Adam von Bartsch (1757-1821) and the Invention of the Original Printmaker

Abstract

Through his widely cited catalogues of prints, Austrian printmaker, curator, and author, Adam von Bartsch (1757-1821), developed and disseminated concepts and methods of investigation that formed the foundation of the rational and empirical study of prints. The analysis of Bartsch’s publications, which included new editions of sixteenth-century woodcuts, catalogues raisonnés (authoritative registers of printmakers’ complete works), and didactic texts, reveals nuanced conceptions of originality and of historical development adapted to the technology of printmaking. He coined the term, peintre-graveur (“painter-printmaker”), to identify artists who used the printing press to multiply the novel expressions of their minds and hands, and to distinguish autographic printmakers from graveurs, practitioners who used the same means to repeat designs invented by other artists. The collaboratively produced prints Bartsch described in Le Peintre Graveur (Vienna, 1803-21), his twenty-one volume compendium of catalogues raisonnés of Dutch, German, and Italian artists from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, however, showed that the author recognized originality generated by the application of genius and talent to the seemingly mechanical tasks of translating a composition into print or inking a printing surface. Bartsch’s descriptions illustrated his commitment to firsthand observation and his reliance on side-by-side comparisons for attributing and classifying prints, techniques that generations of print specialists learned from his publications. The roughly chronological order of the catalogues raisonnés in Le Peintre Graveur demonstrated the changes in artists’ manners over time in each national school, so that the organization of the catalogue outlined a schematic history of original printmaking. Collectors, dealers, and scholars of European prints adopted Bartsch’s work as a standard reference and, by the end of the century, printmakers possessed of artistic ambition self-identified as peintres-graveurs to signal the originality of their work to collectors. In the analysis of his scholarship, Bartsch emerges an important voice in the discourse on originality and as a key figure in promoting the acceptance of printmaking as a fine art.