Description
DATA VISUALIZATION / POST-INCUNABLE OF LITHOGRAPHY:
A rare, possibly first time chart in Swedish language, was drafted by Carl Fredrik Viereck (1778-1853), a German educator, who lived in Switzerland and later settled in Stockholm. He authored several educational books.
The chart, printed on 8 sheets and hand coloured with vivid original colours was made by the first lithographer in Sweden, Karl Müller.
Karl Müller – The Man, who Introduced Lithography to Sweden
The lithographer of the map Karl (also Carl) Müller was a direct pupil of the inventor of lithography, Alois Senefelder.
Senefelder mentions Müller in his pioneering work on lithography Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey as his student, with whom he worked in Vienna and describes his skills with following words: “A draftsman, named Karl Müller, learned to draw neatly on stone, partly with a pen and partly with a brush… (Senefelder 1818, p. 96)”
Müller later went to Zürich, where he revealed the secrets of the lithography to artists there and to Naples, where he was known as Carlo Teodoro Muller (Twyman 1996, p. 33).
In the early 19th century Karl Müller was working in Berlin at the military lithographic department of the German general staff (renamed Königlich Lithographisches Institut (Royal Lithographic Institute), in 1820).
In December 1817, Müller and his colleague Ludwig Fehr left the German military department and came to Stockholm through Copenhagen during the wars against Napoleon possibly through military connection, and in April 1818, the pair opened the first lithographic workshop in Sweden. Their first publications were for a magazine on lifestyle and fashion called Konst och Nyhets Magasin för medborgare af alla klasse.
After Fehr left Stockholm only a year later to open his own press in Oslo, Karl Müller became the sole proprietor of the firm, expanding its repertoire to various publications. He also introduced several technical improvements and was experimenting with zinc lithography, replacing the traditional stone printing.
On the peak of his career Karl Müller mysteriously disappeared in late October, 1830, when he travelled to a town Motala in central south Sweden to order a new press, but never reached his goal. He possibly had an accident or was killed on the route. The workshop was continued by his widow.
The Chart in Focus
The time chart is not dated, but the last events on the map are set in 1827, when the print was probably made.
The chart was contemporarily also published in a smaller version on two sheets with a longer title Åskådlig framställning af staternas geografiska historia från 2000 år före Chr. föd. intill närvarande tid tecknad efter de förnämsta historiska hjelpredor af C. F. Viereck lärare vid Elementarskolan i Gefle (Visual Representation of Geographical History of Countries from 2000 years BC up to the Present Time, Drawn from the Most Important Historical Sources by C. F. Viereck, Teacher at the Elementary School in Gefle).
We could trace only a single other example of our version on the market, sold at an auction in 2017, and one institutional example, held by Kungliga biblioteket (Royal Library) in Stockholm.
The time chart is not mentioned in standard literature on the subject (Daniel Rosenberg – Antony Grafton, Cartographies of Time. A History of Timeline, 2010; Sandra Rendgen – Julius Wiedemann (Ed.), History of Information Graphics, 2019).
References: OCLC 186843235; Cf: Alois Senefelder, Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey, 1818, pp. 96-97; Michael Twyman, Early Lithographed Music. A Study Based on the H. Baron Collection, 1996, pp. 30-33; The introduction of lithography in Sweden, Lecture at Hanaholmen on 15 October, 2011, Translation: Gabriella Berggren (first_years.pdf (afburen.se)). Johann H. Pestalozzi: Briefe aus den Jahren 1805 bis 1807 (Nr. 1066-1336), 1982, p. 442.
