Daniel Hopfer

Daniel Hopfer was a German artist who is widely believed to have been the first to use etching in printmaking, at the end of the fifteenth century. He also worked in woodcut. Although his etchings were widely ignored by art historians for years, more recent scholarship is crediting him and his work with "single-handedly establishing the salability of etchings" and introducing the print publisher business model.

Unlike most later prints, etched on copper plates, Hopfer's printed etching continued to use the iron plates he was used to working with in steel plate armour, the material he was trained in, and with which he continued to work.

The son of Bartholomäus Hopfer, a painter, and his wife Anna Sendlerin, Daniel moved to Augsburg early in his life, and acquired citizenship there in 1493.

In 1497 he married Justina Grimm, sister of the Augsburg publisher, physician and druggist Sigismund Grimm. The couple had three sons, Jörg, Hieronymus and Lambert, the last two of whom carried on their father's profession of etching, Hieronymus in Nuremberg and Lambert in Augsburg. The two sons of Jörg, Georg and Daniel (junior), also became distinguished etchers, patronised by no less than the Emperor Maximilian II, whose successor, Rudolf II, raised Georg to the nobility.

Daniel was trained as an etcher of armour. There are only two proven examples of his own work on armour: a shield from 1536 now in the Royal Armoury museum (La Real Armería) of the Royal Palace of Madrid and a sword in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum of Nuremberg. An Augsburg horse armour in the German Historical Museum, Berlin, dating to between 1512 and 1515, is decorated with motifs from Hopfer's etchings and woodcuts, but this is no evidence that Hopfer himself worked on it.

The etching of metals with acid was known in Europe from at least 1400, but the elaborate decoration of armour, in Germany anyway, was an art probably imported from Italy around the end of the 15th century-little earlier than the birth of etching as a printmaking technique. Although the first extant dated etchings are the three by Albrecht Dürer of 1515, and despite the fact that none of his works are dated, stylistic evidence suggests that Daniel Hopfer was using this technology as early as 1500. It is often thought that Hopfer taught Dürer the technique.

The Hopfers prospered in Augsburg, and by 1505 Daniel owned a house in the city centre. He sat on the committee of the Augsburg guild of smiths, which at this time included painters and etchers, probably because these crafts were uniquely connected in the town, one of Europe's principal manufacturing places of arms and armour.

Daniel died in Augsburg in 1536. His achievement was widely recognized during his time, and in 1590 he was posthumously named as the inventor of the art of etching in the imperial patent of nobility bestowed upon his grandson Georg.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023