Print Collecting: Then & Now

Monogrammist SK (engraver)
c. 1530-c. 1580
after Raphael Sanzio (artist)
Italy (Duchy of Urbino), 1483-1520

The Battle of Ponte Milvio, c. 1550
Engraving printed from four plates on vellum
Counterproof, first of two states

_{Prints and Drawings Collection
Purchased through the Library Endowment Trust, 2021}

This print is believed to have been copied from a lost modello (intermediary drawing) designed by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael for a large fresco commemorating Roman Emperor Constantine I (c. 272-337 CE) and his army’s defeat of rival Emperor Maxentius (c. 283-312 CE) on the Milvian Bridge in Rome on 28 October 312 CE. The fresco, which was completed four years after Raphael’s death by his pupil Giulio Roman, decorates the walls of the Sala di Constantino (Hall of Constantine) in the Vatican.

Raphael has been described as the first artist to realise the potential of prints being made after his designs to propagate recognition and generate artistic fame. Prints were officially, and unofficially, created after Raphael’s paintings and drawings during the artist’s lifetime, with many being distributed among collectors and artist’s workshops across Europe. Printed from four copper plates on vellum (animal skin), this rare counterproof, or reversed impression, of the print’s first state was made around 1550 by a printmaker known only by the monogram SK, and was almost certainly commissioned specially for a wealthy private collector.

Francisco de Goya (artist and publisher)
Spain, 1746-1828

Nadie se conoce. [Nobody knows himself.], 1797–98
First edition published 1799
Etching, aquatint, burnisher

_{Prints and Drawings Collection
Purchased through the Library Endowment Trust, 2024}

Francisco de Goya was Painter to the King of Spain, working in the courts of Charles III (r. 1758-88), Charles IV (r. 1788-1808) and Ferdinand VII (r. 1808/1813-33). During his life, he grappled with reconciling the aesthetics of privilege and poverty, diplomacy and war, with the cultural aspirations to reason sought by proponents of the European ‘Age of Enlightenment’.

Both this print and its companion in the exhibition, Que viene el Coco. [Here comes the bogey-man.], belong to Los Caprichos [The Caprices], a series of 80 plates created in Madrid between 1797-98. This was the first of Goya’s four major print series and arguably his most technically innovative and inventive graphic work. Designed as a sequence of sardonic illustrations of human irrationalities and prejudices rooted in ignorance, social customs and self-interest, Goya wrote of this image, ‘The world is a masquerade. Face, dress and voice, all are false. All wish to appear what they are not, all deceive and do not even know themselves.’

Francisco de Goya (artist)
Spain, 1746-1828

Que viene el Coco. [Here comes the bogey-man.], 1797–1798
Published after 1805
Etching, aquatint

_{Prints and Drawings Collection, 1984}

Que viene el Coco. [Here comes the bogey‑man.] is an earlier acquisition to the Prints and Drawings Collection, included as it offers an opportunity to demonstrate two different approaches to print collecting.

While series such as The Caprices were published as a set, individual works were often removed from their original context to be sold by art dealers. As they circulated among collectors, it was common practice to mark prints with hand-written inscriptions or collector’s stamps. In accordance with the tastes and customs of the nineteenth century, it was also typical for collectors to cut the margins from a sheet to the edge of the plate-mark, or printed image. While annotations and collector’s marks are now highly valued for the important information they reveal about the provenance of works, rare uncut sheets such as the one on which Nadie se conoce. [Nobody knows himself.] (the companion piece to this work in the exhibition) is printed are the most prized among collectors.

Glen Mackie (Kei Kalak)
Australia (Yam Island, Torres Strait), 1975-

Kawai (The Black Dogai), 2011
Linocut
Edition 10/35

_{Prints and Drawings Collection
Purchased through the Library Endowment Trust, 2024}

Glen Mackie (Kei Kalak) is a Iama (Yam) man from the Kala Lagaw language group of the Torres Strait Islands, who has been active in the Torres Strait Islander printmaking movement since the 1990s. The movement emerged in Cairns, North Queensland, in the mid-1980s and by the late 1990s had developed into a distinct style that is now widely recognised as belonging to the Torres Strait Islander tradition. Mackie uses the graphic minar, or infill-design, style in combination with the sharp lines of the linocut to great visual effect: representing his family totemic designs, recounting ancestral stories, depicting the archipelago of islands and waters of the Torres Strait and creating his own imaginative geometric patterns.

The dogai (witch-like) figure seen here reoccurs throughout Torres Strait Islander art. In Mackie’s print, the ‘wicked black dogai’ emerges from the sea around the reef at Gebar (Two Brothers Island) where they terrify the community before being defeated by a boy who shoots an arrow through their heart. This print is one of nineteen Torres Strait Islander works to enter the collection between 2016 and 2022, which were acquired for their ability to offer an important contemporary comparison to the visual story telling of mythology found throughout the historic European works in the Prints and Drawings Collection.

Thomas Evans (publisher)
England, active 1803-1815

The odd-dealer, 1807
John Grouse & Mother Goose, 1807
Widow Waddle, of Chickabiddy-Lane, 1807
The shipwrecked cabin-boy, sung by Master Smalley, in Mother Goose, 1808
The conjuror, c. 1805/06
The scolding wife, c. 1805/06
Lilies and roses, c. 1805/06
The girl of my heart., c. 1806/07
Hand-coloured etchings

_{Prints and Drawings Collection
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gift Program by Elizabeth Lane in memory of Richard Lane, 2021}