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I haven't written much on this blog about engravers, perhaps because I started a rather over-ambitious post about engraving in general that still languishes in my unfinished files. So today I'll just talk about one of my favourite twentieth-century engravers, Ferdinand Springer. Not only do I admire the formal precision and grace of his work, I feel an affinity with his choice of subjects, which tend to the philosophical and metaphysical. Late in his career he produced editions of the Tao Te Ching and the Bardo Thodol, and the two earlier sets of prints I have by Springer are for similar subjects - a 1947 edition of Paul Val�ry's Socratic dialogue Eupalinos ou l'Architecte and a 1948 edition of Plato's Mythe de la Caverne. Ferdinand Springer, Eupalinos ou l'Architecte IV Engraving, 1947 Ferdinand Springer, Eupalinos ou l'Architecte VI Engraving, 1947 The line engravings for Eupalinos are a masterclass in how to handle an engraver's burin. Although the en

Raoul Dufy, Sailor Lithograph with pochoir colouring, 1920 PRAYER after Guillaume Apollinaire, Pri�re When I was a small child My mother dressed me in blue and white O Blessed Virgin Do you still love me I know I will love you To my dying day Even if it�s all over And I don�t believe in heaven or hell I don�t believe I don�t believe any more That seaman who was saved Because he never once forgot To say his Hail Mary Was like me was like me translation � Neil Philip 2011 Raoul Dufy, Amphitrite Etching, 1930 I wish all my readers a merry Christmas, a happy Hannukah, and a peaceful and healthy New Year. I promise I will resume regular posts when circumstances allow. In the meantime I hope you enjoy these two prints by one of my favourite artists, Raoul Dufy, paired with a poem by his friend Guillaume Apollinaire.

John Piper's topographical paintings and prints offer an unparalleled record of mid twentieth-century Britain. While at one point in the 1930s Piper was poised to be one of the leaders of English abstraction, his sudden reversal to representational art in 1938 came just in time for him to re-evaluate both the natural and the built landscape at a time when both were under threat. The three lithographs in this post were made for an article by John Piper in The Cornhill in November 1944, entitled Topographical Letter from Devizes, and form a loving record of the market town of Devizes in Wiltshire, "this most ordinary of English towns". The Cornhill magazine was edited by Peter Quennell; this issue also includes contributions by John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Alan Moorhead,  Elizabeth Bowen and others. John Piper, Devizes: In Long Street (Levinson 57A) Lithograph, 1944 Piper writes of Devizes with great fondness, celebrating "its good minor architecture, magnificent

The French art critic L�on Roger-Mil�s is best-known today for his 1897 book Art et Nature , which included original etchings by Pissarro, Renoir, Besnard, and Renouard among other Impressionist delights. So I was interested to acquire a copy of the only book of poems by Roger-Mil�s, Les Veill�es Noires (Gloomy Evenings), published in 1889 by Paul Ollendorf, in an edition of 400 copies. I knew it was illustrated with original etchings. Surely it also would be full of Impressionist masterpieces. Well, not quite. Instead,  Les Veill�es Noires is an object lesson in looking down the wrong end of the telescope. That's not to say the etchings - brilliantly interpreted and printed by Auguste and Eug�ne Del�tre - aren't good. Some of them are fantastic. But the artists chosen by Roger-Mil�s to illustrate this milestone book are a roll-call of talented men who missed out on their place in art history by sticking with the academic aesthetic of the Salon de Paris and turning their back

The great pre-Nazi flowering of German Expressionism is so striking a cultural phenomenon that it is tempting to feel that the whole movement was crushed under the jackboot, never to revive. But of course art has its underground streams that re-emerge when the conditions are right, and so the aesthetics of Expressionism found a new flowering in Germany post WWII. If I use the term Neo-Expressionist to define the art of Carl-Heinz Kliemann, it is only to mark this generational divide - otherwise, his work seems to me completely in line with that of the pre-war Expressionists. Two of these, Max Kaus and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, were his teachers at the Hochschule f�r Bildende K�nste Berlin from 1945-1950. My colour woodcuts by Carl-Heinz Kliemann were made in 1962 for an edition of the Book of Genesis published by K�the Vogt Verlag. They show the influence of Picasso, for sure, and also Matisse I think, but they are wonderfully confident and expressive works. 2000 copies were printed, with

Francisque de Saint-�tienne was born in Montpellier in 1824. A landscape painter and etcher, Saint-�tienne was a pupil of Jules Laurens. He exhibited at the Salon de Paris from 1857-1863, also exhibiting four landscape etchings at the International Exhibition in London in 1862. He also published etchings with Cadart's Soci�t� des Aquafortistes. My etching dates from 1860, and is I think fairly representative of his work. It shows the untamed wildness of the Balearic island of Formentera, before any thought of today's tourism. Francisque de Saint-�tienne, Formentera Etching, 1860 In 1863 Francisque de Saint-�tienne returned to Montpellier from Paris, and ceased to send work for exhibition in the capital, exhibiting only in the regional exhibitions of the Soci�t� artistique de l'H�rault. His name is sometimes spelled Francisc de Saint-�tienne; his true name was Louis Francisc Hippolyte Bessodes de Roquefeuille. He died in Montpellier in 1885.

A good artistic quiz question would be: What nationality was Fr�d�rique �milie O'Connell? The answer is neither French nor Irish, but German. The painter and etcher Fr�d�rique �milie Auguste O'Connell, n�e Miethe, was born in Potsdam in 1823 and died in Paris in 1885. An early devotion to drawing marked her out for an artistic career, and at the age of 18 she went to Berlin to study under Charles Joseph B�gas. She then continued her studies in Brussels, where she married in 1844. In 1853 she settled in Paris, establishing an atelier in Montmartre. Fr�d�rique �milie O'Connell threw herself with fervour into the artistic and social life of Paris, and her salon was frequented by writers as well as artists, notably Alexandre Dumas fils and Th�ophile Gautier. She also took many female students, and the prospectus of her course of studies is given in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 15 Novembre 1859. Fr�d�rique �milie O'Connell: Prospectus of studies She exhibited at the Paris Sal