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Floding, Per Gustaf
(b Lidköping, 3 March 1731; d Stockholm, 17 Oct 1791). Swedish printmaker, draughtsman and teacher. He learnt to draw as a youth in Stockholm and from 1747 studied engraving under Jean Eric Rehn. He produced several copperplate engravings for Carl Gustav Tessin’s large collection of paintings, drawings and prints (Museum Tessinianum), and as a result he was awarded a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1755. He enrolled at the Ecole as a protégé of Tessin and Alexandre Roslin. He was taught drawing by Boucher, Louis-Michel van Loo, Joseph-Marie Vien and Roslin and engraving by Jacques-Philippe Lebas, Laurent Cars and Charles-Nicolas Cochin II. With François-Philippe Charpentier (1734–1817) he was among the earliest practitioners of aquatint or gravure au lavis, a means of reproducing pen-and-wash drawings, and executed five sheets (1762) in this technique. He did a large copperplate engraving of Adolf Fredrik, Patron of the Arts, after a drawing by Cochin (c. 1860). This was sent to Sweden and resulted in Floding’s appointment in 1763 as His Majesty’s Engraver and as Garde des estampes to Crown Prince Gustav (later Gustav III). In 1764 he returned to Sweden and in 1766 founded the Flodingska Gravyrskola, with Jakob Gillberg joining him as a teacher. The school eventually closed in 1778 owing to Floding’s abrasive personality and his unpopularity with his students. In 1768 he was appointed professor and secretary at the Kungliga Akademi för de Fria Konsterna. In 1777 he was replaced as secretary and expelled from the membership of the academy as a result of his mismanagement of the post but was allowed to keep his professorship on the condition that his students would be treated more humanely. Floding was the foremost engraver in Sweden in the 18th century. One of his finest engravings is the portrait of Gustav III (1779). He also did a series of vignettes for the treatises of the Kungliga Vetenskapsakademi and several book plates. As his strength lay in copperplate engraving, his etchings are not of the same high quality.
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