Charles Joseph Hullmandel

Charles Joseph Hullmandel (15 June 1789 – 15 November 1850) was born in London, where he established and maintained the first lithographic establishment in London on Great Marlborough Street from about 1819 until his death. He introduced various improvements to the process including what he called the lithotint. Greatly reducing the cost from older copperplate engravings they made reproductions of artwork more accessible and contributed to numerous publications in the period.

Life and work

Hullmandel was born in Queen Street, Mayfair. His father was a German-speaking musician and composer, Nicolas-Joseph Hüllmandel (1756–1823), a native of Strasbourg who became a pupil of C. P. E. Bach and from 1780 spent ten years as a fashionable music teacher in Paris. In 1787 he married Camille-Aurore du Cazan, who was of a noble French family, and in 1789 sent his wife to England, following her in 1790, as the French Revolution unfolded.

As a young man, Charles Hullmandel studied art and spent several years living and working in continental Europe. He learned printmaking after meeting Alois Senefelder in Munich and printed many of his own works. His earliest works included Twenty-Four Views of Italy (1818) printed by Moser and Harris, Somers Town, but published under his address. In 1818, he set up a printing press at his home in London after a visit to Munich with Rudolph Ackermann, and went on to study chemistry under Michael Faraday for the purpose of improving his printing. which enabled the printed reproduction of Romantic landscape paintings of the type made popular in England by J. M. W. Turner. In 1843 he went into partnership with Joseph Fowell Walton (born 1812, living 1863), a cousin of the landscape artist and lithographer William Louis Walton, the firm then becoming known as Hullmandel & Walton. thumb

Hullmandel lived with his sister Adelaide Charlotte Evelina (d. 1839) and her partner Valentine Bartholomew (1799–1879). He died of a stroke at home on Great Marlborough Street, in 1850 and was buried on the western side of Highgate Cemetery.