A Brill Calendar: July 14

Few publishers in the 19th century abstained from illustrating their products.

And especially if engraving in box-wood, copper, steel and stone added a little to the reader’s understanding. The ‘visual culture’ in which the Western world is supposed to live has been long in the making.

The enchantment of exact likeness is coeval with the evolution of European societies since Antiquity. From the beginning, drawing, painting and sculpting in ways deemed ‘true to life’ served purposes of dignitaries, school-masters and scholars; as well as a gamut of human intentions and objectives. The emergence of photography during the middle of the 19th century initiated a further stage in appreciating man-made images.

This new craving for graven images caused all kinds of novelty in its turn; as exemplified by the biography of the English engraver Edward Whymper (London, April 27 1840 – Chamonix, France, September 16 1911). Sent by his family-business to Switzerland in order to make drawings for a book on Alpine flora & fauna, young Edward became infatuated by mountain-climbing; and the became first man to climb the most picturesque mountain of them all, the Matterhorn. After seven failed attempts, on July 14, ‘Quatorze Juillet’, 1865, he succeeded. It is seldom that an extraordinary triumph was followed so quickly by tragedy. During the descent of the party of seven men, one of them fell, taking three of his companions also to their deaths. A breaking rope saved the lives of the three survivors.

During the infancy of Alpinism and tourism, news and newsworthiness ‘listened to a different drummer’ than now. Whymper, a Moses of alpinism, published the account of a ‘moment suprème’ in the history of mountain-climbing, only as late as in 1871, in his book ‘Scrambles Amongst the Alps’.