Jacque Callot

Jacques Callot, (March–August 1592 -March 24, 1635), French printmaker was one of the first great artists exclusively to practice the graphic arts . His series of prints documenting the horrors of war influenced the socially conscious art of the 19th and 20th centuries. He learned engraving under Philippe Thomassin in Rome. Callot gained Medici patronage for pictorial records of in feste, quasi-dramatic pageants, sometimes dealing in allegorical subjects. He succeeded in comingling a naturalistic style with the artificiality of the occasion. Most of his composition were staged settings and the figures were of tiny scale, each one indicated by the fewest possible strokes. This required a very fine etching technique. His breadth of observation, his lively figure style, and his skill in assembling a large, jostling crowd secured for his etchings a lasting popular influence all over Europe. He illustrated sacred books, made a series of plates of the Apostles, and visited Paris to etch animated maps of the sieges of La Rochelle and the Île de Ré. In his last great series of etchings, the “small” (1632) and the “large” (1633) The Miseries and Misfortunes of War, he brought his documentary genius to bear on the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War. Callot is also well known for his landscape drawings in line and wash and for his quick figure studies in chalk.