Graphic — A 794: Silver, books, contemporary art
Jacques Callot was a baroque printmaker and draftsman from the Duchy of Lorraine (an independent state on the north-eastern border of France, southwestern border of Germany and overlapping the southern Netherlands). He is an important person in the development of the old master print. He made more than 1,400 etchings that chronicled the life of his period, featuring soldiers, clowns, drunkards, Gypsies, beggars, as well as court life. He also etched many religious and military images, and many prints featured extensive landscapes in their background.
Charles Joshua Chaplin was a French painter and printmaker.
He studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and initially painted realistic landscapes. Later, however, Chaplin became known for his elegant neo-Roco portraits of young women. These sensual images of women and young girls posing erotically in misty surroundings and often dressed in transparent clothing attracted the interest of high society and the aristocracy of the time.
In the mid-19th century, Chaplin's works were a great success, he was often exhibited in the salons in Paris and at the Royal Academy of Arts in Great Britain and was one of the most popular painters of the Second Empire.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an 18th-century Italian painter, engraver, architect, and archaeologist who represented Neoclassicism and Romanticism. He was famous for creating a lot of original etchings with images of antique architecture monuments.
Giovanni Piranesi created hundreds of drawings and drafts in which he depicted the reconstructed ruins of ancient Roman buildings. His works are still used as teaching aids in the education of architectural students in many prestigious European universities. Piranesi periodically printed voluminous books with dozens of his own engravings depicting modified ancient architectural masterpieces - "graphic fantasies". His works were in demand among professional architects, who borrowed Piranesi's original ideas for their designs.
The peak of Piranesi's career came in the 1760s when, in recognition of his merits, he became an honorary member of the Guild of St. Luke and received from the Pope the title of Knight of the Golden Spur.
More than 700 of the master's original etchings have survived, printed in scholarly works.
William Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, pictorial satirist, social critic, editorial cartoonist and occasional writer on art. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects", and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian".
Lucas van Leyden, also named either Lucas Hugensz or Lucas Jacobsz, was a Dutch painter and printmaker in engraving and woodcut. Lucas van Leyden was among the first Dutch exponents of genre painting and was a very accomplished engraver.
