Peter Perez Burdett
Peter Perez Burdett (* around 1734 in Eastwood in the county of Essex ; † 9. September 1793 in Karlsruhe ), and Peter Pever Burdett called, was an English cartographer, surveyor, draftsman, etcher, engraver, engineer and entrepreneur who in England and Southern Germany has worked. With many interests and a very lively spirit, he was at home in a wide variety of fields. In addition to his cartographic work, he has also dealt with printmaking , urban development measures, river regulations and the construction of ships and mills. He experimented a great deal with the aquatint process just invented by the French painter Jean Baptiste Le Prince (1734–1781) and finally brought out the first English prints using this technique. - Peter Perez Burdett was a Freemason and a member of the highly respected Lunar Society in Birmingham, an association of people interested in culture and science, including luminaries such as the Scottish inventor James Watt (1736-1819) and the English-American philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley ( 1733–1804).
biography
In England
There is little information about the origins of Peter Perez Burdett: his maternal grandfather, from whom he is said to have been named Perez, was a clergyman in Eastwood and his parents were named William and Elizabeth Burdett. It is not known what training Peter Perez had, but in view of his various activities it can be assumed that some of his work was self-taught.
Around 1760 something of his work becomes visible for the first time when he was in the service of Washington Shirley (1722–1778), 5th Earl Ferrers , and lived on his country estate near Derby . The Earl was very interested in science, owned his own planetarium and did a lot of research with Burdett. For example, the two men observed the passage of Venus in front of the sun in 1761, about which Washington Shirley, with Burdett's help, was able to write a treatise that soon earned him membership of the Royal Society in London . (A few years later, the English painter Joseph Wright of Derby [1734–1797], a very good friend of Burdett, painted The Orrery , which shows the two men [together with six other people] The earl is standing or sitting in a somewhat imperious posture in front of a table-top planetarium and looks to the right at Burdett, who is making notes on a piece of paper, writing down a few words that Washington Shirley may have called out to him again - regardless of its other meaning - how a scene with the two men could have looked during their collaboration at the time.)
In 1764 Peter Perez Burdett left the Earl's manor and settled in Derby with his wife Hannah, where he moved into a house on Full Street owned by another friend of his, the architect Joseph Pickford (1734–1782), had built for him. The Burdett couple were immortalized in a large oil painting in 1765 by Joseph Wright of Derby, who lived nearby. - Peter Perez Burdett was working on large maps at the time and will have been on the road a lot for field surveys. In 1767 a topographical map of Derbyshire was completed and in the next few years another of Cheshire and other work such as a map of Chester followed .
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In 1769 Peter Perez Burdett went to Liverpool to plan the city's water supply. From 1770 onwards, he made some sheets using his aquatint process. Among them was an engraving ( Vuë de l'Aqueduc du Duc de Bridgewater ), which was created after a drawing by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). (The philosopher had emigrated to England from 1766 to 1767 and lived in Staffordshire on the Derbyshire border and had contacts with the Lunar Society in Birmingham.) From 1770 to 1773 Peter Perez Burdett exhibited some of his printed works in the Royal Society of Arts in London. Another important job for him during this time was to invent a process with which engravings could be transferred to ceramics. He corresponded with the entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood from November 1771 to March 1773 , without coming to a conclusion that would have enabled usable production. Peter Perez Burdett also addressed this matter to Frederick the Great in a letter dated February 21, 1773 from Liverpool and in vain offered his method for the Berlin porcelain factory .
Peter Perez Burdett left England in late 1774 and has probably never set foot again. He was deeply in debt at the time and is said to have taken this step to escape pressure from his creditors. That may have been the case, but perhaps it was less this fear than more a pursuit of new opportunities abroad. His wife stayed behind in England; The couple does not seem to have had any children.
In South Germany
As early as the beginning of 1775, Peter Perez Burdett entered the service of Margrave Karl Friedrich von Baden, which probably proves that his departure from England was not a desperate step into the void. In Baden he worked until the end of his life and carried out a wide variety of jobs - just like in England. In addition, he went through an officer career: was appointed captain in 1777 and was most recently major.
However, he has not completely detached himself from his previous life in his new home. From there he maintained his contacts and, as in the past, corresponded with various personalities around the world such as Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), to whom he recommended in a letter the use of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben (1730–1794), what of that American politicians are known to have been obeyed. Peter Perez Burdett was visited by Joseph Wright of Derby as early as autumn 1775, probably on a return trip from Italy, and in the course of time others will certainly have done the same.
Peter Perez Burdett's first task in Baden was the artificial regulation of the Murg in order to prevent the annual floods between Kuppenheim and the mouth of the Rhine , a rather extensive project that he led from Rastatt . (From 1780 on he lived permanently in Karlsruhe.)
This was followed by cartographic work that went on for years. Margrave Karl Friedrich had inherited the margraviate of Baden-Baden in 1771 and commissioned a staff of military cartographers with the topographical mapping of this newly added part of the country. Together with Burdett, the officers Vierordt, Schmauß and Schwenck carried out extensive cartographic recordings, the majority of which are still preserved today in originals and contemporary copies. To this end, they contributed their decades of experience in this work in 1788 in a comprehensive report ( the connection of the topographical survey of the offices of Carlsruhe, Durlach, Stein and Pforzheim ... with a future renovation measurement) , which was an opinion that was many years ahead of the development . - At the same time, Peter Perez Burdett dealt among other things with the improvement of trade on the Rhine, planned port facilities in Karlsruhe, built mill buildings in Daxlanden , built ships and scientifically trained students of the Baden engineering corps, including the young Johann Gottfried Tulla (1770 –1828), which he is said to have promoted very much.
On July 11, 1787, Peter Perez Burdett married for the second time and then fathered a daughter. And so ended a life that was certainly quite interesting on the whole.
literature
- Werner Busch : The unclassical picture: From Tizian to Constable and Turner: With 134 illustrations, 67 of them in color , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2009
- Werner Burkhart (Ed. Together with others for the Daxlanden Citizens' Association): Daxlanden: The local history , Info Verlag, Karlsruhe 2007
- Christiane Wiebel: Aquatint or "The art of engraving in copper": The printing process from its beginnings to Goya , book accompanying the exhibition organized by the Coburg Fortress Art Collections, Coburg 2007
- Ruthardt Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German southwest: With 16 color plates and 42 black and white maps , Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Konstanz and Stuttgart 1961
- Paul Kléber Monod: Solomon's Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment , Yale University Press, New Haven 2013
- Mary Sponberg Pedley: The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England , University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2005
- Maxwell Craven: John Whitehurst of Derby: Clockmaker & Scientist 1713-88 , Mayfield Books, Derbyshire 1996
- Edward Saunders: Joseph Pickford of Derby: A Georgian architect , Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd, Phoenix Mill Far Thrupp Stroud Gloucestershire 1993, ISBN 0-7509-0380-5
Web links
- Index entry for Peter Perez Burdett in the Deutsche Biographie
- British Museum with some work by Peter Perez Burdett
Remarks
- ↑ Ruthardt Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German Southwest (1961), p. 65
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Burdett, Peter Perez |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Burdett, Peter Pever |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English cartographer, geodesist, draftsman, eraser, engraver and engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1734 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Eastwood |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 9, 1793 |
| Place of death | Karlsruhe |