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Designed by PIETER BRUEGHEL the Elder
Probably Breda 1525/30 – 1569 Brussels
Brueghel trained with Pieter Coecke van Aelst, in Antwerp,
from 1545 till the latter’s death in 1550. In 1551 he was admitted
as a master into the artists’ Guild of St Luke in Antwerp.
Shortly after, he travelled to Italy, returning to Antwerp in 1555,
where he worked mainly as a designer of prints for the publisher,
printmaker and print seller, Hieronymous Cock, the most important,
and among the first, print publishers in Northern Europe.
Brueghel designed over forty prints for Cock, which established the
artist’s reputation;
for Cock’s shop, aptly called Aux quatres Vents (To the four Winds)
spread his prints throughout mainland Europe.
Brueghel etched only one print himself, a landscape etching with a rabbit hunter.
All his other print designs were drawn for Cock. Cock mainly employed Pieter van der Heyden to engrave them.
Brueghel remained in Antwerp until 1563, when he married the daughter of Pieter Coeke van Aelst and moved to Brussels. By that date he was concentrating more on painting than prints, and when signing his paintings adopted a variant spelling of Brueghel, dropping the ‘h’ (Bruegel); hence the two alternative spellings.
Big Fish eat little Fish
Hollstein 139 i/ii
230 x 297 mm (sheet)
Engraving, 1557, by Pieter van der Heyden (c1530-72), signed with his monogram (PME - the initials of his Latinized name, Peter Mercinus).
First state, published by Hieronymous Cock, 1557, with the erroneous attribution to Bosch.
A very good impression, on paper with an unidentified small circular watermark, trimmed to or fractionally inside the plate.
A central vertical drying? crease, a couple of other short creases, verso old corner ‘hinges’ and a very small thin patch at the top edge.
Sold
Brueghel’s drawing for the engraving, signed and dated 1556, is in the Albertina.
(In this early instance, before Brueghel’s reputation was established, Cock, for marketing reasons, probably substituted the attribution to the famous Bosch, who had died in 1516.)
Having begun with landscapes, this is one of Brueghel’s first designs in the fantastic, didactic manner of Bosch, whose work he admired.
As an image visualising the proverb Big Fish eat little Fish, Brueghel’s print has become iconic.
The plate is lettered at the foot with the proverb in Latin, and a ‘commentary’ beneath in Flemish, as though spoken by the gesticulating man in the foreground boat,
“Look son, I have long known that big fish eat small”.
His son, in turn points at the other figure in the boat, who is pulling a smaller fish from a larger.
Above the child’s hand is the Latin ECCE (here, behold).
Brueghel himself had not included the word ‘ecce’, or the title lettering, but otherwise, the engraving, which naturally reverses the design, is very close to the original drawing.
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JOHANN JAKOB HAID
Kleineislingen 1704 – 1767 Augsburg
A painter, engraver and publisher, particularly of portraits, trained in Augsburg. Haid also worked in England for some time.
Concert
538 x 415 mm
Mezzotint after (‘Domenichino’ - sic )/ Leonello Spada.
On laid paper.
A tiny unobtrusive hole and trace of a diagonal fold line.
£1000
Haid made his mezzotint version in portrait format, in reverse, after either the original painting, known as The Concert, in the French royal collection, which is landscape in format, or after the line engraving, by Etienne Picart, for Tableaux du Roi, published 1677, when the painting was thought to be by Domenico Zampieri – Il Domenichino.
The painting, in the Louvre, is now attributed to the Bolognese artist Leonello Spada (1576-1622).
Haid has lettered the mezzotint with the first verse of an ode by Horace (Ode 4, Book III), which translates as
Descend from heaven and come, speak with pipe
a long melody, queen Calliope,
now, if you prefer, with a keen voice
or with the strings and lyre of Phoebus.
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ALLEN WILLIAM SEABY
London 1867 – 1953 Reading
A painter, illustrator, and colour woodcut artist, Seaby studied
with Morley Fletcher at Reading university.
He returned to the university to teach printmaking and was Professor
of Fine Art there from 1920 to 1933.
A member of the Society of Gravers and Printmakers in Colour,
and of the Society of Animal Painters, Seaby exhibited widely in London
and Europe.
Nightingale Singing
287 x 210 mm
Original colour woodcut, c1920-27.
Signed in pencil and numbered 7/100.
On japan.
Small touch of white in the margin at the foot of the sheet.
Sold
Printed from a linear key block and four colour blocks.
The British Museum has impressions of the completed print and
five progress proofs from the constituent blocks.
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ROBERT POLHILL BEVAN
Hove 1865 – 1925 London
Trained at Westminster and at the Académie Julian in Paris,
Robert Bevan was a founder member of the Camden Town Group in 1911,
and from 1914 of the London Group.
It was on his second visit to Pont Aven, 1893-94, when he met Gauguin,
whose influence is seen in the early lithographs, that Bevan had made
his first lithograph.
In the following six years Bevan made a further twenty-five
lithographs before he abandoned the technique.
It was only in 1919 that he returned to lithography.
With a single exception, all the lithographs of this later period were based
on his oil paintings.
In the later lithographs Bevan uses a ‘blocky’ technique to create form.
The Plantation
Dry
37, only state.
307 x 355 mm
Lithograph, 1922.
The stone monogrammed.
Signed in pencil and numbered 24/40.
On smooth wove, a little cockled in the side margins.
£3500
Based, in reverse, on an oil of the same title, painted in 1919
at Lytchetts, the cottage he rented at Clayhidon on the
Devon-Somerset border.
Bevan and his wife, permanently based in Swiss Cottage,
regularly spent summers painting in the West country.
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BLAIR HUGHES-STANTON S.W.E.
London 1902 – 1981 Kings Lynn
After six boyhood years on a Royal Navy training ship,
Hughes-Stanton began training as an artist, attending
the Byam Shaw School 1919-22, the R.A. Schools 1922-23,
and evening classes at the Leon Underwood school at Brook Green,
where he was introduced to wood engraving.
He was a founder member of the short-lived English Wood Engraving
Society in 1925, and joined the Society of Wood Engravers in 1932
after he and his then wife, Gertrude Hermes, had already moved
a couple of years previously to the Gregynog Press in Powis.
He left Gregynog in 1933, after separating from Hermes,
and moved to East Anglia where he founded his own Gemini Press.
In the War he was seriously injured in a POW camp and was repatriated in 1943.
In later decades he turned to using lino for colour printing and to create
much larger, spectacular images as he went increasingly abstract.
Estuary
154 x 708 mm
Original colour linocut, 1958.
Signed in pencil, dated, entitled
and numbered 20/34.
On japan.
£2000
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