Godefroy Engelmann the Elder

Godefroy Engelmann (August 17, 1788 – April 25, 1839) was a Franco-German lithographer and chromolithographer.

Biography

Godefroy Engelmann was born in 1788 in Mühlhausen, a small town near the France/Switzerland/Germany border. At the time of his birth Mulhouse was a free German republic associated with the Swiss Confederation, but was annexed by France 10 years later. He died in that same town in 1839, from a tumor in his neck.

Engelmann trained in Switzerland and France at La Rochelle and Bordeaux, and he studied painting and sketching in Jean-Baptiste Regnault's atelier in Paris. In the summer of 1814 he travelled to Munich, Germany to study lithography, a then-novel German invention. The following spring, he founded La Société Lithotypique de Mulhouse. In June 1816 he opened a workshop in Paris.

Engelmann is largely credited with bringing lithography to France,