AUGUSTIN HIRSCHVOGEL (1503-1553)
PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION
AUGUSTIN HIRSCHVOGEL (1503-1553)

Landscape with a high Rock and a Castle at Left

Details
AUGUSTIN HIRSCHVOGEL (1503-1553)
Landscape with a high Rock and a Castle at Left
etching
1546
on laid paper, without watermark
a very fine impression of this rare print
printing with remarkable clarity even in the finest lines
with many light plate impurities, a small accidental smudge of printing ink at lower left
trimmed to or just outside of the borderline
generally in very good condition
Sheet 143 x 214 mm.
Provenance
With Colnaghi & Co., London (their stock number C16038 in pencil verso).
With R.M. Light & Co., Santa Barbara, California.
Acquired from the above; then by descent to the present owner.
Literature
Bartsch 74; Schwarz 74; Hollstein 47

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Lot Essay

Augustin Hirschvogel (1503-1553) came from a family of glass painters in Nuremberg. He trained in the family craft, then set up a workshop as a majolica painter in his native city. In the late 1530's we find him in the Balkans working as a cartographer for Emperor Ferdinand I. Having established close connections to the Imperial Court, he finally moved to Vienna, where he lived permanently from 1544. It was probably there that he started decorating arms and armour and began to work in the new technique of etching.
He was one of the first printmakers of the German Renaissance to create landscape prints, views of buildings and scenery, without any religious or allegorical content, and indeed the first to execute them in pure etching. He grasped and took full advantage of the spontaneity of the etched line and his scenes are imbued with an almost naïve immediacy, which was new to the medium. He thus stands at the beginning of a long tradition, lasting well into the 19th century, which considered etching as the natural printmaking method for the depiction of landscapes.
Very few impressions of Augustin Hirschvogel's landscapes appear to have survived and they are great rarities on today's art market. Hollstein records a total of twenty impressions and three counterproofs of this print.

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