Eric Gill

Self Portrait

1927

William Hogarth was an English painter and engraver, the outstanding British artist of his period. During his childhood, his father, a schoolteacher, was imprisoned for debt, and this early experience of the seamy side of life left a deep mark on Hogarth (much of his output is concerned with the contrast between success and failure, and he depicted prisons in several works). He trained as an engraver of silver plate and by 1720 had set up his own business in London, doing various kinds of commercial work. In his spare time he studied painting, first at the St Martin's Lane Academy and later under Sir James Thornhill, whose daughter he married in 1729. By the early 1730s he had achieved some success as a painter of conversation pieces and at about the same time he invented the idea of using a sequence of anecdotal pictures ‘similar to representations on the stage’ to point a moral and satirize social abuses. From a set of 12 original engravings illustrating Industry and Idleness, after the drawings by William Hogarth, printed in 1833. The engravers are F Jordan, E Smith, C Armstrong, S Davenport, H Adlard, W H Worthington, H Fernell, A Duncan and F F Walker. The engravings, which are in excellent condition, would be mounted and ready to frame Edward Smith (fl. 1823-49) The landscape, figure, and portrait engraver Edward Smith may have been a native of Edinburgh but appears to have worked mostly in London. His earliest recorded plates...

William Hogarth was an English painter and engraver, the outstanding British artist of his period. During his childhood, his father, a schoolteacher, was imprisoned for debt, and th...

William Hogarth was an English painter and engraver, the outstanding British artist of his period. During his childhood, his father, a schoolteacher, was imprisoned for debt, and th...

William Hogarth was an English painter and engraver, the outstanding British artist of his period. During his childhood, his father, a schoolteacher, was imprisoned for debt, and this early experience of the seamy side of life left a deep mark on Hogarth (much of his output is concerned with the contrast between success and failure, and he depicted prisons in several works). He trained as an engraver of silver plate and by 1720 had set up his own business in London, doing various kinds of commercial work. In his spare time he studied painting, first at the St Martin's Lane Academy and later under Sir James Thornhill, whose daughter he married in 1729. By the early 1730s he had achieved some success as a painter of conversation pieces and at about the same time he invented the idea of using a sequence of anecdotal pictures ‘similar to representations on the stage’ to point a moral and satirize social abuses. A set of 12 original engravings illustrating Industry and Idleness, after the drawings by William Hogarth, printed in 1833. The engravers are F Jordan, E Smith, C Armstrong, S Davenport, H Adlard, W H Worthington, H Fernell, A Duncan and F F Walker. The engravings, which are in excellent condition, would be mounted (matted) and ready to frame Edward Smith (fl. 1823-49) The landscape, figure, and portrait engraver Edward Smith may have been a native of Edinburgh but appears to have worked mostly in London. His earliest recorded plates...

Aquating Engraving Image Size: approx. 20 1/4 x 13 3/8 Framed Size: 28 x 20.5 inches Pencil Signed Lower Right Louis Justin Laurent Icart was born in Toulouse in 1890 and died in Paris in 1950. He lived in New York City in the 1920s, where he became known for his Art-Deco color etchings of glamourous women. He was first son of Jean and Elisabeth Icart and was officially named Louis Justin Laurent Icart. The use of his initials L.I. would be sufficient in this household. Therefore, from the moment of his birth he was dubbed 'Helli'. The Icart family lived modestly in a small brick home on rue Traversière-de-la-balance, in the culturally rich Southern French city of Toulouse, which was the home of many prominent writers and artists, the most famous being Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Icart entered the l'Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Toulouse in order to continue his studies for a career in business, particularly banking (his father's profession). However, he soon discovered the play writings of Victor Hugo (1802-1885), which were to change the course of his life. Icart borrowed whatever books he could find by Hugo at the Toulouse library, devouring the tales, rich in both romantic imagery and the dilemmas of the human condition. It was through Icart's love of the theater that he developed a taste for all the arts, though the urge to paint was not as yet as strong for him as the urge to act. It was not until his move to Paris in 1907 that Icart would concentrate on painting, drawing and the production of countless beautiful etchings, which have served (more than the other mediums) to indelibly preserve his name in twentieth century art history. Art Deco, a term coined at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, had taken its grip on the Paris of the 1920s. By the late 1920s Icart, working for both publications and major fashion and design studios, had become very successful, both artistically and financially. His etchings reached their height of brilliance in this era of Art Deco, and Icart had become the symbol of the epoch. Yet, although Icart has created for us a picture of Paris and New York life in the 1920s and 1930s, he worked in his own style, derived principally from the study of eighteenth-century French masters such as Jean Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean Honoré Fragonard. In Icart's drawings, one sees the Impressionists Degas...

Aquating Engraving Image Size: Approx 19 x 15.5 Framed Size: Approx. 28.5 x 24.5 William Albert Ablett (1877 - 1937) Although born to English parents, William Ablett lived in Par...

Jean-Emile Laboureur (1877-1943), Une Marmite, engraving, 1916, signed in pencil lower left; titled, dated and inscribed “epreuve de 1er etat” bottom margin edge [with the initial an...

Jean-Emile Laboureur, Jeunes Filles Sur Le Port, 1920, engraving, signed in pencil [also initialed and dated in the plate]. Reference: Godefry, Sylvain Laboureur 200, second state of...