Filippo Morghen

I've been a huge fan of Chinoiserie and Grottesca for a long time. These unusual plates are a bizarre hybrid of the two genres. It's interesting to me that up to the Nineteenth Century, the 'Orient' was still so unknown and mysterious, that artists such as Morghen could get away with proposing a land peopled with tomato-dwelling midgets who hunt giant hedgehogs.

In the late Eighteenth Century, the printmaker Filippo Morghen (ca. 1730-1808), a Florentine based in Naples, issued a curious set of ten etchings under the title ‘A Collection of the most notable things seen by Sir Wilde Scull, and by M. de la Hire, in their famous voyage from the Earth to the Moon" [Raccolta delle cose più notabili veduta dal cavaliere Wilde Scull, e dal sigr: de la Hire nel lor famoso viaggio dalla terra alla Luna]. 

He contributed a series of etchings for a fantastic collection of Archeological works from Herculaneum. Here's a link to the thumbnail index for all eight volumes, with links to all Plates! 

A link to the original files shown on this blog can be found here.