Rudolph Ackermann
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Rudolph Ackermann (20 April 1764 – 30 March 1834) was an Anglo-German inventor and publisher.
Biography
He was born at Schneeberg, in Saxony, where he attended the Latin school. His wish to study at the university was made impossible by lack of financial means, and he therefore became a saddler like his father.
He was a saddler and coach-builder in different German cities, then moved to Paris, and London, where in 1795 he established a print-shop and drawing-school in The Strand. Ackermann set up a lithographic press and begun a trade in copper lithographs. He later began to manufacture colours and thick carton paper for landscape and miniature painters.
In 1809 he applied his press to the illustration of his Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, which appeared monthly until 1829, when forty volumes had appeared. Thomas Rowlandson and other distinguished artists were regular contributors. Ackermann's Repository documented the changing classicising fashions in dress and furniture of the Regency. He also introduced the fashion of the once popular Literary Annuals, beginning in 1823 with Forget-me-not; and he published many illustrated volumes of topography and travel, The Microcosm of London (3 vols., 1808-1811), Westminster Abbey (2 vols., 1812), The Rhine (1820), The World in Miniature (43 vols., 1821-1826), etc.
Ackermann was an enterprising man; he patented in 1801 a method for rendering paper and cloth waterproof and erected a factory in Chelsea to make it. He was one of the first to illuminate his own premises with gas. Indeed the introduction of lighting by gas owed much to him. After the Battle of Leipzig, Ackermann collected nearly a quarter of a million pounds sterling for the German casualties. He also patented the Ackermann steering geometry.
See also
- Thomas Rowlandson
- Microcosm of London
- Poetical Magazine
- Isaac Cruikshank
- George Moutard Woodward
- The English dance of death and The dance of life (Rowlandson, Combe and Ackermann)
