Description: Condition A. Original colour
lithograph from "Twelve Portraits" published
by William Heinemann, London 1899.

Presented in 16 x 20 in. acid free, archival museum mat, with framing labels. Ready to frame. Shipped boxed flat via Fedex.
Certificate of Authenticity.
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Otto von Bismarck (1810-1903) was born in Brandenburg, Germany. He studied law and agriculture and in 1847 entered the new Prussian Parliament as a ultra-royalist who was totally opposed to democracy. During the 1848 Revolutions he argued against constitutional reform but as a member of the Federal German Diet at Frankfurt demanded equal rights for Prussians.

Bismarck served as a foreign ambassador in Russia and France. recalled in 1862 he became President of Prussia. Over the next few years Bismarck helped to reorganize Germany under the leadership of Prussia.

In 1870 Bismarck deliberately provoked the Franco-Prussian War and as a result was able to obtain Alsace and Lorraine from France. To counteract the danger of Russia and France joining forces against Germany, Chancellor Bismarck formed the Triple Alliance in 1879.

Bismarck dealt severely with trade unionists but in an effort to reduce the appeals of socialism, Bismarck he introduced the world's first modern welfare scheme which provided sickness, accident and old age benefits Bismarck resigned from office in 1890 and spent the rest of his life in retirement. (www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWbismarck.htm)

"Nicholson did this image just after his
association with James Pryde as The Beggarstaff Brothers had come to an end. But his revolutionary approach to design which marked the Beggarstaff posters, found further expression in the small-scale woodcuts on which he then concentrated.

William Nicholson's woodblock prints of the 1890's were amongst the most revolutionary British print images of the era. They used a treatment of form, with a stylized simplification of shape, and a handling of perspective and picture space which had had no precedent in British art. Influences of Japanese art, and a parallel thinking to, if not a direct knowledge of, the ideas of Toulouse Lautrec and of the Nabis painters in Paris at the same period can certainly be felt, although there is no record that Nicholson had actually studied either at this date." (Weston)