Baillieu Library Print Collection
Current Exhibition - Journeys and Places: Etchings by Jan van de Velde II
Ian Potter Museum of Art, 5 September 2009 to 17 January 2010
This intimate one-room exhibition demonstrates the importance of the artist Jan van de Velde II (1593–1641) in the context of the Dutch Baroque landscape tradition. Jan van de Velde II is considered one of the most noteworthy Dutch etchers of the first part of the seventeenth century. The exhibition includes over fifty prints that are held in the John Orde Poynton Collection at the Baillieu Library, the most comprehensive collection of van de Velde’s series of landscapes in any Australian public collection. Journeys and Places will provide a rare opportunity for contemporary audiences to consider the technical innovations of this body of work as well as the symbolic meaning of the landscape in Dutch art of the period.
Print Collection
The University’s Print Collection is one of its most prized treasures. It includes some 7,000 prints – mostly etchings, engravings, mezzotints, lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings – that date from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. It is based on a gift of 3,700 Old Master prints donated by Dr John Orde Poynton in 1959 and was further enhanced in 1964 with Harold Wright’s bequest of half his Lionel Lindsay print collection and prints by his British contemporaries. There are some Australian works, but the majority of prints are European. The Collection is unique amongst Australian university collections; no other university in Australia has a similar collection of international prints spanning five centuries. Some of the highlights include prints by Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries, Aldegrever, the Sadeler Family, Jacques Callot, Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt, William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya and Lionel Lindsay. The Collection was originally intended as a teaching tool for students and it continues to be used particularly by students of art history and history here at the University.
Currently the collection can be electronically accessed via The Ian Potter Museum of Art web site. We are in the process of digitizing the prints and these images are being attached to the web site as they become available.
Photographic copies of most prints in the collection can be purchased, depending on their condition and copyright. Items from the collection can be viewed by prior arrangement, for research purposes. For further information contact Special Collections staff at the Baillieu Library:
Ms Chen Chen: Special Collections Officer (Cultural Collections and Prints)
Tel: (03) 8344 8040
Email: chenc@ unimelb.edu.au
Ms Kerrianne Stone (Mondays-Wednesdays)
Tel: (03) 8344 3790
Email: kjstone@ unimelb.edu.au