We are a fan of physical antiques reference books. Modern digital references certainly have their places, but the old physical references preserve past and often lost knowledge which can be helpful in identifying antiques. In this post, we will consider the case of Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings first published in 1885 by Charles Scribner.
One of the pitfalls of old references is that they may contain data supplanted by new findings and scholarship. Thus, these older references have to be held in a degree of disbelief or suspicion. But there are other aspects which are quite reliable and useful, an example being the brief biographical information found for difficult to trace artists.
The books also treat subject domains such as the Creation and Assumption, as well as secular subjects, noting the more important works and artists among these genres.
We shall sample a few artists at random to glimpse some of the forgotten and obscure artists of the 19th century and earlier.
Our first selection is Jean Victor Adam (1801 + 1867), a French artist known for his military and genre paintings but who also did lithography work for a short period.
Another artist is Konrad Buhlmeyer (1835 – 1883) born in Vienna and known as a landscape and animal painter. Some of his more notable paintings include View Near Lundenburg, View in Salzburg, and On Gmunden Lake. Do any of you have such works? A quick DuckDuckGo search yielded no results on the first 2 pages, substantiating, at least for your author, the value of these older references.
Our third selection is Amos Cassioli (1838 - 1891). Whoever heard of him? He won first place in a painting contest in Florence Italy, the subject being Lorenzo de’ Medici showing his art collection to Galeazzo Sforza.
On the other hand, Cassioli has a Wikipedia entry which gives his date of birth as 1832. I am not sure which date is correct, but the difference corroborates the earlier caution of not accepting the information in older references as infallible.
The painters covered were considered of note and prominence, and there are certainly famous artists such as Charles Daubigny and Rembrandt, but the majority are names lost to history or known only by specialists. The forward also notes that the artists are European, which helps narrow the scope and subject matter, but even then still requiring 4 volumes to cover.
We covered this research resource because of its learned approach and value to someone trying to identify past works whose qualities are still valued and thus of interest in documenting their artists.
