#copperplate etching

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copperplate etching on rag paper, 2025

Decorative Sunday

Architectural designs from The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs by English garden designer Batty Langley, printed and sold by S. Harding in London in 1745.

The title page boasts that it is “illustrated by upwards of four hundred grand designs, neatly engraved on one hundred and eighty-six copper.” The book begins with a description of the five orders of columns, according to the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.

Batty Langley wrote in the introduction:

“The great pleasure that builders and workmen of all kinds have of the late years taken in the study of architecture; and the great advantages that have accrued to those for whom they have been employed; having their works executed in a much neater and more magnificent manner than was ever done in this kingdom before; has been the real motive that induced me, to the compiling of this work, for their further improvement.

Besides, as the study of architecture is really delightful in all its process; its practice is evidently of the greatest importance to artificers in general; and its rules so easy, as to be acquired at leisure times, when the business of days is over, by way of diversion.”

View more posts about decorative arts and pattern books.

Copperplate aquatint etching by Dennis Ashbaugh for Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), by William Gibson, 1992. Photograph © Kevin Begos Jr. Courtesy of the Transcriptions Project, UC Santa Barbara.

NUDE Exhibition Gallery BiDamas Minamimorimachi Osaka. Starting Tomorrow!

wolfmother

Sea Nymphs - Copperplate Etching [Drypoint, Aquatint & Roller] 600mm x 365mm