[Head of a black woman with a lace kerchief hat] [graphic] /a Moeglich fecit.

[Nuremberg] : [s.n.], 1784.

1 item ; 15.1 x 11.9 cm

This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance.

Germany -- Nuremberg, -- publication place.

272946

From dealer's description: "Unrecorded copy of Hollar’s Head of a Black Woman with a Lace Kerchief Hat [Wenceslaus Hollar] (after) / Andreas Leonhard Moeglich. [Head of a Black Woman with a Lace Kerchief Hat]. S.l. [Nuremberg]: “Moeglich fecit,” 1784. [15.1 x 11.9 cm the sheet; 12.1 x 9.2 cm the plate], [1] f. etching. Faint abrasions to upper right quadrant, a few pale stains, annotations on verso. Unrecorded 1784 etching by the Nuremberg printmaker Andreas Leonhard Moeglich (1742-1810) based on Wenceslaus Hollar’s (1607-77) enigmatic 1645 portrait today generally known as Head of a Black Woman with a Lace Kerchief Hat. Moeglich’s version is in reverse, somewhat larger than the original, and embellishes the sitter with the added accessories of a pearl necklace and pearl earring.Moeglich specialized in rococo and neoclassical silhouettes and profile portraits of famous and upper-class white Europeans, and so his interest in Hollar’s informal, three-quarter-view print of an anonymous diasporic African woman is indeed unusual and warrants further investigation. The conventional syntax of hatched lines and stippling taught to apprentice intaglio printmakers was not well adapted to the requirements of portraying sitters with dark complexions, and so ambitious practitioners sometimes copied prints by earlier artists who had successfully portrayed black subjects. Hollar’s oeuvre was widely admired by later printmakers, but Moeglich did not make a habit of copying other prints by Hollar, and so it is almost certain that he was principally interested in the blackness Hollar’s anonymous sitter (see, e.g., E. Kolfin, “Rembrandt’s Africans,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. III, part 1 [From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque], D. Bindman & H. L. Gates Jr., eds., pp. 271-306, esp. pp. 299-302). Approximate relative sizes of Moeglich version & Hollar original (Folger ART Vol. b35 no.46) The Moeglich print offered here is not listed among the known copies/variations of this subject in Simon Turner’s recent catalogue raisonné of Hollar’s prints (The New Hollstein German Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts 1400-1700, part IX, p. 95, no. 815), nor have I seen it recorded among the print or digital sources relating to the (much understudied) Moeglich (e.g., the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; G.K. Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon, vol. 9 [1840], pp. 339-340). The only publishe mention that Moeglich copied this design comes from Gustav Parthey’s 1858 supplement to his Hollar catalogue (Nachträge und Verbesserungen zum Verzeichnisse der Hollar’schen Kupferstiche, p. 657, no. 2007) in which he cites an enlarged print by Moeglich of Hollar’s “Kopf einer Negerin” from the collection of Aloys Apell in Dresden (R. Weigel, Catalog der gewählten Kupferstichsammlung des Herrn Moritz Steinla … der reichen Hollar-Sammlung des Herrn A. Apell in Dresden… [1857], p. 87, no 1225). Oddly, the date assigned to the print is not the “1784” clearly seen on the print offered here, but 1773. The dimensions cited (4 Zoll 7 Linie by 3 Zoll 5 Linie = 4 and 7/12 inches by 3 and 5/12 inches) are roughly that of the plate of the item offered here. Either something was lost in translation and this entry does refer to the print offered here, or Moeglich executed another now-unrecorded copy in 1773. The Hollar original is also quite rare: The only U.S. example located by Turner is the Folger copy (ART Vol. b35 no.46), but I find another in the Harvard Art Museums (Fogg, no. M13408)." Ordered from Marshall Kibbey Rare Books LLC, D9748, 2023-05-31, email quote.

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