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- Edmund Marmion
- Also known as
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Edmund Marmion
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primary name: Marmion, Edmund
- Details
- individual; printmaker; British; Male
- Other dates
- 1650-1653 (active)
- Biography
- Etcher and designer of book illustrations. An obscure figure by whom very little work survives. Only one document has been found that concerns him: on 4 March 1650 he was given the freedom of the Painter-Stainer's Company at the same time as Robert Walker and Francis Barlow. Much of what has been written about him has been confused by two red herrings. A will survives of an Edmond Marmion, gent. of Eynesbury, Hunts, who died in 1654, but there is no reason to connect him with our man. Granger (II p.364) recorded an engraving by Gifford of a Sir Edmond Marmion, whom he identified with our artist. But the engraving has never been seen since, and no Sir Edmond Marmion is to be found in any reference book. The 1650 record calls him Mr.
Marmion's principal surviving work is a set of the Five Senses, of which the only known complete set is in the Pepys collection. They are sufficient to demonstrate that he was, with Barlow, the first native etcher of real quality. Only one other etching by him is known: an undated portrait of George Tooke of Popes in Hertfordshire, shown head and shoulders in an oval.
His other identified works are his preparatory drawings for the titlepage and 29 plates that illustrate the tenth edition of Francis Quarles, Argalus and Parthenia, published by Humphrey Moseley in 1656 (this was the first illustrated edition, and the first in quarto). All but three of the drawings survive in Oxford, and that for the titleplate is dated 1653 (see John Horden, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, II 1954, pp.55-62, and D.Blayney Brown, Ashmolean Museum, Catalogue of the collection of drawings IV: Earlier British drawings, Oxford 1982, pp.101-6). The drawings were either engraved, probably by Thomas Cross, or etched, probably by Richard Gaywood.
- Bibliography
- Antony Griffiths, 'The Print in Stuart Britain', 1998, p.167