Artist: Robert Brandard (English, 1805–1862)
Medium: Antique steel engraving on wove paper.
Signature: Signed in the plate, lower left.
Dimensions: Image Size 4 3/8 x 6 1/8 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 13 x 15 inches.
Framing: Please This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
The Young Rustic, with cap under his arm, who is trimming up a stick he has cut out of the wood, is a lifelike study: note the pouting of the lips, after the fashion of boys earnestly engaged on any work.
Robert Brandard was an English landscape engraver. Brandard was the eldest son of Thomas Brandard (d. 1830), engraver and copperplate printer, of Barford Street, Deritend, Birmingham, and his wife, Ann. He went to London in 1824, and entered the studio of Edward Goodall, with whom he remained a year. He engraved some of the subjects for Brockedon’s Passes of the Alps, Captain Batty’s Saxony, Turner’s England and Wales and English Rivers, and numerous plates for The Art Journal, after Turner, Stanfield, Callcott, Herring, and others. His most important engravings on a large scale were Turner’s “Crossing the Brook”, “The Snow-storm”, and “The Bay of Baiae”. He also published two volumes of etchings, chiefly landscapes, after his own designs. He occasionally exhibited small oil pictures at the British Institution, which were distinguished by a good feeling for nature and a healthy tone of colour. The watercolour “Rocks at Hastings” is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. His brother John Brandard was a lithograph artist who designed many illustrated title-pages for music. His younger brother, Edward Paxman Brandard (1819–1898) was apprenticed to him while in Islington, London. Another engraver who studied with Robert Brandard was Joseph Clayton Bentley.