River Landscape with Trees (after Annibale Carracci)

Arthur Pond—artist, connoisseur, collector, dealer, and publisher—specialized in selling high-end Old Master drawings to an English market weary of the undesirable forgeries so often found on trips abroad. Between 1734 and 1740, he produced a collection of Seventy Prints in Imitation of Drawings with his partner Charles Knapton, a skilled printmaker.

The prints were based on drawings in private collections, including Pond’s own. Through the process of selecting which images to imitate, these men demonstrated their ability to recognize art of the highest quality; in the course of re-creating the drawings, Pond and Knapton also demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the artist’s creative process, revealing an expert hand as well as a trained eye. The selection of Seventy Prints in Imitation of Drawings illustrates the common eighteenth-century English preference for Italian artists (or artists such as Claude who worked in Italy).