Les Hirondelles, or The swallows, is an 1882 print by French artist Felix Bracquemond (1833-1914). Bracquemond is today celebrated for his efforts to revive the printmaking arts, and for pioneering Japonisme in France. This artistic style greatly influenced the Modernist movement with its familiar names from Manet and Van Gogh to the Impressionists.
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Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia is arguably one of the most famous prints in the Baillieu Library Print Collection. There have been many interpretations of the engraving—from its complex iconography, potential for allegory and to theories of the four temperaments. One of these interpretations, forwarded by art historians Karl Giehlow and Erwin Panofsky explores the titular theme of melancholy and how it plays into the enduring myth of the artist, where the creative genius exists at the crossroads of inspiration, dedication, and essential mental anguish. Even today, the aggrandising myth of the creative mind persists, and inspiration and a lonesome, isolated existence are often conflated as one. For better or for worse, we tend to romanticise the difficulties our existence.
This charming mezzotint (1776) by Robert Laurie is an engraving of Thomas Parkinson’s painting of the same year, Mr. Shuter, with Mr. Quick, and Mrs. Green, in a scene from She Stoops to Conquer. Parkinson was a known theatrical painter, and Laurie the owner of a successful engravings and publishing business located in Fleet Street, London, an area still associated with the British printing trade. She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is a five-part comedy by Oliver Goldsmith. The scene depicted in Laurie’s mezzotint takes place in the first scene of Act V. After a series of misunderstandings and mistaken identities, the play rollicks towards its conclusion with the union of two happy couples. But, not before the larrikin son Tony Lumpkin has tricked his mother Mrs. Hardcastle into believing she is lost in the countryside, and her husband, Mr. Hardcastle, is in fact a brigand out to rob and kill her.
In honour of National Science Week from the 15th to the 23rd of August 2020, we dive into the Special Collections to look at Enlightenment era encyclopaedias and the curious prints which decorated their pages.
Intaglio printing is the opposite of relief printing. This term encompasses a variety of print-making methods in which an image is created as incised sunken lines on a printing plate, rather than as raised ones. Studying the art of printmaking, it is necessary to grasp the difference between engraving and etching, two techniques of intaglio printing. While deceptively alike to the untrained eye, both in name and look, these two methods developed from different processes, were mastered by differing artists, and create dissimilar effects on the finished print.
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