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Title Collegium Novum [New College]
Artist David Loggan
Medium Copper engraving with hand colouring
Date 1675
SizeImage 319 x 434 mm, Plate 350 x 439 mm, Sheet 383 x 471 mm
NotesLoggan's 'great work' is the earliest and best collection of Oxford views and his much rarer Cambridge engravings. The extraordinary amount of accurate detail in both implies considerable time spent on the study of the buildings and on the preparation of the plates. The Oxford views, as the Introduction tells us, had been 'long expected, and begun several years before' [diu expectatum Opus, annis abhinc aliquot susceptum']. Wood refers to the plates as early as 1665, which is the date that Loggan lived at Nuffield in Oxfordshire, and the probable date that he started work on the views. He mentions them again in 1669, when Loggan was able to exhibit many of the plates as finished. Wood clearly expected that the sheets would have been ready in 1674 to be bound with his Historia et Antiquitates, by those that wished it. He both disclaimed responsibility for the captions to the plates in his introduction to the reader, and several times elsewhere referred to them as 'the cuts belonging to my book'. This, and the fact that Loggan's Index refers to Wood, relating the illustration to the place where a history of the building can be found, provides clear evidence of an intention that Wood's history and Loggan's views should appear together. Why they didn't is unclear, because it seems that they were ready. Fell had written, on Jan. 19th, 1674/5, that the plates were 'in a manner quite finished'. It may be that the tensions which had arisen between Fell and Wood over the editing of Historia et Antiquitates hold the key to this puzzle. The plates were not printed at the Sheldonian, but at Leonard Lichfield's house in Holywell, where it is presumed that the rolling press was housed. (Madan.)

Price£325

[21971] Prints : Oxford : New College

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