Johanna Sibylla Küsel (ca. 1650-1717); after Jacques Callot (1592-1635)

[The little Passion].

Augsburg, before 1685 (marriage).

12 numbered plates on 12 sheets, each ca. 8 x 7 cm. (sheet), 7 x 6 cm. (plate). Signed on the first sheet: "Johanna Sübylla Küslin fec. Aug. Vind." Engraving (and etching?) on laid paper. Verso collector's stamp, Lugt no.: 982b. F. Bernstein, Germany, 20th century.

               A remarkable early demonstration of Johanna Sibylla Küsel’s virtuosity as a printmaker, produced before her marriage to Johann Ulrich Kraus and the establishment of the Küsel-Kraus press. The series is based on Jacques Callot’s celebrated Petite Passion, whose densely populated miniature compositions represented one of the great technical challenges of seventeenth-century printmaking. Executed through a sophisticated combination of etching and engraving, Küsel’s handling already reveals the extraordinary precision, control, and delicacy for which she later became known. Despite the diminutive format, the scenes possess considerable dramatic force.

Johanna Sibylla Küsel emerged from one of the most distinguished dynasties of engravers and publishers in early modern Europe. She was the daughter of the Augsburg engraver and publisher Melchior Küsel, granddaughter of Matthäus Merian the Elder, and niece of Maria Sibylla Merian. Trained within her father’s workshop, she copied works after Callot, Stefano della Bella, Simon Vouet, and others with exceptional technical control. Her copies after Callot’s Nouveau Testament first established her reputation, and the present undated Little Passion belongs to this formative phase of her career. Recent scholarship has increasingly recognised Johanna Sibylla not merely as an assistant within the later Kraus workshop, but as one of its central artistic forces. The present series already reveals the qualities that would culminate in her Tapisseries du Roy of 1687: precision of line, complex spatial orchestration, and a highly sophisticated command of reproductive printmaking.

Condition: slightly toned with occasional spotting, otherwise in very good condition.

Reference: Hollstein German XIX, nos. 3-14.