The Forgotten Fourdrinier

This book is a meticulously researched but very readable story of Huguenot Paul Fourdrinier’s journey from being an apprentice in Holland to a highly recognized printmaker in London in the eighteenth century.

Paul is almost forgotten and artistically underrated but was an accomplished copper engraver who founded the English Fourdrinier dynasty, which produced the developers of the Fourdrinier papermaking machine and the mother of Cardinal Newman.

The reader will be immersed in his world and his connections to aristocrats, artists, and great projects of the age—including the development of Palladian neoclassical architecture, the Foundling’s Hospital, and the Savannah colony in Georgia—and renowned talents such as the sculptor Rysbrack, painter Hogarth, designer William Kent, and composer George Frederick Handel. As well as the great and powerful, we meet the eccentrics—George Vertue, Horace Walpole, the reverend Stephen Duck, Batty Langley, courtesan Teresia Constantia Phillips, and the curious affair of Mary Toft, who convinced half the nation that she had given birth to rabbits.

This was a time of exciting intellectual development. The combination of copper engraving and printing combined with the removal of state censorship and the institution of copyright led to a wave of information and learning not dissimilar to the impact of the Internet. The institution of commercial companies and banks foreshadowed the Industrial Revolution and made possible projects such as Charles Labeyle’s first Westminster Bridge, the building of Regency Bath, and James Gibb’s Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, all engraved by Fourdrinier on behalf of their creators.

In his shop in Whitehall, he developed master engravings of uncommon size and shapes for customers, including the Earls of Burlington and Pembroke, and engraved for Thomas Wright, the astronomer who first defined galaxies, and William Chambers, who propelled Chinese fashion into Georgian design.

 

This is a fascinating book from beginning to end.