Liszt Collection

Liszt Collection

The Liszt Collection contains over one million, generally nineteenth-century engravings and images. The Liszt Collection is an international project to preserve a portrayal of history through contemporary engravings, articles and books.

The Liszt Collection mainly covers Europe and the United States as well as other locations in the rest of the world, such as Canada, Australia, certain African countries, and South America and Asia.

The main areas of interest covered by the collection are history, society, art and culture. These areas are covered by showing geographical locations (towns, villages, counties and countries) as well as by showing various aspects of life in the nineteenth century. Ranging from topics such as politics, fashion in nineteenth-century France and social activities in the nineteenth-century German village to topics such as science, hiking in Switzerland, transport and coaches and trains crossing the country side.

In the mid-nineteenth-century wood engraving was used extensively for the speed and ease with which wood engravings could be produced. Engravings could be made within days of the event shown on the engraving. At this time very few (mainly American) painters could make a living selling their canvases and many turned to engraving to earn a living. Artists of the Liszt Collection’s engravings go from J. B. Allan,W. H. Bartlett and Thomas Bewick to R. Zogbaum.