New Acquisitions in Prints

As printmaking in its various forms became an increasingly important part of our teaching at College Street a few years ago, we decided to gather the best of the prints that we already held into a teaching collection at the east end of Level 6 and began, in 2019, to make a few selective purchases in order to expand its range and usefulness both as an art-historical and practical resource.

Our first acquisition was a fine example of a Japanese colour woodblock by Kunisada; we then obtained a masterpiece of seventeenth-century etching by Salvator Rosa as well as a beautiful modern etching by Sydney Ure Smith, a mezzotint by Richard Earlom after Claude Lorrain and, thanks to the generosity of our dealer Mr Josef Lebovic, an outstanding example of seventeenth-century engraving by Paulus Pontius. By the end of 2019, our miniature print museum thus displayed examples of most of the main techniques of relief and intaglio printmaking.

Stephanie Jane Rampton
Towards Patterdale,
2017 Etching and aquatint, 40 x 120 cm

Prints represent one of the few undervalued areas of the art market, where it is still possible to acquire museum-quality works for an extremely modest price. We hope to be able to continue to develop this important teaching collection over the next few years, and would welcome offers of gifts or bequests that would complement our current holdings. In the longer run, we are considering the Level 7 corridor, after appropriate refurbishment, as a permanent home for the expanded Print Collection.