The Antique Print Department recently added a number of new original prints to our website, including a group of important works by Francisco Goya, Georges Rouault, G. B. Piranesi, Aristide Maillol, and Leonard Baskin. View all of the recent arrivals to the Antique Print Department here.
Francisco Goya, "The Little Prisoner."
Crispin van de Passe II was one of the four children of Dutch patriarch publisher Crispin van de Passe (c. 1564-1637) who worked in the family business. Like his father and siblings, de Passe II specialized in portraits, book illustrations and other commissioned graphic works. In 1623, while he was working in Paris, de Passe II completed a series of illustrations for Antoine de Pluvinel’s Maneige Royal (later titled Instruction du Roi à l’exercise, a handbook on horsemanship for the king.) These large illustrations are notable for their unusual combination of print processes: the images consist of engraved plates within an architecturally-inspired woodcut border. In A History of Engraving and Etching, historian Arthur M. Hind calls de Passe II’s illustrations for Maneige Royal “perhaps the best achievement of any member of the family.” (p. 123-124.)
Visit our new Crispin van de Passe II page for available works.
Birds of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands
In 1749, German publisher Johann Michael Seligmann began to issue a nine-volume compilation of the work of renowned British naturalists Mark Catesby (1683-1749) and George Edwards (1694-1773), using plates that he produced himself specifically for the volume. Over the next thirty years, the gradual release of these eagerly anticipated volumes brought vivid, charming images of New World birds to continental European audiences and made Seligmann a venerated name in natural history circles.
We’ve just added 34 works from Seligmann’s Sammlung Verschiedener Auslandischer und Seltener Vogel (Collection of Various Foreign and Rare Birds), published in Nuremburg, 1749-1776. Each plate is engraved with the title in German, Latin and French.
Visit our Catesby/Edwards page to view all 60 in our collection!
The Meiji Period (1868-1912) is the 45-year division of Japanese history that directly followed the Edo Period. The Meiji Period was a time of profound transformation, during which Japan went from being virtually sealed off from outside influence to emerging as a dominant global economic power.
It was during the Meiji Period that Japanese and European art began to influence each other. European painters such as Van Gogh and Manet collected ukiyo-e prints and cultivated an obsession with Eastern art that came to be known as Japonisme, informing a generation of Art Noveau designers with pictorial techniques borrowed from Japan. Meanwhile, a newfound interest in Westernization and the ability to import a wider range of pigments transformed the character and quality of the Japanese prints produced during this time.
Davidson Galleries maintains a diverse inventory of Meiji prints, along with works from the earlier Edo Period and prints from the twentieth century Shin Hanga and Sosaku Hanga movements.
For the art lovers on your list!
Davidson Galleries maintains a diverse inventory of original prints by antique and contemporary artists at all price levels. Visit the Gift Ideas page for a sample of the available works falling in the price range of $200 or less, making them attractive gift ideas for the art lovers on your list.
The Golem project is a suite of twenty etchings by Matt Rebholz, inspired by the tale of the Frankenstein-esque figure from Jewish folklore. Perhaps the best known of the Jewish legends, the Golem is an automaton, usually made from mud or clay and created through an intense and systematic mystical process. In Hebrew, the word golem refers to something unformed and imperfect, and implies a body without a soul. The narrative arc of the prints is a loose re-imagining of the 1915 Gustav Meyrink novel Der Golem, in which the title character wanders the streets of a corrupt and ruined city, blissfully unaware that he is a malfunctioning meat robot and not truly a man.
The prints are organized in a theatrical fashion, the spaces constructed as though they were the sets of a stage play and the players carefully arranged within them. Often the environments become more important than the figures, sometimes to their ultimate exclusion. These elements conspire to form a series of intimate, allegorical vignettes pregnant with obscenity and metaphor. The grotesque tableaux of The Golem serve as a polluted and uneasy dreamscape, peopled by a cast of damaged characters eager to do each other harm. Within this environment, the Golem himself can be read as a metaphor for humanity adrift in an absurd and dystopian world. As The Golem project ran its course, it deviated significantly from Meyrink’s original narrative, becoming less and less concerned with the original storyline. As it metastasized and evolved thematically, the imagery became increasingly concerned with my own thoughts about contemporary society and the manifestations of consumption, ingestion and expulsion within it.
