Description

This post is also available in: Nederlands

Franz Edmund Weirotter (May 1733 – May 11, 1771) was an Austrian painter, draftsman and etcher. Weirotter was born in Innsbruck and mainly painted landscapes and maritime scenes. He traveled to Paris and Rome, where he produced a number of paintings and etchings. Some of his works are located in San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums. Weirotter died in Vienna on 11 May 1771.

& nbsp;

Pierre-François Basan, born in Paris on October 23, 1723 and died on February 12, 1797, is a writer, publisher and trader of French prints. His father, Claude-Pierre Basan, is a wine merchant; his mother, Nicole Charpizaux, nephew of the engraver Etienne Fessard (1714-1774), to whom the young Pierre-François was given for the lessons in drawing and graphics. He continues his apprenticeship with the engraver Jean Daullé.

From 1747 he was engraver at the publisher of prints Michel Odieuvre, for which he engraved many portraits. From 1750 to 1754 he participated in two major engraving reproduction companies: the Gallery of Count Brühl and the Royal Gallery of Dresden; he is one of the engravers of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle. In 1751 he married Marie Drouet, the daughter of a Hatter from Angers, an orphan whose guardian was the engraver Noël Le Mire. They will have three children. From 1754 he devoted himself to the publishing and trading of prints, only occasionally engraving. It is a commercial network with a European dimension, a combination of his company his son Etienne Leon Aangrijpend, cousin of Étienne Fessard. The Basan-Poignant company works until 1788.

From 1761 to 1779 Basan published six volumes, called “The Work of Basan”, where he collected hundreds of prints and reproduced the works of great Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian and German masters (his own engravings take a minimal place) batter).
It also contains nearly five thousand copper plates, including those of Rembrandt: in 1786 Basan buys 78 original Rembrandt bronze at the auction of the French collector and engraver Watelet and publishes in the aftermath of the collection of 85 prints original … by Rembrandt, a work that will be published for more than a century. He published these plates from 1789 to 1797 in various editions of a collection known as the “Basan collection” (some copper Rembrandt were retouched by a certain Auguste Jean, a “restorer” who worked for Basan). In the nineteenth century, the son of Bashan, Henry-Louis, retouched the plates and published a collection in 1807-1808. In collaboration with Le Mire, from 1767 to 1771 he published a quarto edition of Ovid Metamorfosen in 4 volumes by Jean-Baptiste Despilly and Noël-Jacques Pissot, accompanied by a biography of the author by Father Goujet and illustrated by the best engravers of the time.