The first volume of the reference work on
Dutch and Flemish printmaking that has become
known as ‘Hollstein’ was published
in 1949. It was the initiative of Friedrich
Wilhelm Hollstein (1888-1957), a Berlin print
dealer and auctioneer who was forced by circumstances
to leave Germany in 1937 and moved to Amsterdam.
He must have been an optimistic man. He calculated
that he would need 25 volumes to catalogue
the entire production of prints from 1450 to
1700. Fourteen volumes had seen the light of
day by the time he died in 1957, and it was
due to the intervention of the Rijksprentenkabinet,
and of Karel G. Boon in particular, and the
book publishers Menno Hertzberger, A.L. van
Gendt, Koninklijke Van Poll, and Sound & Vision
Publishers, who believed in the project and
were prepared to invest in it, that the series
was continued. Slowly the standard of the print
descriptions improved, and the series was completed
thanks to the dedication and involvement of
the late Mrs Dieuwke de Hoop Scheffer and her
successors. It took another 53 years to finish
the series, which now runs to 71 volumes. In
the meantime the New Hollstein series was launched
in 1993, representing an enormous and enthusiastically
received enhancement of the project. It will
be continued according to the standards established
in recent years.
Friedrich Hollstein realised from the very outset
that it would be necessary to round off the series
with an index, and he announced that there would
be one. We too, who have been editing and publishing
the series for quite some time now, have often
been told how useful it would be to have an index
to Hollstein. With completion of the series looming
we began discussing the possible ways of supplying
a tool that would provide access to the vast
corpus of prints catalogued by a variety of compilers
over the past 60 years. We gained experience
in this respect with the indexes included in
the volumes in the New Hollstein series over
the last two decades. In those volumes, all the
roles in the production of prints were carefully
identified by researchers working for the project,
subjects were described according to a fixed
system, and other details like techniques and
biblical and other literary references were categorised.
Unfortunately, that was not done in the earlier
series.
We decided to limit the index to a list
of some 10,000 proper names – those of
engravers, etchers and woodcutters, printers,
painters, draughtsmen, publishers, poets, authors,
dedicatees, sitters and others who were instrumental
in the production of the prints and book illustrations
catalogued in the 71 volumes of Hollstein. But
much more information has been collected, mainly
on the subjects of the prints, and that will
be presented separately in a digital format by
Sound and Vision Publishers, enabling users to
search the catalogued prints in a variety of
ways.
The index published here must be consulted
with great care. We have not attempted to correct
or supplement the information contained in
the volumes, since that would have been impossible
in practice. The index contains the data as
they are given in the published volumes. What
we have done is try to ensure that names refer
to the correct historical person.
What remains is a feeling of gratitude to pioneers
like Adam von Bartsch, Max Lehrs, Arthur M.
Hind, Friedrich Hollstein and many others,
cataloguers pur sang, who have shown that in
order to research prints and interpret them
it is essential to inventory what has come
down to us. The ways of doing so have evolved
since Bartsch’s day, thanks to the invention
of photography and, later, the introduction
of the computer. In that context, Hollstein’s
initiative and what has become of it will prove
to have been an essential contribution to the
study of the history of printmaking. This index
is further testimony to the importance of Hollstein.
Compiled
by Miekie Donner
Edited by Ger Luijten en Huigen Leeflang |
