David Hockney’s early autobiographical prints, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean 1961 and the series A Rake’s Progress 1961–3, are examined in relation to contemporary developments in American art and literature, the artist’s affinities with his British modernist contemporaries and predecessors, and other aspects of his emerging sense of artistic and sexual identity.

In her small La Jolla, California art studio sculptor June Schwarcz (1918-2015) expanded her etching knowledge with metalworking and printmaking and continued to find more expressive ways to enamel.

This article studies a set of 199 educational playing cards published in 1644, commissioned by Cardinal Jules Mazarin as an educational device for the five-year-old Louis XIV upon his coming into power. Etched by the famed Florentine printmaker Stefano della Bella, and written by the French poet-playwright Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the Jeux de Cartes were divided into four sets, presenting morals from Ovid, teaching geography, depicting famous queens and the characteristics for which they were remembered, and portraying every king from French history, thus proffering positive and negative examples of rule. Upon completion, they were immediately, repeatedly printed and widely sold. This article newly discusses the Jeux in the context of the speculum principum, alongside trajectories of early modern playing cards and pictorial education, to analyze how they imbued morals in the mind of the young king while broadcasting his educational agenda to the French public during an unpopular Regency.

This essay proposes an approach to the genre of the seventeenth-century French fashion print that follows the rubric of the printmakers, which takes the basic physical and graphic format of the genre rather than the thematic content of the images as its essential characteristic. This allows for an examination of the many interrelated modes of address that an image or theme might traverse in the course of minor graphic adjustments, and of how these formed a language for more complex interventions into the genre of the fashion print, which brings to light the ways in which the pictorial and rhetorical ingenuity of the printmakers participated in a broader cultural discourse on fashion, fashionability, and social identity in the late seventeenth century.

This article considers printmaking and photography as media of inscription in late nineteenth-century Mexican archaeology. Specifically, it analyzes a debate about the relative virtues of drawn and photographic archaeological images between the Mexican polymath Antonio Peñafiel (1830–1922) and the British and French-American explorers Alice Dixon Le Plongeon (1851–1910) and Augustus Le Plongeon (1826–1908). Peñafiel, tasked with assembling comprehensive documentation of Mexico’s patrimony, found the constructed image of the print an ideal venue for demonstrating national scientific accomplishment, while the Le Plongeons celebrated the apparent presence and documentary holism afforded by photography. However, despite contentious epistemic debates about how scientists should navigate an unsettled ecology of nineteenth-century reproductive media, archival materials in the GRI collections reveal these scholars’ practices to be thoroughly intermedial. This article argues for further attention to local cultures of archaeological knowledge- and image-making as well as a complication of the frequently coupled historiographies of nineteenth-century archaeology and photography.

A close study of Mantegna's Entombment engraving reveals how Mantegna inscribed into the facture of his engravings their ephemerality and destruction. Mantegna's prints introduced a new paper form of perpetuation into western European art, a form of continuation founded not in the endurance of the material but in the kinesis of the material. Through this movement, Mantegna's engravings were translated into other mediums and achieved a new form of continuation reliant not on the original but on the act of copying.

This paper investigates the series of etchings that German-born Catholic convert artist Mattheus Greuter produced in Rome to illustrate Galileo Galilei’s 1613 astronomical publication on sunspots. Greuter used an experimental copperplate etching technique that subsumed Galileo’s observation-based conclusions about the sunspots’ ontological essence, and adapted an exceptionally subtle linear manner from devotional prints, their fine style inflecting Lucretian mechanics and metaphors of vision, and complicating early modern perceptions regarding northern lines as inherently devout and accurate. Greuter’s sunspots capture the poignancy of the all-too-brief historical moment in which Galileo, the German diaspora artist, Jesuit scientists, and Roman inquisitors might coexist.

"Looking for the Longitude" was published as a sequence over 12 days to coincide with the anniversary of the Hogarth Act, culminating on 25 June. Looking for “the Longitude” takes us on an interactive exploration of the ‘Longitude Problem’, drawing in contributions from experts in the field as it grows. Locating a detail from the final plate of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress as its starting point, the article will unfold over subsequent weeks to include a range of connected images and objects, including a Twitter tour of associated places and sites.

This article and checklist present the contents of the Spencer Album of Marcantonio Raimondi prints, long considered to be lost. By examining its composition and tracing its provenance from the Spencer collection at Althorp House to the John Rylands Library, Manchester, we offer new insight into how attitudes toward Marcantonio Raimondi’s work evolved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in Great Britain. Our article also explores Victorian collecting practices and the importance of the graphic arts for Mrs Rylands vision for the Library to be dedicated to her late husband’s memory.