Notwithstanding the relaxation of French censorship laws after the July Revolution, Honoré Daumier (1809–78) was condemned, in 1832, to a six-month prison term for the publication of the caricature Gargantua, portraying King Louis-Philippe (1773–1850) as Rabelais’s gluttonous giant. On November 11, 1832, after two and a half months in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie, he was transferred for eleven weeks to Dr. J. P. Casimir Pinel’s (1800–66) mental hospital at rue Chaillot. There, far removed from the overcrowded and unhygienic prison, he labored on a series of drawings and watercolors titled L’Imagination, until his release on February 22, 1833. The young printmaker Charles Ramelet (1805–51) made lithographs after Daumier’s sketches, and these started to appear in the press even before the artist had completed his sentence. The first print, published on January 14, 1833 in the new illustrated daily newspaper Le Charivari, depicted an old women daydreaming about inexhaustible wealth. It was accompanied by a short explanation by the editor Charles Philipon (1800–61), Daumier’s publisher, friend, and colleague, stating that the series sought to investigate “diabolic actions, castles in Spain, projects, desires, fixed ideas, and all the chimeras of the imagination.”

The British Library is delighted to announce the launch of Picturing Places www.bl.uk/picturing-places , a new free online resource which explores the Library’s extensive holdings of landscape imagery.

The British Library’s huge collection of historic prints and drawings is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered. Picturing Places showcases works of art by well-known artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and J.M.W. Turner alongside images by a multitude of lesser-known figures. Only a few have ever been seen or published before.

Historically, the British Library’s prints and drawings have been overlooked by scholars. This is the first time that a large and important body of such materials from the Library are being brought to light. While landscape images have often been treated as accurate records of place, this website reveals the many different stories involved – about travel and empire, science and exploration, the imagination, history and observation.

As well as over 500 newly-digitized works of art from the collection, this growing site will feature over 100 articles by both emerging and established scholars from many disciplines. Part of the British Library’s ongoing Transforming Topography research project, films from
the Library’s 2016 conference exploring the depiction of place are also accessible, providing revelatory insights about the history of landscape imagery.

Follow @BL_prints for updates on the project’s progress.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

Edited by John Ittmann; With essays by Warren Breckman, Mitchell B. Frank, Cordula Grewe, John Ittmann, Catriona MacLeod, and F. Carlo Schmid

From the 1770s through the 1840s, German, Austrian, and Swiss artists used the medium of printmaking to create works that synthesized poetry, literature, music, and the visual arts in new and captivating ways. Finding an eager audience in the growing number of educated middle-class collectors, printmakers experimented with modern technologies, such as lithography, and drew on the contemporary interest in regional folklore and traditional fairy tales to produce innovative compositions that both contributed to and reflected the dramatic cultural and political upheavals of the Romantic era. Featuring the work of more than 120 artists, including Casper David Friedrich, Ludwig Emil Grimm, Joseph Anton Koch, Philipp Otto Runge, and Johann Gottfried Schadow, this authoritative book contains many unique and never-before-published examples of prints from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s unrivaled collection.

John Ittmann is the Kathy and Ted Fernberger Curator of Prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In late 19th-century Paris, the printmaking process of etching underwent a revolutionary transformation. At a time when prints were usually used to copy paintings rather than make original works of art, a revival of interest in etching led to greater knowledge of technique, allowing artists to experiment with subject matter and process more than ever before.

Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris accompanies the RISD Museum’s exhibition of the same title, on view from June 30 to December 3, 2017. The digital publication’s nine essays use objects seen in the galleries to explore the process of etching and the world of late 19th-century Paris. These texts draw from their authors’ specialized knowledge of printing, French history, and art history to consider the exhibition’s theme from a wide range of perspectives. The richly illustrated digital publication features works on paper by well-known artists such as Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, as well as those lesser known today, including Albert Besnard and Henri Guérard.

The first scholarly digital publication produced by the RISD Museum, Altered States is enhanced by a glossary that uses videos and images to tie the contemporary practice of etching to its history.

Rick Amor: An Online Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints by Irena Zdanowicz was launched on 15 July in Canberra at the National Gallery of Australia during the symposium ‘The Art of Attribution: The Catalogue Raisonné in the 21st Century’, organized jointly by the NGA and the Australian Institute of Art History at the University of Melbourne. This publication is the first online catalogue raisonné of prints to be published in Australia and is a work in progress. Its first phase documents Rick Amor’s intaglio prints and their 900-plus states; the relief prints and lithographs will be added in due course. The catalogue is a work of independent scholarship, supported by Black Moon Pty Ltd, and by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.

Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954-2002 brings together, for the first time, the University of Sydney Art Collection's ninty-three modern and contemporary Chinese prints. This substantial collection includes national prize-winning prints and works by internationally acclaimed artists, including Zhao Zongzao and Su Xinping. The half-century represented here reveals not only the development of the powerful woodcut tradition under Mao, but also the rapid expansion of printmaking as artists embraced a broader set of themes and more experimental techniques. Such developments reflect the tumultuous periods in which these works were produced and offer a unique and intimate glimpse into the lives of these fifty artists - a vastly different perspective from the familiar forms of contemporary Chinese art seen in better known international art circuits.

STEPHEN H. WHITEMAN is lecturer in Asian art in the Department of Art History and associate curator for China projects for the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. MINERVA INWALD is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. BINGQING WEI is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney. JOHN CLARK is professor emeritus in art history at the University of Sydney.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans’ material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women’s contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman’s application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee’s donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

Jennifer Van Horn is assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware.

Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Suzanne Karr Schmidt's Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance tells the story of a hands-on genre of prints: how innovative paper engineering redefined the relationship of early modern viewers to art, humanism, and science.

Interactive and sculptural prints pervaded the European reading market of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Single sheets and book illustrations featured movable flaps and dials, and functioned as kits to build three-dimensional scientific instruments. These hybrid constructions—part text, part image, and part sculpture—engaged readers; so did the polemical, satirical, and, occasionally, erotic content. By manipulating dials and flaps, or building and using the instruments, viewers learned to think through images as well as words, interacting visually with desires, social critique, and knowledge itself.

Forthcoming publication expected October 2017.