The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University of Oxford in 1677. It is also the world's second university museum, after the establishment of the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1661 by the University of Basel.
Francis Douce was a British antiquary and museum curator.
James Granger (1723–1776) was an English clergyman, biographer, and print collector. He is now known as the author of the Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution (1769). Granger was an early advocate of animal rights.
Kinuko Yamabe Craft is a Japanese-born American painter, illustrator and fantasy artist.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of illustrated poems by William Blake. Originally, Blake illuminated and bound Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience separately. It was only in 1794 that Blake combined the two sets of poems into a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Even after beginning to print the poems together, Blake continued to produce individual volumes for each of the two sets of poetry.
Cyril Walter Hodges was an English artist and writer best known for illustrating children's books and for helping to recreate Elizabethan theatre. He won the annual Greenaway Medal for British children's book illustration in 1964.
Isaac Cruikshank was a Scottish painter and caricaturist, known for his social and political satire.
Prentiss Taylor was an American illustrator, lithographer, and painter. Born in Washington D.C., Taylor began his art studies at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed by painting classes under Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and training at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1931, Taylor began studying lithography at the League. He became a member of one of the most important printmaking societies in America at that time, the Society of American Graphic Artists. Taylor interacted and collaborated with many writers and musicians in his time in New York in the late 1920s and early 30s. This was in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Among his close friends and colleagues were Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.
John Wykeham Archer was a British artist, engraver and writer.
Thomas Hearne was an English landscape painter, engraver and illustrator. Hearne's watercolours were typified by applying a wash of subtle subdued colours over a clear outline in fine brush, pen or pencil. His techniques were studied by younger artists such as Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner.
Luigi Mayer (1755–1803) was an Italian-German artist and one of the earliest and most important late 18th-century European painters of the Ottoman Empire.
Hugh Thomson was an Irish Illustrator born at Coleraine near Derry. He is best known for his pen-and-ink illustrations of works by authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and J. M. Barrie. Thomson inaugurated the Cranford School of illustration with the publication of the 1891 Macmillan reissue of Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford.
Anthony Morris Storer (1746–1799) was an English man of fashion, politician and collector.
"The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus,"also called"Titus Andronicus' Complaint," is a ballad from the 17th century about the fictional Roman general, Titus, and his revenge cycle with the Queen of the Goths. Events in the ballad take place near the end of the Roman Empire, and the narrative of the ballad parallels the plot of William Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus. Scholarly debate exists as to which text may have existed first, the ballad or the play. The ballad itself was first entered on the Stationers' Register in 1594, the same year the play was entered. Surviving copies of the ballad can be found in the British Library, in the Huntington Library, and at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Online copies of the facsimiles are also available for public consumption at sites such as the English Broadside Ballad Archive.
Dr. Lucy Peltz is Head of Collection Displays and Senior Curator 18th Century Collections at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Richard Bull (1721–1805) was an English landowner and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1756 to 1780. He was a noted art collector who lived in a historic house on the Isle of Wight.
The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608, compiled by Thomas Trevelyon in London, England in 1608, is an illustrated manuscript miscellany containing handwritten notes and drawings on historical, religious, social and practical themes, adapted from a variety of sources, including the Bible and ancient and contemporary English writers. According to Dr. Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts and Archivist at the Folger Shakespeare Library, "the primary purposes of the Trevelyon miscellany ... are didactic and mnemonic. The extracts and examples from secular, allegorical, and Protestant texts are an enduring monument for improving one's moral conduct in this life and preparing for the next."
Louis Émile Benassit was a French artist and raconteur. He cut a colorful figure in the literary and artistic circles of Paris in the 1860s and 1870s, known equally for his satirical drawings and for his barbed wit. His updated versions of the fables of La Fontaine were widely reported in the French press. After his own military service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he frequently depicted soldiers, often enduring snow or inclement weather. Eventually, thanks in part to the influential art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, his work began to fetch high prices; Benassit's depictions of courtiers and ladies of the 1700s became especially popular. But beginning in 1882, a progressive paralysis that started in his right arm cut short both his career and his appearances in café society, though by at least one account he learned to paint using his left hand. The last twelve years of his life were spent in relative seclusion away from Paris.
Pinckney Marcius-Simons was a New York-born artist who spent his youth in Spain, Italy, and France. He studied painting under Jehan Georges Vibert, eventually joining the painter’s household. Continuing to reside in France, he exhibited at the Paris Salon at an early age and quickly established himself as a successful genre painter. In the 1890s, he radically changed his subject matter and technique. Sometimes classified as Symbolist, his phantasmagoric later works depicted Christian religious visions, elements of Classical mythology, and scenes inspired by the operas of Richard Wagner. His works were greatly admired by Teddy Roosevelt, who owned four paintings by Maricus-Simons and called him "a great imaginative artist, a wonderful colorist; and a man with a vision more wonderful still." In 1908 he was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Described from the beginning of his career as "delicate in health," he died in his forties in Bayreuth, where he was buried. In his lifetime his works fiercely divided critics and were avidly sought by collectors, but after his death he was largely forgotten.
James Hughes Anderdon (1790–1879) was an English banker, slave owner, and art collector. He is now known for his large-scale projects in extra-illustration.
