Ernest Gambart
Life and career
Gambart was born in Kortrijk, the son of a printer, binder and bookseller. By the age of 19, he had moved to Paris where he established his own print and papermaking business. He soon became known to the well-established Goupil print publishers, for whom he moved to England in 1840 to establish a branch in London. He soon struck out on his own again in 1842, this time in partnership with one Mr. Junin, to form the company Gambart & Junin which specialized in the import of art prints from Europe. The company was a success, and by early in 1844, the company was established as publishers as well as importers and exporters.
Art publisher
Gambart soon gained a reputation as a leading publisher of fine art prints. He established fair and mutually beneficial agreements with most of the best known British and European artists of the mid-Victorian period, including Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Rosa Bonheur, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, William Holman Hunt, John Linnell, J. M. W. Turner, David Roberts, Frederick Goodall, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and William Powell Frith. He was a friend to many of these artists, and helped establish the reputation of some. For example, in 1855, he brought Rosa Bonheur to England with her monumental piece, The Horse Fair, which he purchased[1] and which she showed to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in a private audience. For the same visit, he arranged a sojourn to Scotland where Bonheur made sketches for later works. He published many of her paintings as steel engraved reproductions. Through his efforts, she became better known in England than her native France.
The Dutch-born Alma-Tadema benefited in a similar manner ten years later. He met Gambart in 1864 and Gambart was impressed by the young man's work. Gambart arranged an exhibition in London in 1865 and promoted his work while the artist remained in Belgium. [2] Alma-Tadema finally moved to London in 1870.
Gambart worked with some of the finest engravers and technicians of his day to create works as close to the artist's intent as possible in a black and white medium. Among the craftsmen he employed were Charles George Lewis. Gambart later also employed colour lithography.[3]
His attention to quality paid off both in the arrangements he maintained with leading artists (his career lasted 25 years) and also in sales. Among his best selling reproductions were William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World (1858), an inspiring and highly influential image of Christ, and William Powell Frith's The Derby Day (1858).
Original works
Personal life
Honours
- Member of the Royal Victorian Order (1898).
Notes
References
- Biography by Richard Goodall
- Biography featuring a portrait of Annie Gambart
- Gambart and the problem of copyright in the Victorian Age
Further reading
- Jeremy Maas, Gambart, Prince of the Victorian Art World, London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975
- Norbert Hostyn, Ernest Gambart, in : Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek, 16, Brussels, 2002.
- Pamela M. Fletcher, Creating the French Gallery: Ernest Gambart and the Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in Mid-Victorian London, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 6, issue 1, Spring 2007
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