Drawing on Copper: The Basire Family of Copper-Plate Engravers and their Works

摘要

The huge expansion in the demand for prints in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced a new phenomenon in the history of British printmaking, the family dynasty. Familiar in Paris from the late seventeenth century onwards, they first appear in London after 1750 with the Basires and Heaths, and run on after 1800 with the Findens, Cookes, Pyes, and many more. Almost all of them remain unstudied by professional historians, and they have remained the preserve of amateur enthusiasts. The most recent is Richard Goddard who has produced an extremely well researched monograph on the four generations of the Basire family, Isaac and then three successive Jameses, who between them cover the years from the 1730s to the 1850s.