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Darwin Correspondence Project

2.10 Moritz Klinkicht, print from Legros

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This bold wood engraving is a copy of Legros’s bronze portrait medallion of Darwin (see separate entry), interpreting sculptural relief in terms of line and tone. It was executed by the German draughtsman and engraver Moritz Klinkicht, who worked for the Illustrated London News and various London publishers, specialising in portraiture. It exists as an autonomous print, but had originally appeared as an illustration to Cosmo Monkhouse’s article on Legros in The Magazine of Art, in 1882, highlighting the sculptor’s boldness in fashioning ‘the mighty head of Darwin’. According to Monkhouse, the engraver worked from Legros’s spontaneously fashioned plaster model, not from the finished bronze. Spielmann also used this print, in preference to a photographic reproduction of Legros’s medallion, to illustrate his book British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day (1901). Neither author credited Klinkicht by name as the engraver. The British Museum’s impression of the print is inscribed ‘From the medal by Alphonse Legros. Exhibited at the Royal Academy 1882’. Klinkicht had earlier engraved a photograph of Darwin by George Charles Wallich for the Gardener’s Chronicle (6 March 1875), p. 309. 

  • physical location British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings 

  • accession and collection number 1980.U.944.2 PPA426765 

  • copyright holder British Museum 

  •  originator of image Carl Moritz Johannes Klinkicht, after Alphonse Legros: signed at the bottom in capitals ‘M.Klinkicht sc.’ [sculpsit]. 

  • date of creation c. 1881–2 

  • computer-readable date 1881-01-01 to 1882-04-30 

  • medium and material wood engraving 

  • references and bibliography Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Professor Legros’, Magazine of Art, 5 (1882), pp. 327–334 (p. 333). Marion Harry Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day (London, Paris, New York, Melbourne: Cassell, 1901), p. 167. J. van Wyhe, ‘Iconography’, p. 143. 


 

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