Artist

Bartolozzi, Francesco

Title

Saints Peter and Paul

Technique

engraving

Date

1780

Dimensions

31.5cm height x 25.0cm width

Type

print

Accession Number

2014.12.3

Collection

Permanent Collection

Gift of Harold and Linda Kalman

During his lifetime, Francesco Bartolozzi enjoyed an international reputation as one of Europe’s finest line and stipple engravers. In 1764, Bartolozzi moved from Venice, Italy, to London, England, where he was appointed Engraver to the King. While there, he engraved over two thousand plates, nearly all using stipple engraving, or the so-called crayon manner engraving technique. This method imitated the subtleties of chalk drawing, which had recently been invented by the French but that Bartolozzi made fashionable and elevated into a distinct art. Only four years after moving to England, in 1768, Bartolozzi was elected a founder member of the Royal Academy. Between the late 1780s and the mid-1790s, Bartolozzi ran a large studio with up to fifty pupils and assistants, giving him great influence on a future generation of artists. Bartolozzi continued to work in London until 1802, when, at the age of seventy-five, he moved to Lisbon, where he became the director of the Academia de Belas Artes. Prints by Francesco Bartolozzi are held in many collections around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in Canada, as well as in the collections of the Huntarian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland, the British Museum in London, England, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.