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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
Mariana Katzarova
(b Dolni Dŭbnik, nr Pleven, July 24, 1901; d Sofia, Jan 23, 1958).
Bulgarian cartoonist, illustrator, draughtsman, painter, teacher, editor and critic. In 1926 he studied painting at the Academy of Art, Sofia, and although he was later known for his paintings, he achieved greater fame as a political and social cartoonist and newspaper and magazine illustrator. His early cartoons are courageous commentaries on political events in Bulgaria from 1925 to 1934, wittily satirizing the monarchy and dictatorships. He also mocked the machinations of the various bourgeois political parties as they fought for power. Among his most celebrated cartoons are the Kidnapping of the Constitution and the Tsar’s Family, published in the Sofia newspapers Zemedelsko Zname and Sturetz, as well as Suvremennik and other left-wing publications. He also illustrated the series Spanish Chronicle (1936). In 1940 he began freelancing for the anti-Fascist satirical newspaper Sturshel (Sofia) and in 1941 became its editor. During World War II he executed many political cartoons opposing Fascism and Nazism (e.g. ...
Article
Hella Robels
Family of Dutch engravers and publishers. Both Boetius Bolswert and Schelte Bolswert began their careers in Amsterdam but moved south c. 1617–18, working as book illustrators in Antwerp and Brussels and producing religious prints (e.g. the joint work on Saints of the Order of the Jesuits, Hollstein, p. 85, nos 278–82). The brothers are chiefly known for the excellence of their reproductions of paintings by Rubens, which they began to produce c. 1630.
Bolswert, Boetius [Boëthius] (Adamsz.) (à)
Bolswert, Schelte [Schelderic] (Adamsz.) (à)
BNB; Hollstein: Dut. & Flem.; Thieme–Becker; WurzbachE. Dutuit: Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes, 3 (Paris, 1885/R Amsterdam, 1972), 4, pp. 21–274T. Levin: ‘Handschriftliche Bemerkungen von Erasmus Quellinus’, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst [incorp. suppl. Kstchron. & Kstlit.; merged with Jb. Kstwiss. & with Repert. Kstwiss. to form Z. Kstgesch.], 23 (1888), p. 173A. Rosenberg: Die Rubensstecher (Vienna, 1893), pp. 97–133F. van den Wijngaert...Article
Amy Fox
(b Nashville, TN, Nov 30, 1945).
American graphic designer. Carson studied fine art and art history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, graduating in 1966. She started her career as a graphic designer in 1967 working for United Methodist Publishing House, Nashville, TN, designing magazines and educational materials. Working with limited budgets and for readers ranging from children in kindergarten to adults, she learnt to communicate with varying age groups. Drawing on her magazine design skills, she began work for Color Productions in 1968. Producing international magazines gave her exposure to the full-spectrum of design production, illustration, and final press production. When the company resources diminished in 1970, Carson took a position at Design Graphics, a Nashville art studio.
In 1973 she landed a job at Scholastic Publishing House designing their early childhood magazine Let’s Find Out. Teaming up with editor Jean Marzollo, she worked with nationally known illustrators and photographers to make the children’s stories and educational material easy for children to relate to. This partnership lasted far beyond her tenure there, leading to collaboration on the ...
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Ilja M. Veldman
(b Amsterdam, 1522; d Gouda, Oct 29, 1590).
Dutch printmaker, poet, writer, theologian and philosopher. His work as a printmaker began in Haarlem in 1547, when he made a woodcut for a lottery poster after a design of Maarten van Heemskerck. From then until 1559 Coornhert worked as Heemskerck’s principal engraver. Initially he etched his plates, but during the 1550s he turned to engraving. He was possibly also responsible for the woodcuts after Heemskerck and the publication of Heemskerck’s early prints. In addition, he engraved designs by Willem Thibaut (1524–97) in 1556–7, Lambert Lombard in 1556 and Frans Floris in 1554–7. During this period Philip Galle was his pupil. In 1560 Coornhert temporarily stopped his engraving activities, set up a print publishing house, became a clerk and devoted himself to his literary work. In 1567 he was arrested for political reasons but managed to escape to Cologne in 1568. During his exile, which lasted until 1576...
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Henry Adams
(b Veracruz, Mar 13, 1880; d Stamford, CT, Jan 10, 1961).
Mexican illustrator, writer, gallery owner, and publisher, active in the USA. He was the son of a wealthy Mexican lawyer and publisher. De Zayas started his career as an artist by providing drawings for his father’s newspaper in Veracruz. In 1906 he moved on to Mexico City’s leading newspaper, El Diario, but a year later, after the ascension of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whom the newspaper had opposed, he fled to the USA. There he landed a position making caricatures for the New York Evening World. Shortly after his arrival in the USA, he came into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, who staged solo shows of De Zayas’s caricatures at his gallery Gallery 291 in 1909 and 1910, both of which proved to be huge popular successes.
In 1910 De Zayas traveled to Paris, where he stayed almost a year, scouting out adventurous forms of modern art for Stieglitz, notably the cubist work of Picasso and African sculpture. On his return, equipped with knowledge of European modern art and inspired by the work of the French modernist ...
Article
Linda Whiteley
French family of typographers, printers, publishers and collectors. The first to settle in Paris was Denis Didot (2nd half of 17th century), whose son François Didot (1689–1759) founded in 1713 the family publishing business. His sons François-Ambroise Didot (1730–1804) and Pierre-François Didot (1731–93) developed the business, adding a type foundry and a paper-mill. The elegance of their publications brought them the patronage of the brothers of Louis XVI: Monsieur (later Louis XVIII) and the Comte d’Artois (later Charles X). The sons of François-Ambroise included Pierre Didot, a publisher, among whose illustrators were some of the most distinguished artists of the day, and Firmin Didot (1764–1836), who designed the Didot typeface for his brother’s use. Firmin Didot’s son Ambroise Firmin-Didot was a notable collector of prints. The cadet branch of the family, Didot Jeune, the descendants of Pierre-François Didot, included Saint Marc Didot, who assembled a fine collection of paintings....
Article
Annette Faber
(fl Leipzig, 1592; d after 1617).
German painter, illustrator and printmaker. In 1592 he was granted the freedom of Leipzig, where he worked mainly as an illustrator for the publisher Henning Gross. He specialized in views and plans of towns, including Moscow, Wrocław, Venice, Istanbul and Jerusalem. His etchings illustrated the Persianische Reise (Leipzig, 1609) by ...
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Stephen Bann
(b Nassau, Bahamas, Oct 28, 1925; d Dunsyre, Scotland, March 27, 2006).
Scottish sculptor, graphic artist and poet. Brought up in Scotland, he briefly attended Glasgow School of Art and first made his reputation as a writer, publishing short stories and plays in the 1950s. In 1961 he founded the Wild Hawthorn Press with Jessie McGuffie and within a few years had established himself internationally as Britain’s foremost concrete poet (see Concrete poetry). His publications also played an important role in the initial dissemination of his work as a visual artist. As a sculptor, he has worked collaboratively in a wide range of materials, having his designs executed as stone-carvings, as constructed objects and even in the form of neon lighting.
In 1966 Finlay and his wife, Sue, moved to the hillside farm of Stonypath, south-west of Edinburgh, and began to transform the surrounding acres into a unique garden, which he named Little Sparta. He revived the traditional notion of the poet’s garden, arranging ponds, trees and vegetation to provide a responsive environment for sundials, inscriptions, columns and garden temples. As the proponent of a rigorous classicism and as the defender of Little Sparta against the intrusions of local bureaucracy, he insisted on the role of the artist as a moralist who comments sharply on cultural affairs. The esteem won by Finlay’s artistic stance and style is attested by many important large-scale projects undertaken throughout the world. The ‘Sacred Grove’, created between ...
Article
Laura Suffield
(b Paris, Sept 15, 1712; d Paris, Oct 8, 1768).
French printer and publisher. He was born into a family of printers and type-founders. In 1729 he began to work at the celebrated Le Bé type foundry in Paris, of which his father was manager; he also studied drawing at the Académie de St Luc. In 1736 he started up as a professional type-founder, producing woodcut vignettes and some large-format type. In 1739 Fournier was formally registered as a typecutter. He made the first move towards the standardization of type sizes with a Table of Proportions (1737), although his method was supplanted by that of the Didot family. His first specimen book, Modèles des caractères de l’imprimerie (Paris, 1742), showed 4600 punches. Fournier’s typographic skills lay in his modernization of type forms. His roman types increased the thin–thick stroke contrasts and used flat, unbracketed serifs; his italic has been described as the most legible of all. His interests also lay in the design of metalcut floral ornaments and in music cutting, for which he developed a more unified system than that previously possible. Fournier’s technical improvements included moulds for the continuous casting of rules and leads that allowed for much longer rules. Having applied in ...
Article
Laura Suffield
(b Bloomington, IL, March 8, 1865; d Marlboro-on-Hudson, NY, May 11, 1947).
American typographer, printer and graphic designer. He demonstrated his interest in letter forms when a child, cutting out 3000 in paper. While working as a clerk in Boston, he discovered the Kelmscott Press. In 1895 Goudy founded the Booklet Press, a small printing shop, later renamed the Camelot Press. In 1896 he designed his first type, called Camelot, and in 1899 set up as a freelance designer, producing book designs and advertising lettering. His Village Press printed two books before 1904 when he moved to Hingham, MA, where a further nine books were produced over the next two years. The establishment of the press in New York was followed by a fire (January 1908) in which all Goudy’s property was lost. From this point he abandoned general printing in favour of type design. A trip to Europe in 1909 enabled him to study inscriptions. His first two types to achieve serious recognition and success were ...
Article
Aída Sierra Torres
(b Mexico City, ?1820; d Mexico City, 1897).
Mexican illustrator and printmaker. He probably began his career in 1847 in the workshop of the Murguía publishing house. In 1854, in collaboration with Andrés Campillo, he created an outstanding series of illustrations for the book Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos, in which he portrayed character types (e.g. Great Poet, lithograph) in the manner of Honoré Daumier. In 1855 he founded the firm Litografía de Iriarte y Compañía. The following year he published portraits of famous personalities in the weekly review El Panorama. He was a co-founder in 1861 of the political fortnightly La Orquesta, on which he worked for more than ten years as an illustrator and eventually as a caricaturist and as editor. Iriarte continued to contribute to a number of periodicals, including El Renacimiento, and his firm also published the weekly San Baltazar (1869–1870). He collaborated with Santiago Hernández on numerous illustrations for, among others, ...
Article
Lilian M. C. Randall
(b Baltimore, MD, May 29, 1824; d Paris, Dec 16, 1909).
American agent and collector. The son of a publisher and book illustrator, Fielding Lucas jr (d 1854), he worked as an engineer for the New York–New Haven Railroad, the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the Croton Aqueduct Board. In 1856 he inherited a sum sufficient to free him to pursue his interest in the arts. The following year he moved to Paris, never to return to America. In Paris, Lucas gained widespread respect in art circles through his work as agent to several American collectors and art dealers. By the mid-1880s he had expended about half a million francs at the behest of William T. Walters, a prosperous businessman also from Baltimore. Lucas was actively involved in the formation of Walters’s collection of 19th-century art, noted for its outstanding works by French Realist, Academic and Barbizon school artists, with works commissioned from such artists as Honoré Daumier, ...
Article
Isabelle Monod-Fontaine
French dealers and publishers. Aimé Maeght (b nr St-Omer, 27 April 1906; d 1981) first worked as a lithographic draughtsman and poster designer, joining the printing firm Robaudy in Cannes at the age of 20. In 1928 he married Marguerite Devaye (b Cannes, 25 April 1905; d 31 July 1977) with whom he opened a shop selling radios in 1932 while still working as a lithographer and advertising designer. In 1937 they opened the Galerie Arte in Cannes, where they exhibited the work of painters such as Georges Rouault, Jean Pougny, Roger Chastel, Henri Lebasque and Jean-Gabriel Domergue. With the encouragement of Pierre Bonnard, a friend of the Maeghts from 1941, and of Matisse and other artists and writers whom they met in the south of France, they decided to devote themselves to art publishing and dealing. In late 1945 they settled in Paris and opened the ...