Jeremias Falck

Falck was never forgotten. As early as 1767 in his “Dictionnaire des graveurs anciens et modernes“ published in Brussels, François Basan listed him with his first name Jérémie as a “Polish engraver who worked a lot in France during the middle of the last century”, and listed a few of his important works.[18] By the beginning of the 19th century his works were already in the most important Polish collections. In Germany the early “Allgemeine Künstler-Lexicon“ by Georg Kaspar Nagler [19] (in 1835) and the first edition of “Meyers Conversations-Lexicon“ in 1847 [20] included him with almost identical articles and a list of his most important works, erroneously with “Danzig 1709” as his birth date, but clearly about the year he died. Equally in 1847 the Danzig Legal Councillor, Wilhelm Seidel wrote extensively about Falck’s career and his artistic works in his essay entitled “News of a Danzig engraver“ published in the “Neuen preußischen Provinzialblättern“. Here he judged that “Falck’s works will be much in demand by collectors and will count amongst the excellent products of the School of Netherlands engravers.”[21] On the Polish side, in an article that appeared in 1850 in the Nuremberg periodical “Athenaeum für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben“ by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski listed 150 engravings by Falck [22]; and the Polish art historian Edward Rastawiecki (1804-1879) listed 317 sheets by Falck in the “Biblioteka warszawska” in 1852.[23] According to Block, over 300 works by Falck were found respectively in the collections in the Czartoryski Museum and those made by Mieczysław Pawlikowski in Lviv. The list of works drawn up by Block in 1890 drew on new research into Falck and supplemented it.[24] It seems highly unlikely that an oil painting made around 1650 and entitled “Still Life with Oysters”[25] in the Westphalian Regional Museum in the Münster comes from the hand of Jeremias Falck, despite the huge amount of publicity it aroused. Today works by Falck can be relatively easily found on the Internet, at the museums and libraries that own them, as well as on specialised search engines like “europeana collections” and “Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett”.

Axel Feuß, May 2017