The frank bensow collection, Part II

Uppsala Auktionskammare is delighted to present another selection, following our successful sale this past March, of nearly one hundred museum-quality Old Master engravings, woodcuts, and etchings, spanning the 15th to the early 19th century from the collection of the renowned Swedish print collector Frank Bensow (1883-1969).

Uppsala Auktionskammare is grateful to specialist Todd Weyman for cataloguing and expertise in bringing The Bensow Collection to auction. For nearly three decades Todd Weyman was the Vice President and Director of Prints and Drawings at Swann Auction Galleries, New York, and is among the leading international print specialists. He is a featured appraiser and prints expert on the American version of the Antiques Roadshow and is now based full-time in Stockholm.

The Bensow Collection is sold as a part of our Decorative Sale 27 – 28 May 2025.

Frank Bensow (1883-1969) was born in Göteborg and was a distinguished civil engineer as well as a major in the Swedish Army, serving in the Road and Waterway Construction Service Corps. He amassed his collection of more than eight hundred sheets of Old Master prints over several decades. Bensow assembled an encyclopedic collection, not unusual for connoisseurs like himself during the early to mid-20th century golden age of print collecting.

Pencil notes made by Bensow on many of the sheets indicate that his earliest acquisitions, made during the mid- to late 1940s, were the familiar cornerstone artists of many other traditional print collections, including Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, Claude Lorrain, and Jacques Callot, among others. These acquisition notes reveal that his focus during the 1940s and 1950s was German and Dutch prints, while his collecting interests shifted to Italian and French works in the 1960s.  Additional inscriptions on some sheets and personal correspondence indicate that Bensow tracked auction sales through houses such as Gutekunst & Klipstein (Bern, 1920s-1950s) and Galerie Gerda Bassenge (Berlin, 1960s), as well as venerable print galleries including P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., Ltd., London (he had sent Colnaghi a long list of desiderata in 1952), William H. Schab (New York, 1940s-1960s) and C.G. Boerner (Düsseldorf), from whom he likely also acquired some of the prints in his collection.

Though it is unclear what sparked Bensow’s initial print collecting interest, with a technical background and civil engineer profession such as his, it seems probable that his wife, the Swedish painter and illustrator Sigrid Bensow (1882-1954), who he married in 1910, would have provided him with at least an early appreciation of art. Noteworthy in Bensow’s collection are a significant number of works acquired from the renowned Stockholm print collector Dr. C. Axel Widstrand (1866-1956), whose print collection, among the largest in Sweden and once totaling over 40,000 works, was a fundamental contribution to the graphics collection at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, and who must certainly have influenced Bensow.  The attention to the superior quality of the early impressions he acquired and the referencing of their states and catalogue raisonné details, with pencil notations in Bensow’s hand on many sheets, stemmed from his close study of printmaking techniques and literature, an acute knowledge of comparable impressions, and to some degree a similar precision that was demanded by his technical profession. As Bensow noted in a brief introduction of an exhibition of graphic works from his collection shown at the Norrköpings Museum in 1961, “If you come across an old, decent ‘copper engraving,’ you often develop a certain appreciation for the image’s content–it gives a proper sense of time period, line work, and values. Upon closer inspection, you usually find the engraver’s name or signature and look it up in reference books like Nagler, Bartsch, and the like–both sources provide information about the artist and what they are known for. And then you discover a lot.”

The current offering from Bensow’s collection includes an array of both familiar and not often seen Old Master prints from over four centuries.  Some of the Renaissance highlights include an impressive, large engraving of ”The Massacre of the Innocents”, circa 1540-1565, by Nicolas Beatrizet after a design by the great Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli.  The quintessential Renaissance composition is set in an Italianate palace courtyard and populated by myriad idealized nudes in multiple poses.  Also of note are Marcantonio Raimondi’s iconic engraving after Raphael, “The Judgment of Paris”, circa 1510-20, and an exceedingly scarce School of Fontainebleau engraving of ”Jupiter Pressing the Storm Clouds”, circa 1540-1545, by Léon Davent after a fresco by the Italian Mannerist Francesco Primaticcio.

Additional High Renaissance and Baroque highlights include a well-preserved example of Agostino Carraci’s chef d’oeuvre ”Aeneas and his Family Fleeing Troy”, engraving, 1595, after a now lost painting by Federico Barocci; a brilliant, early impression of the Dutch Mannerist Zacharias Dolendo’s highly uncommon ”The Crucifixion”, engraving, circa 1600, after a design by Jacob de Gheyn II; and Giovanni B. Castiglione’s ”Allegory of Transience (Temporalis Aeternitatis)”, etching, 1655.

There are Dutch Golden Age standouts by printmakers including Schelte A. Bolswert, Antonie Waterloo, Johannes Visscher, and David Teniers II, and significant prints created from designs by Pieter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn, among others, while of particular Scandinavian interest are a pair of etchings by the itinerant Dutch artist Allaert van Everdingen, who spent time at the height of his career in Sweden and Norway, depicting the mineral springs in Eidsvold, Norway, from circa 1650.

Rounding out the second round of offerings from the Bensow collection is a splendid selection of 17th and 18th century French Baroque and Rococo prints, ranging from an especially scarce example of Simon Vouet’s only known etched subject, ”The Holy Family with a Bird”, 1633, to a wonderful impression of an etching made by Marie-Jeanne Boucher, ”Le Sommeil”, circa 1750, after the same subject by her husband, François Boucher, and finally French masterworks from the late 18th century by Charles François Hutin, Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non, the so-called ”Abbé de Saint-Non”, and Jean Jacques de Boissieu.

The current selection from Bensow’s collection emphasizes his connoisseurship in acquiring the fundamental prints that supported many collections like his during the early to mid-20th century as well as prints made by little known or lesser appreciated artists.  These once unfamiliar graphic works are equally as thrilling as the cornerstone Old Master showpieces. Bensow’s keen eye, along with his ability at locating the best and earliest impressions, and his originality in exploring areas of the Old Master field that were then under-appreciated profoundly aided him in assembling one of Sweden’s most exceptional print collections of the past century.

Live Auction: Wednesday 28 May
Saleroom: Magasin 1, Södra Hamnvägen 8 in Stockholm.

Viewing: 23 – 26 May at Magasin 1, Södra Hamnvägen 8 in Stockholm.
Open Weekdays 10 AM – 5 PM, Weekend 11 AM – 4 PM.