Catalogues - Engravings

The Atelier Collection is an historic collection of hand-pulled and hand-coloured engravings and a small selection of hand-coloured prints. Rosenstiel's has built up the collection since the company was founded in 1880 and the original copper plates from which the prints are pulled span two centuries of print history. Each print is painstakingly pulled by skilled craftsmen, using techniques which have changed little over the last four hundred years. Most images are then hand-coloured by a skilled watercolourist, whilst some are carefully inked in the plate.

HISTORY

The Atelier Collection plates, assembled by Rosenstiel's over 120 years, fall into several groups. One of the largest consists of sporting subjects (for example, hunting, racing, steeple-chasing and coaching scenes) originally published in the early nineteenth century by the firm of Ackermann, whose immigrant founder, Rudolph, had come to London in 1783 and established his remarkable Repository of Arts at 96 Strand. His son, Rudolph junior, set up business on his own in Regent Street in 1826, calling his shop the Eclipse Sporting Gallery and, later, the Eclipse Sporting and Military Gallery. There were subsequently to be various changes of address for both Ackermann businesses, but their prolific output of sporting prints, drawing manuals and important illustrated books proceeded uninterrupted, gaining for them such appointments as Printseller to His Majesty William IV and, later, Publishers and Suppliers of Art Requisites to Queen Victoria.

An equally large group of plates consists of subjects (mainly pastoral scenes) originally engraved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries after the paintings of George Morland (1762-1804), Francis Wheatley (1747-1801) and others. Many of these plates are photogravure reproductions of the original engravings, issued in the first decade of the present century by such publishers as Louis Wolff & Co. Photogravure, an intaglio process dispensing with the need for hand-engraving but still requiring hand-printing, was at that time in its infancy and among these plates are interesting examples of the still-new technology. Also in this group, however, is a substantial number of original plates, including six of Francis Wheatley's celebrated series the Cries of London, (of which Milk Below Maids, is illustrated), originally published between 1793 and 1797.

Next, there is a rather smaller group of topographical plates. Historically, the most important of these are the views of Scottish towns drawn and engraved by John Clark and published by Smith & Elder between 1822 and 1825.

An even smaller group consists of plates commissioned by Frost & Reed between 1905 and 1967. These are all engraved by the laborious but beautiful technique of mezzotint and are the work of such craftsmen as Joseph Chamberlain and Lawrence Jossett, after the eighteenth-century masters Francois Boucher, Francois-Hubert Douais, Jan van Huysum and others. The subjects are mainly decorative pastorals, flower groups and portraits.

Finally, there are several plates which do not fit easily into the above classification. Chief among these is the magnificent The Rubber, (illustrated), a line-engraving by the eminent Lumb Stocks, after the painting by Thomas Webster. It was originally published by Thomas McLean in 1851.

It is difficult to trace the various changes of ownership of these plates before they eventually came into the hands of Frost & Reed. What is certain is that engraved plates did very frequently change hands. We are given a fascinating glimpse of these transactions by the sale catalogues of such auctioneers as Messrs Puttick & Simpson, in whose pages some of the plates now owned by Rosenstiel's are listed. For example, the plate and copyright of Mrs. Minnie Cormack's Juliet was offered for sale on the 11th of February, 1932. Although there were no bids for the plate itself, six colour prints of the plate were bought for 10/-; and on the 25th of February, 1937, the pair of game-cock plates was bought for £8. At the same sale, the plates of the race-horse Blink Bonney and The Derby, 1848 (illustrated), were bought for £20; and thirteen of Wheatley's Cries of London plates went for £38. To give a fuller idea of the scale of such plate sales: no fewer than forty-nine sporting plates by Henry Alken and twenty-six by James Pollard (both highly popular artists whose work was frequently commissioned by Ackermann's) were among hundreds sold on that one day alone.

The core collection described above is supplemented by several other groups of subjects. First, there is a splendid series of thirty-nine sporting dog plates designed and engraved by the distinguished animal artist Reuben Ward Binks (1880-1950). Most of these are aquatints; a few are etchings.

Secondly, there is a group of photo-mechanical prints, so called to avoid confusion with the photogravures. In these prints the image is transferred photographically from an original engraving (or, in a few cases, from a painting) and unlike the photogravures, which are printed by hand, the printing is done mechanically. These prints are all of excellent quality and it is in many cases difficult visually to distinguish them from engravings. An example is the print of W. P. Frith's Derby Day, (illustrated) which is very similar in size to the original engraving published in 1858.