David Loggan (1634–1692)

Image.  Title page of David Loggan, Oxonia illustrata (1675): detail.

David Loggan (1634–1692), artist and engraver, was born in Danzig, then a semi-autonomous Hanseatic city, the largest in east-central Europe, within Polish Prussia.  The son of a marchant of Scottish descent, he was baptized in the Calvinist church of St Peter and St Paul on 27 August 1634. After learning engraving from Willem Hondius in Danzig and Crispijn van de Passe II in Amsterdam, he moved to London between 1656 and 1658, where he established himself as a portraitist and engraver. After fleeing the plague, he settled in 1669 in Holywell Street, Oxford, where he was appointed 'public sculptor' to the University.  While producing numerous engravings for the University Press, he began work on his Oxonia illustrata, which was published in 1675, and intended to accompany Antony a Wood's The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (1674).  Once the University had acquired the services of Loggan and his rolling press, Oxford proved capable of competing with London in the production of lavishly illustrated books, helping to attract the custom of the botanist Robert Morison and the physician Walter Charleton amongst others.  A variation of the image above was subsequently used as a printer's mark for the University Press, notably on the title page of Morison's Plantarum historiae universalis Oxoniensis (Oxford, 1699).

The following year, Loggan returned to London, was naturalized as an English citizen, and began work on Cantabrigia illustrata, which eventually appeared in 1690. Loggan died at his house in Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) in July 1692 and was buried on 1 August 1692 at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

References. Geoffrey Tyack, ‘Loggan, David (bap. 1634, d. 1692)’, ODNB; Vittoria Feola and Scott Mandelbrote, ‘The Learned Press: Geography, Science, and Mathematics’, in Ian Gadd, ed. The History of Oxford University Press: Volume I: Beginnings to 1780 (Oxford, 2013), 309-49, here 325-6, 331-2, 337, 347. The National Portrait Gallery contains 191 engraved portraits by Loggan.  Other works by Loggan on Cabinet include the title page of Comenius’s Opera didactica omnia and the portrait of Jacob Bobart the Elder.

Credit: Howard Hotson (February 2017)