Rudolph Ackermann (1764-1834) was a man of many talents; carriage-maker, artist, inventor, lithographer, publisher, bookseller, publicist and entrepreneur, he also worked tirelessly to raise funds to relieve  his native  Germany after the devastation of Napoleon's invasion. He published works which have created the most lasting visual images of the Regency period; illustrating and promoting the latest styles and fashions in dress, furnishing, domestic architecture, gardens and foreign travel. His monthly magazine The Repository of Arts (1809-1828) remains a primary visual source book for later historians of design. His Microcosm of London (1808-10), paired the talents of Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin to create a landmark work of topographical publishing. He also promoted innovations in carriage design, water-proofing material, chemistry, lithography and steam power. 

This new biography by John Ford includes extensive new research into Ackermann's life, drawing on his papers, accounts and other untapped sources and provides a wealth of material to those interested in early modern print culture and the arts of the Regency period.

Abstract—In the spring of 2015, the author was asked to organize and direct a comprehensive inventory of the large and distinguished collection of prints at the Boston Public Library. Work- ing with the staff of the BPL and a corps of graduate students, the team located, described, and prepared for digitization a diverse collection of prints, posters, chromolithographs, drawings, and ephemera, once regarded as among the best collections in the United States. The collection was under-staffed, neglected, and adrift in a great public library that struggled to balance its commitment to public service with its status as a major national research library. This article describes the project and the next steps for the collection.

In 1922, the English writer George Somes Layard commented that: “A series of marks on a print is its diary: the fate and journey of many a masterpiece can be thereby traced until it finds at last its permanent home in the Museum.” Layard succinctly foreshadowed what might now be described as the materiality, agency, and lives of these art works: their materials and production; and the markings, annotations, and signs of use that connect the human stories of artist, printmaker, print publisher, dealer, collector, and collecting institution. The potency of these narratives is magnified when prints are considered not only as individual objects, but also within, and in concert with, extant print albums.

Before the second half of the eighteenth century, collectors most commonly stored and displayed their prints in albums: book-like volumes often housed as part of a library. Since then, changing institutional display and storage preferences have resulted in the now customary presentation of prints in individual sunk or recessed mounts, rather than bound en masse. As a result, intact albums of prints (especially those preserved in the arrangements determined by eighteenth-century collectors) are rare survivors.

Much important data about the assembly of print collections in the eighteenth century—once evident in the physical characteristics of intact albums—is now diminished or lost. These physical characteristics are the primary focus of this investigation. Adhesions, foliation, annotations, bindings, and signs of use (which are often overlooked by viewers or consciously excised from eighteenth-century print albums in institutional collections) can be as intriguing as the prints contained within the albums. These material features are also marks of identity and agency: they reveal the “lives” of the albums and the hand of the collector.

Sears Gallagher (1869-1955) was a draftsman, printmaker, and illustrator born in Boston. Gallagher was a founder of the Monhegan art colony.

The papers of draftsman, printmaker, and illustrator, Sears Gallagher measure 1.1 linear feet and date from circa 1882-2010. The collection consists of biographical information including awards and a scholarly biography; correspondence, primarily professional in nature, documenting the placement of works; professional files that document the management of studio practices including the printmaking process and the distribution and sale of prints; scrapbooks chronicling Gallagher's professional and family history in the form of clippings, photographs, and correspondence; printed material including clippings and commercial prints of watercolors; photographs including those of the artist and his studio; and artwork including numerous drawings on paper and sketchbooks documenting key moments of travel and artistic production.

**Please click on the 'External Link' below to learn more.

The Journal of the History of Collections has launched a Thematic Virtual Issue on the topic of Collecting Prints and Drawings. The collection compiles articles from past issues of the journal and is a useful resource for those with research interests in the history of works on paper and the people who collected them.

------

In 1565, Samuel Quiccheberg included prints and drawings among the contents of his imaginary 'theatre' of 'artificial and marvellous things'.1 For Quiccheberg, the sheer variety of works on paper was the appeal of this type of material, which could encompass everything from watercolours, intaglio and relief prints of all manner of subjects, to maps and genealogical tables. It is prints and drawings, and their allure for collectors, which forms this second virtual issue drawn from the archives of the Journal of the History of Collections.

Just as Quiccheberg celebrated prints and drawings for their variety, so this collection of papers celebrates the diversity of their acquirers: the many dedicated collectors who formed important, intriguing and very personal groups of works. Among these are the early collections of Gabriele Vendramin, who used a fortune founded on soap-production to acquire the drawings of the leading artists of his day; of the Swiss doctor Felix Platter, who preserved the collection of his mentor Conrad Gessner, among them many of the preparatory drawings for Gessner's renowned publication the Historiae Animalium (1551); and of Cardinal Alessandro Orsini, who amassed not only prints, but also the copper plates from which they were made.

For the last few years of Orsini's life, his colleague at the papal court was Cardinal Francesco Barberini, whose secretary, Cassiano dal Pozzo, amassed a vast and important collection of works on paper. For dal Pozzo, drawings and prints formed a 'Paper Museum', through which he sought to accumulate the riches of the natural and man-made worlds. Although dal Pozzo's zeal was notable, by the seventeenth century, collections of drawings and prints were increasingly common. In Leipzig later in the century, the architect Gottfried Wagner would amass 10,202 sheets which became one of the key holdings of the Dresden print room after his death. In the eighteenth century, like dal Pozzo, the artist Jan van Rymsdyk had aspirations to form his own small 'Museum', of artists' drawings.

Prints and drawings were not just stored in albums and portfolios: they could be framed alongside paintings and displayed on walls, or pasted into texts to provide illustration. In eighteenth-century Britain, concurrent fashions for portrait collecting and extra-illustrating texts saw market become'madness', with new prints issued to meet demand and increasing rarities fetching enormous prices. One enterprising cleric, the Revd John Brand, found an inventive way to participate in the latest craze without bankruptcy: he borrowed and carefully drew copies of the prints he coveted to form a unique and at the same time fashionable collection.

Beyond the individualities of collectors themselves, the study of the market for prints and drawings can illuminate our understanding of the polite world and its mores, of the complexities of connoisseurship, and of the production (and preservation) of satire as a barometer of a society. If this collection begins, chronologically, with Gabriele Vendramin and his exquisite sheets of fine art, so it ends with Erwin Swann, who sought to preserve the graphic art of satire in a collection of prints and drawings no less fascinating than those formed by his illustrious forebears.

Footnote 1: Mark A. Meadow and Bruce Robertson (eds and trans), The First Treatise on Museums. Samuel Quiccheberg's 'Inscriptiones', 1565 (Los Angeles, 2013).