THE
ARTIST MIRRORED
A
selection of Artists’ printed
Portraits & Self-Portraits
Though the medieval artist has come down to us as essentially
an anonymous artisan and craftsman, it is thought that
stone carvers and painters sometimes gave their own features
to their creations, especially in such subjects as St
Luke painting the Virgin. Even in an age of religious
conviction of immortality, there was a desire to leave
a permanent earthly record for posterity, at least of
faces even if not identified by name.
Portraiture as a genre, and portraits of artists, in
particular, emerged in the Renaissance, inspired by humanism
and its concomitant cult of the individual.
As in medieval times, artists had also not generally
been accorded a status above craftsmen in either ancient
Greece or classical Rome, but exceptionally Pliny had
extolled, in retrospect, the prowess of the Greek painter
Apelles and the sculptor Praxiteles. The rediscovery
of this antique text encouraged artists to aspire to
a new intellectual status in the Liberal Arts as well
as inspiring in their audience a new attitude of admiration
for the creative artist.
It
was an appreciation only partly based on the artist’s
skill in reproducing the natural world, rendering tints
and textures of skin, hair, lace, satin, velvet, the
play of light and the ability to create in two dimensions
the illusion of solid objects in three-dimensional space.
Above all Renaissance Italy initiated a reverence for
the ingenuity of the artist’s conceived design – his
ability to express ideas through an allusive visual language
which made him the equivalent to and equal of the poet
and philosopher. The Renaissance artist had to be educated,
to know and understand the significance of classical
history and mythology, as well as the Bible, to be able
to express himself in an iconography which spoke to a
learned patron. In time ingenio, the Italian term that
encompassed this talent developed into the concept of
the artist as genius. Commensurately as artists became
celebrities there developed a demand for information
about their lives and a desire for their portraits.
In
general painted portraits preceded
printed portraits by almost a century, but as in the
15th century printmaking was in its infancy this is
not surprising. The earliest printed portrait is coincidentally
probably the self-portrait with his wife engraved by
Israhel van Meckenham c1490 (though in the immediately
following few decades engraved portraits of scholars
and statesmen more generally preceded the production
of engraved portraits of artists).
Portraiture
developed first in Germany and the Low Countries, followed
by Venice, in keeping with the tenet that artists in
northern climes were more interested in specific individual
physical details and accurate rendering of the natural
external world than their ‘idealising’ southern
Italian confrères. This said, in the early decades
of the 16th century, though they may have drawn or painted
them, neither Dürer nor Cranach or their Northern
contemporaries engraved self-portraits or portraits of
fellow artists. Whereas exceptionally Raimondi in Rome
engraved the portrait of Raphael, and Bandinelli commissioned
first Agostino Veneziano and later Eneo Vico and Nicola
della Casa to engrave his drawings of himself and his
academy. Equally, Vasari’s ‘dictionary’ of
artists predated van Mander’s by fifty years.
The
publication of written biographies of artists gave
impetus to engraved portraits of artists. The Italian
painter Georgio Vasari’s VITE (Lives of the most
excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) was first
published in 1550. A second enlarged edition appeared
in 1568. Inspired by the example of Vasari, the Flemish
painter Karel van Mander published his HET SCHILDERBOECK
(Book of Painters) in 1604. Part I comprised the biographies
of artists from Germany and the Low Countries, while
Part II was devoted to Italian artists in a condensed
translation of Vasari, brought up to date from van Mander’s
own information acquired in his four year’s stay
in Italy 1573-77. (Part III was a painters’ manual.)
The tradition continued in later centuries with Houbraken’s
DE GROOTE SCHOUBURGH, published 1717-21,
with biographies of 17th century Dutch artists and Horace
Walpole’s
ANECDOTES OF PAINTERS (working in
England) published 1762-71.
Written
texts soon suggested complementary visual representation.
The publisher Hieronymous Cock in Antwerp probably
began commissioning engravings of northern artists
around 1550, though his series of about twenty portraits
was not issued till 1572, by his widow. This series
of plates of northern artists’ portraits was re-issued over the following
century by a succession of subsequent publishers and
prompted Hendrick Hondius to issue his own parallel PICTORUM
ALIQUOT CELEBRIUM PRAECIPUAE GERMANIAE INFERIORIS EFFIGES
(Portraits of celebrated Artists of the Low Countries)
about 1610. Hondius re-engraved Cock’s portraits
and updated the collection, to make it relevant to his
contemporaries by adding artists who had worked in the
four decades since 1572, to a total of seventy plates.
The new Hondius plates innovatively showed the artists
in their studios or with typical examples of their work.
The
17th century was one of the greatest centuries for
artists’ portraits and self-portraits, witnessed
in oil painting by Velasquez’ self-portrait painting ‘Las
Meninas’ and fellow non-printmaker Vermeer’s
self-portrait painting in his studio ‘Allegory
of Painting’. Van Dyck and Rembrandt
established their reputations as portrait painters, and
both also etched portraits. Rembrandt was the first
serial self-portraitist and his example inspired followers
in later centuries. His self-portraits exhibit all the
motives inherent in the genre, they are at times artistic
statements, or self-promotion, or a record of a significant
moment in his life, or simply exercises where he finds
himself a convenient model to practice different expressions.
In the mid-1660’s Leopold de’ Medici began
collecting artists’ painted self-portraits. The
ongoing collection was (and is) appropriately housed
in the Uffizzi corridor built by Vasari. Celebrated artists
continued to be commissioned for self-portraits into
the 20th century.
The
17th century was also a significant one for the engraved
portrait. Leoni in Italy was followed by van Dyck in
Antwerp, whose 104 subjects in the 'Iconographia'
included 69 artists. In France in the second half of
the 17th century Nanteuil and Edilinck led a specialist
school of portrait engravers who recorded great men
of the French court, including their fellow artists.
Printed
portraits of artists in the 17th and 18th centuries
usually emphasise the artist’s status. He is
presented as a gentleman, if not a nobleman, wearing
such symbols of honour as gold chains or crosses; the
picturesque impedimenta and paraphernalia of the studio
banished, only to reappear in the new genre of group
portraits of artists at work in the academy lifeclass.
National academies for art were established across
Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The lifeclass
was central to an artist’s progress; skill in
figure drawing proved the artist in a system where
history painting expressed through grand figure compositions
was considered as the top of the artistic hierarchy.
Studio interiors occasionally reoccurr in the 19th and
20th centuries, in portraits of Bohemian artists. Romanticism
and the breakdown of traditional patronage having given
rise to a new concept of the artist outside society;
the impoverished genius or rebel in a garret, in contrast
to the successful, prosperous, conventional academic
artist.
The
invention of photography largely made illustrative
portrait engravings, particularly reproductive engravings,
obsolete. In response artists redirected their gaze
to the inner reality as much as the external characteristics,
expressed in the more painterly techniques of etching & drypoint,
lithography and woodcut.
In
the modern period the Germans have been the most prolific
portrait printmakers. Some were particularly given
to the serial self-portrait (Kollwitz, Corinth, Liebermann,
Beckmann), while the French portrayed their friends
more often than themselves. Manet made lithographs
of Berthe Morisot, Degas etched Manet and Mary Cassatt,
Pissarro etched Cézanne, Céanne etched
Guillaumin, Renoir made a drypoint of Berthe Morisot
and lithographed Rodin, Vuillard lithographed Cézanne
etc.
The
cosmopolitan Whistler was one of the most portrayed
artists in print. He etched himself twice; Menpes made
numerous drypoints studies of Whistler; Boldini and Helleu
caught him in drypoint, Rajon and Way in lithography,
Nicholson in woodcut.
In
England Legros established a modern tradition of original
portrait printmaking, which was continued by his pupil
William Strang and complemented in the first two decades
of the 20th century by Frances Dodd, E S Lumsden &c. But by the 1930’s Campbell Dodgson
in his editorial to Fine Prints of the Year was lamenting
the lack of portraiture and welcomed the young H A Freeth
as an exception in his generation. From the late 1960’s
through to the 1980’s David Hockney, exceptionally
among his peers, revived the portrait print, a tradition
continued by Lucien Freud.
Published 2002
80 pages, 132 items described and illustrated in black & white.
(UK
Price: £10, International orders: £15)
Index
of Artists portrayed
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Artists
included in the catalogue:
- Amigoni
J (after)
- Baldinucci
(after)
- Bannerman
A
- Baudous
R De
- Beckmann
M
- Belleroche
A
- Blampied
E
- Boldini
G
- Bolswert
S à
- Bosse
A
- Bracquemond
F
- Bretheron
J
- Bridgman
A (Mrs W Kempster)
- Brockhurst
G L
- Brotherton
C
- Callot
J
- Carracci
A (after)
- Carriera
R (after)
- Chambers
T
- Chaplin
C
- Chirico
G de
- Clouet
A
- Colquhoun
R
- Cooper
R
- Copley
J
- Corinth
L
- Courboin
F
- Cuitt
G
- Dance
G
- Daniell
W
- De
Boissieu J J
- Drury
P
- Dyck
A van
- Dyck
A van (after)
- Edilinck
G
- Fantin
de la Tour H
- Freeth
H A
- Friedrich
L
- Frisius
S
- Gale
W
- Gill
E
- Gole
J
- Grosz
G
- Helt
N de (after)
- Herkomer
H von
- Hermann-Paul
- Hockney
D
- Hogarth
W (after)
- Hollar
W
- Holloway
E
- Hondius
H
- Howarth
A
- Houbraken
J
- Hübner
B
- Hutin
P
- Ireland
S
- Jaeckel
W
- Jode
P de
- Josse
C
- Jungwierth
F X
- Kalckreuthe
L von
- Keene
C
- Keller
J
- Kilian
L
- Kneller
G (after)
- Kollwitz
K
- Lack
H M
- Lasinio
C
- Lebrun
C (after)
- Legros
A
- Leoni
O M
- Lépicié B
- Leslie
C M
- Liebermann
M
- Livens
H M
- McBey
J
- Mellan
C (after)
- Mercier
P
- Millais
J E
- Mohr
A
- Monziès
L
- Muyden
E van
- Orchardson
W Q (after)
- Orde
T (Lord Bolton)
- Ostade
A van (after)
- Pankok
B
- Phillip
M E
- Pissarro
C
- Pontius
P
- Ray-Jones
R
- Rayner
H
- Rembrandt
- Renoir
P A
- Reynolds
J (after)
- Reynolds
S
- Rigaud
H (after)
- Rothenstein
W
- Rubens
P P (after)
- Schalken
G
- Schmidt
G F
- Schmutzer
J
- Simpson
J
- Slevogt
M
- Strang
W
- Stuart
G (after)
- Tischler
H
- Troost
C (after)
- Underwood
L
- Unger
W
- Vallotton
F
- Vinkeles
R
- Vorsterman
L
- Wagner
J
- Waltner
C A
- Watson
Caroline
- Watson
Charles
- Watteau
A (after)
- Way
T R
- Weirotter
F E (after)
- Winckel
R
- Winniger
F
- Wolfsfeld
E
- Worlidge
T
- Worlidge
T (after)
- Zuccherelli
F
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