Charles Joseph Hullmandel was born in London, where he maintained a lithographic establishment in Great Marlborough Street from about 1819 until his death.
Background
He was born in Queen Street, Mayfair. His father was a German-speaking musician and composer, Nicolaus Joseph Hüllmandel (1751–1823), a native of Strasbourg who became a pupil of C. P. E. Bach and from 1780 spent ten years as a fashionable music teacher in Paris.
Career
As a young man, Charles Hullmandel studied art and spent several years living and working on the continent. He learnt print-making and printed many of his own works. In 1818, he set up a printing press in London after a visit to Munich with Rudolph Ackermann, and went on to study chemistry under Michael Faraday with a view to improving his printing.
During the first half of the 19th century Hullmandel became one of the most important figures in the development of British lithography, and his name appears on the imprints of thousands of lithographic prints.
He developed a method for reproducing gradations in tones and for creating the effect of soft colour washes which enabled the printed reproduction of Romantic landscape paintings of the type made popular in England by J. M. West. Turner. Hullmandel"s essay The Art of Drawing on Stone (1824) was an important handbook of lithography.
He died at Westminster in 1850.