- Also known as
-
Wenceslaus Hollar
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primary name: Hollar, Wenceslaus
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other name: Hollar, Václav
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other name: Hollar, Wenzel
- Details
- individual; painter/draughtsman; printmaker; Czech; British; Male
- Life dates
- 1607-1677
- Biography
- Draughtsman and etcher. Born Prague. 1627-8, active in Stuttgart; 1629-30, worked for Jacob van der Heyden's publishing house in Strasbourg; 1631-32, worked in various German towns including Frankfurt where he worked with Merian; 1633-36 resided in Cologne, employed by A.Hogenberg, visiting the Netherlands in 1634; 1636 joined the service of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, with whom he travelled along the Rhine to Prague; December 1636, arrived with Arundel in London; 1644, to Antwerp after selling a number of plates to Peter Stent; 1652, returned to London, concentrating thereafter on book-illustration and cartography; 1666, named 'Scenographus regius' by the king but the Great Fire of that year brought to an end Hollar's projected view of the entire city; 1668-9, joined Lord Henry Howard on his expedition to Tangiers, but most of his late work consisted of routine illustrations for book publishers. Died in London in severely reduced circumstances.
The Hollar collection in the BM numbers over 4,700 prints, and has been built up from many sources over many years. The core is an album purchased by Sloane from Hollar's widow in 1701 (see 'Landmarks in Print Collecting', p.25). These prints are inventoried within Q,4 and 5.
- Bibliography
- New Hollstein, 9 vols. 2009- 2012 (by Simon Turner)
R. Pennington, 'A descriptive catalogue of the etched work of WH', Cambridge 1982 (2717 nos, following the numbering used by Parthey in 1853, but with new states added)
F. Sprinzels, 'Hollars Handzeichnungen' [Hollar's Drawings] (Vienna, 1938) (catalogue)
A. Volrábová (ed) Wenceslaus Hollar 1607-1677 and Europe Between Life and Desolation, Prague, National Gallery, 2007 S. Turner, 'Hollar in Holland: Drawings from the artist's visit to the Dutch Republic in 1634', in Master Drawings 48 (2010), pp.73-104.
