magazine that acted as the chief mouthpiece of literary naturalism. He took up the cause of modernist painting in his very first publication, A. Böcklin (1891), a text introducing 15 heliographs of the artist’s work, and this was followed by publications on Fritz von Uhde (1893; 1908) and on Hans Thoma (1904). In 1894, with Julius Meier-Graefe, Bierbaum founded Pan, which was to become the leading avant-garde journal of the period in Germany, notable for its typography and for the inventive integration of text and illustration. There were also reproductions of paintings, drawings and sculpture, and the list of contributors included Franz von Stuck, Thoma, von Uhde, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, Félix Vallotton, ...

Article

Birmann, Samuel  

Y. Boerlin-Brodbeck

(b Basle, Aug 11, 1793; d Basle, Sept 27, 1847).

Swiss painter and publisher, son of Peter Birmann. From about 1811 he worked in his father’s studio, where he drew mainly landscapes in pencil, pen, watercolour and bistre (e.g. Rigi, 1814; Basle, Kstmus.). In 1815 he went to Rome with the landscape painters Jakob Christoph Bischoff (1793–1825) and Friedrich Salathé (1793–1858). He executed a few oil paintings and also studies and detailed landscapes, usually in the hills around Rome, for which he employed pen, pencil, watercolour and wash. In 1817 he visited Sicily and produced drawings of luminous horizons in a Romantic vein, precisely delineated, yet with an economy of detail. In late 1817 he returned to Basle and worked in his father’s business while sketching in the Alps each summer. In 1818 he exhibited in Berne and in 1820, 1821 and 1825 in Zurich. In 1822, together with a group of other Swiss artists that included his brother ...

Article

Bolswert, Schelte  

Hella Robels

[Schelderic](Adamsz.)

(b Bolsward, c. 1586; d Antwerp, Dec 12, 1659).

Dutch engraver and publisher, brother of Boetius Bolswert. He was probably a pupil of his brother in Amsterdam. He engraved a number of prints after such artists as Vinckboons (e.g. Christ Entering Jerusalem, 1612; Hollstein, no. 14), Gillis van Coninxloo III and Abraham Bloemaert. He moved to the southern Netherlands and in 1617 was working for the publishers Plantin–Moretus in Antwerp. Schelte devoted himself mainly to religious prints (e.g. the Life of St Augustine series, 1624; Hollstein, nos 201–28) and became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1625–6. Until 1627 he worked in Brussels and Antwerp on Gérard Thibault’s Académie de l’espée (Leiden, 1628; Hollstein, no. 327).

Schelte Bolswert’s career as an engraver of Rubens’s work began with the Lion Hunt (?1628; Hollstein, no. 298), but the majority of this reproductive work was executed after 1630. In all, Schelte made about eighty engravings after Rubens, of which only four, however, were authorized by Rubens: the ...