Adalékok Binder János Fülöp rézmetsző munkásságához

Johann Philipp Binder (1736/7-1811), who worked in Buda in the second half of the 18th century and the first decade of the 19th, followed the Augsburg Rococo engraving tradition of the middle third of the 18th century. Since the publication of György Rózsa’s catalogue of three hundred and eighty-eight engravings by Binder and his workshop in 1998, his work has been the subject of much attention. In my study, I supplement the known oeuvre with nearly twenty signed engravings on religious and secular subjects found in nine books or other printed sources not yet examined in relation to Binder’s oeuvre, and discovered on three separate sheets. One of these may also modify the artist’s biography as known and accepted to date. On the basis of his will published five days after his death on 23 December 1811, I list the possessions he left to his second wife, who was still running the workshop a decade later. Museum catalogues and databases open up new perspectives for research. An important methodological lesson for the compilation of a new, more complete Binder catalogue, and for the processing of the 18th-century Hungarian reproduced graphic corpus in general, is that it is important to take all surviving copies of a book in hand, as not all illustrations are bound in all copies. Such a Binder catalogue would allow an analysis of the change in the artist’s style and the gradual inclusion of assistants.