THE PRINT IN
1790 - 1930
A private collection
Catalogue
of an exhibition first
shown at the
12 March to 5 May 1985
THE PRINT IN
1790 - 1930
A private collection
Catalogue
of an exhibition first
shown at the
12 March to 5 May 1985
Art and Genius: Printmaking in
Early
Nineteenth-Century
In the early nineteenth century printmaking was at a
crisis of its history. The significance of that crisis is partly retrospective:
photography was on the point of being invented and was about to redefine
permanently the role of the printmaker in society. But even as the
experiments of Daguerre and Fox Talbot were developing the first shadowy
'photogenic drawings' from the old principle of the camera obscura,
the professional engravers were asserting their place in the world with a new
aggressiveness. In 1836
they submitted a Petition to the House of Commons drawing attention to what they considered was an
unacceptable bias against them on the part of their fellow artists. The House referred the matter
to a Select Committee, which heard the depositions of a group of leading
practitioners who put their case with all the vehemence of wounded professional
pride. In particular, they resented the attitude of the
These discontents, of course, had been rankling for some
time. They had already been forcibly expressed in 1 806 when John Landseer. father of the animal-painter and
himself a distinguished
engraver, gave a
series of lectures to the Royal Institution in which he attempted to remedy the fact
that 'there is no regular history extant in any language' of 'the most
commercial of the arts of embellishment'.'' He attacked the Academy
for its treatment of engravers, and was so outspoken against Alderman Bovdell, the promulgator of the famous 'Shakspeare
Gallery' (which had in fact patronised
painters and engravers alike) that his lecture series was abruptly' terminated. This did not prevent him from
publishing it, with some acrimonious observations
on the whole affair. In 1810, the Academician Joseph Farington mentioned in
his Diary that Landseer's mind was 'full of consideration of a Plan for forming a Society 8:
The
Select Committee of 1835 naturally enquired into the claims the engravers made
for their calling, and received passionately' argued replies pointing out the
commercial advantages of the international print market and the cultural benefits
of widely disseminated works of art. The engravers complained that 'the public
consider engravers only as a set of ingenious mechanics, which is not the fact'. One of the petitioners. John Pve, described with lyrical fervour
the creative significance of his medium, the line-engraving: 'The best plates
engraved now appear to me as being free translations from pictures, instead of
being cold rigid copies. Thev are entirely
so as to effect – that being the quality by which the English school is
distinguished, whether we speak of painting
or engraving. The painter produces his pictures by the aid of forms,
lights and shadows, and varieties of warm and cold colours.
The engraver copies the compositions of the painter, and produces his effect,
aided merely by different strengths of tints and gradations of black and white
– and the most successful engravers often produce effects, with this yen
limited means, which fill the minds of the spectators with a consciousness of
the, magnitude and great
pleasurable varieties of nature (with very few excepti(ns) beyond atnv
thing fitrnterlyv
done.'-' _John Landseer, in one of his
lectures. had gone further, pointing out with characteristic trenchancy:
'Engraving is no more an art of copying Painting,
than the English language is an art of copying Greek
or Latin.''' And another writer, discussing the subject of engraving
in 1824, could assert that: 'The judicious taste of a master of the calcographic art, substitutes so rich and brilliant a chiaroscuro,
or rather abstracts it from the original which he copies, with so new and superior a
perception, that a fine impression from a plate, wrought with consummate skill,
possesses that peculiar and intrinsic merit
which renders it a new work. and a valuable piece of art."
There was,
then, a head-on collision between those who defined engraving as a mere
reproductive process and those for whom it was a creative art form in its own right. regardless of
whether it was
nominally 'copying' another work. The quarrel was symptomatic of the age: the
new, Romantic emphasis on the artist as an inspired anti revered benefactor of
humanity – an emphasis by then firmly institutionalised
in England in the Royal Academy and the two watercolour
societies that had sprung up in the first decade of the century – put
creativity at a premium. Hack copying was nowhere. Yet the engravers were
making a valid point: or rather, several. First. as we have seen, they could
claim that the reproductive line-engraving had been brought to such a pitch of
technical excellence that on grounds of virtuosity alone its practitioners
deserved a place on the contemporary
A further
complication of the nutter was the new multiplicity
of technical processes with which the early
nineteenth-century artist
1836 regarded
as the highest and best medium for the printmaker — and mezzotint, which had
swept England in the eighteenth century as an efficient and relatively speedy
method of reproducing
paintings, especially portraits, were no longer alone in the field. William Blake's
experiments in the 1790s with a stereotype plate, which he characteristically
claimed to have been explained to him in a vision, is a significant instance of
a thoroughly professional engraver responding to the climate of
change. Woodcutting had always been a crude popular medium in England and was
at a low ebb in the eighteenth century, but Horace Walpole, introducing his Catalogue of Engravers, who
have been born or resided in England (2nd edition, 1786). pointed to the Frenchman jean Michel Papillon's Treatise of 1 766 on the subject of wood-engraving as an example to
'make editors ashamed of the slovenly stamps that are now used for
the fairest editions'. 10 His dissatisfaction proved prophetic; for
towards the end of the century Thomas Bewick was to
introduce the art of engraving on the end-grain of the wood and bring it to a
perfection that gave it currency for 70 years or more. It brought what was virtually a new medium to the illustration of
books. Likewise, aquatint, again developed in
Lithography was undoubtedly the most revolutionary of the
innovations of the period. Neither an intaglio process like engraving and
etching nor a relief process like the woodcut, it enabled the designer to draw
directly onto a prepared stone surface and produce an exact (though reversed)
replica of his drawing.
After some years of gestation in
At this
stage the criteria by which lithography was judged were those of the existing
print processes. It was acknowledged to be capable of great fidelity to the
artist's drawing, to give 'proofs of the
accuracy, distinctness, and minuteness with which the steel pen may be used':
but the ultimate accolade bestowed by one of its minuteness nearly equal to the
etchings of Hollar'.t= John Landseer, anxious to defend line-engraving against the new
invention, seized on the aptitude of lithography for rendering drawing
techniques as its great limitation: 'it is not
the painter's sketches, that
it is most desirable to multiply, but his finished
performances'. t_t The
traditional conception of the print, as moulded
by centuries of familiarity with the products of the copper-plate, remained the
touchstone, and the rapid erosion of those old notions was a circumstance that
lent much of the dynamism of dialectic to the period. Line-engraving itself
underwent profound changes. It had already in the mid eighteenth century been radically modified towards greater flexibility and
expressive range by the innovations of William Woollen,
who, in plates like his famous 'translation' of Richard Wilson's Niobe, 1761, combined engraving with etching and repeated bitings
with acid to overcome the inherent hardness and dryness of conventional.
Continental line-engraving, and so was a pioneer of the new 'creative', and recognisably British, school of engravers who belong to the
Romantic movement.
Woollen's ideas were taken still further by
William Sharp, the doyen of the historical line-engravers, to whom the
nineteenth-century
practitioners looked back with particular reverence. Sharp not only made use of
engraving and etching in combination but also borrowed the technique of stippling, which was widely used in the later eighteenth century for
fancy or sentimental subjects: building up its images by means of a multitude
of tiny dots, it avoided the hard linear quality of true engraving and achieved
a softness and
delicacy that was considered particularly appropriate to the rendering of disconsolate
lovers and pretty children. The most famous exponent of this 'chalk manner' was
the Italian Francesco Bartolozzi, whose admission as
a full Academician on the slender excuse that he also painted was a cause of
special annoyance to the ambitious and patriotic engravers of the
next generation.
They, in
their zeal to advance their medium, were as technical) audacious and
experimental as the Romantic watercolourists were in
theirs. Their large mixed-media plates, incorporating line, stipple, etching and mezzotint.t't
are tours de Torre
which go beyond anything that Woollen
and Sharp had done, and which, it must be said, are often a great deal more
interesting than the fashionable pictures from which they are taken. And herein
lies the last of the engravers' dilemmas: they were inevitably
dependent on the level of invention supplied by the painter, and the problem of
judging their merits is frequently clouded by the dullness or bombast of their
models. But we may usually presume that an engraver admired the work he was
reproducing. The earl- nineteenth century is scattered with evidence of close
relationships between artists and engravers prolonging and amplifving
the principle established
by Reynolds with his army of mezzotinters. Indeed,
the creative intimacy between artists
and engravers was perhaps one of the most compelling reasons for revising the engravers' status; yet it
is odd that it is never mentioned in the depositions of the engravers
themselves; nor, apparently, did the Academicians who made such use of them
often think of pleading their cause. t r'
There
were, perhaps, as many quarrels as happy unions. Both Turner and Constable
engaged in bitter disputes with their engravers: Constable seems to have driven
his mezzotinter David Lucas to drink and an earls
grave:''' Turner had stormy relations with Charles Turner. the mezzotinter of the Liber Sludiorum, and with George Cooke,
the engraver and publisher of, among other works, the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of 
send to him wherever he happened to be, are a sequence of
lessons that must have
inculcated sensibility into the most obtuse hack; and, on the whole, Turner
made sure that his engravers were not such. Both John Landseer
and John Pve worked for him. They and their colleagues learnt to
'abstract' a 'rich and brilliant chiar-oscuro' from the most testing of all
originals – those condensed essays in pure colour
which Turner submitted as designs for picturesque views and illustrations to
poetry in the I 820s and 1830s. Turner's use of colour
in his work for the engravers is so personal and uncompromising that it prompts
the suggestion that he neither knew nor cared how the engraver's 'translation'
was to occur. Yet he, of all artists, demonstrates perfectly the gamut of the
relationship between painter and printmaker. The long series of plates for the Liber Studiorum,
which comprehend
in the history of their execution at least four techniques – etching, aquatint,
soft-ground and mezzotint – were some of then the product of Turner's
supervising a professional team of etcher and
mezzotinter, some of a collaboration between artist and engraver, and some of the
unassisted work of the artist alone. As the series proceeded, Turner seems to
have become more and more involved with mezzotint, and having begun as the
etcher of some of the outlines concluded as the mezzotinter
of whole plates; adding the postscript of a dozen unpublished and unusually
intimate mezzotints
known as the 'Little Liber'. This progression,
coinciding as it does with the evolution of
Turner's most idiosyncratic work as an illustrator, takes on the significance of a
long-drawn-out dissertation
on the relationship of colour to black-and-white. As
his use of colour moved toward the saturated, obviating the old
systems of chiaroscuro which relied on the tonal range between black and white,
so he became more conscious of the expressive value of black and white in
themselves. Hence his almost simultaneous realisation that he
could design in pure colour for the engraver, and that he could, conversely, construct chromatically
complete subjects in black and white. This profound idea, embodied as it is in
a large group of works at the core of Turner's output, expands to comprehend
the large mezzotints made after his pictures by Quilley,
F. C. Lewis and Thomas Lupton. and the large line-engravings after individual
landscapes that he supervised in the 1830s and 1840s. And it includes more
still: we shall find that the period of the early nineteenth century (Turner's mature lifetime) is in its art
largely an enactment of this idea, which is itself the aesthetic embodiment of the struggle
between painters and engravers.
An
equally striking, though very different, manifestation of the issue is to be
found in the art of John Sell Cotman, in many ways the most extraordinary colourist
of the age. As a watercolourist he moved from
a youth of subdued, subtle harmonies of tertiary hues to a maturity of vivid
primaries, as boldly saturated as any of Turner's, and organised with a corresponding boldness that gives them
much greater pictorial force than Turner's more atmospherically controlled
palette. For Cotman, strong colour
found a necessary concomitant in clear, precise outline: despite their chromatic brilliance, his designs are
inconceivable apart from their idiosyncratic, expressivelyv
counterpointed linear structures. To draw such
outlines was to imply the colour masses contained
within them; hence, just as Turner could eliminate colour
to produce mezzotints in which black and white are, effectively, colours, so Cotman could make
etchings which, in their clear, exquisitely articulated outlines, express the colour of the world they
so precisely describe. Most of Cot man's etchings, notably those he made for his series of studies of
the Architectural Antiquities of .\'orinandl. 1819-22,
dispense very largely with tight hatching and the other means
whereby etchers establish tone; for tone is superfluous to Cotnan's
patterns of implied colour. Such hatching as there is
usually conveys textural rather than tonal contrast. To verify this intuition
of colour in Cotman's
etchings we need only turn to the equally economical use of outline
in the work of the engravers (notably the Italian Tommmaso
Piroli) who worked on John Flaxman's neo-classical illustrations to Homer,
Aeschylus and Dante, or the more Gothic, German-inspired outlines after
H. C. Selous, Daniel Maclise,
William Bell Scott and Noel Paton, published in the
1840s and 1850s by the Art Union of London. All these works were produced under
the inspiration of an art-historical theory of design, derived either from
classic Greek sculpture or from Italian medieval and renaissance engraving and
painting: in them the 'distinct, sharp and wirey"bounding
line', as Blake calls it, 1' absorbs all the significance of the image into
itself rather than diffusing its implications of colour
and texture throughout the subject.
The theme recurs in Constable's approach to the print;
but, again, a very
different facet of the idea presents itself. Constable used the term 'chiaroscuro' in the title of
his published set of mezzotints, as he revised it in 1833 in the interest of
explicitness: his 'Various
Subjects of Landscape characteristic of English Scenery'
were 'principally intended to mark the phenomena of the Chiar'oscuro
of' Nature'. Constable seems to want us to see nature from the outset as a
gamut of monochrome, from black to white; vet he supplied Lucas, not with
monochrome drawings and sketches, but with coloured
studies and finished paintings. It is the sparkle of natural light and shade as
recorded there that Lucas renders into mezzotint. And it can be argued that
Lucas' work, dragged painfully out of him by a fretful and vacillating
Constable, constitutes the apogee of the mezzotint as a translation of oil
painting: the very gusto of Constable's brush is caught and rennlered
by Lucas' burnishing tool, the airy impressionism of his spontaneous handling marvellously conveyed in brilliant flickerings
of black and white.
Even though painter and printmaker were two individuals, and working,
often enough. under conditions of much personal friction, the English Landscape Scenery exemplifies the elevation of
engraver to partnership with the artist, and the achievement of prints which
have the creative status of original works of art. The chemistry by which this
occurred is hard to analyse. Lucas'
virtuosity planed no small part in it; his willingness to do what Constable
demanded was always tempered by that. It was a partnership in which two very
different kinds of mastery fused and bore fruit. 'We have a bond of
friendship', Constable wrote to Lucas, '. . . in the lovel
amalgamation of our works'. The implication here is that the print is not so
much subservient to the painting as a logical and necessary extension, indeed a
fulfilment of it. The period offers even more
startling examples of the process. After Turner and Lucas, the outstanding mezzotinter of the time is John Martin, whose series of 24
illustrations to Paradise
Lost, commissioned
by Septimus Prowett,
appeared in 1825–7, precisely the moment when Turner was working on the 'Little
Liber', and a year or two before the inception of English Landscape Scenery. This was one of Martin's earliest
essays in the medium and it launched him on a successful career as a publisher of his own
paintings, a la Hogarth, with whom his contemporaries were coupling him by
1831.18
But
whereas Hogarth, for all the energy and idiosyncracv of his line-engravings, never thought of them
otherwise than as reproductions of his pictures, Martin, belonging as he did to
the Romantic generation. brought a new sense
of the self-sufficiency of the print. In preparation for his Paradise Lost he made a whole set of oil
sketches; not because he had it in mind to execute the series in oil as well, but because the prints were from
the outset conceived as independent works, alternatives to, and not
substitutes for, paintings. Having seen Turner's and Constable's approach to
the same question we can, perhaps, understand Martin's methods more clearly. As
one commentator has remarked, 'in aesthetic terms each print represented an
advance on the painted masterwork'.t4 And for Martin's
characteristic subject matter, the mezzotint does appear to be the ideal
medium. The 'sublime darkness' of his apocalyptic subjects is better
expressed by the dense burr of mezzotint than by anything else, and he took to
it with a greater conviction than he ever succeeded in bringing to his
paintings, which are tawdry and crude in comparison. The glow and shimmer of
distant lights in the vast nothingness of hell or chaos is evoked in his prints with a visionary force that makes him a
central figure of the age, even
though his work in oil is often laughable. He demonstrated
graphically, if unintentionally, that a print could actually be more serious, more powerful than
a painting.
He proved, too, that a painter might find the print a more
lucrative source of
income than large and sometimes unsaleable pictures. Even the successful Turner did
conspicuously well out of many of his projects for engraving, though often his engravers
earned more for each
plate than he did for his designs: Martin made over £20,000 from the mezzotints he
issued between 1826 and 1840.2" The
market was expanding rapidly; the middle classes, who had since Hogarth's time been the main purchasers of prints, were by
the early nineteenth century a very large and increasingly
well-informed sector of the population. Engravers were greatly helped to meet
the new demand by the development of soft steel plates in about 1822, largely at the hands of Thomas Lupton, one of Turner's favourite mezzotinters. The steel permitted much longer runs than
copper and effectively gave engraving the new lease of commercial viability that it needed to
sustain competition
with the lithography, chromolithography and photography which all gradually
overtook it in the course of the century.
The search for a market was, clearly, an important factor in bringing at
least some painters to the print. Hogarth, Turner.
Constable and Martin all in their different ways felt the pressure. Nevertheless there was a contrary
pull: James Ward, for example. began his
career as a very successful mezzotinter after other
artists. notably his
brother-in-law George Morland, and Hoppner, but could never reconcile himself to remaining a big fish in
so lowly a pond. He
and his ambition came into direct collision with the official Academy policy on
engraving:
The question was
whether I should come forward as a painter or engraver. I enquired if I became an associate engraver
first. I could then
change that and become an Academician. The repl was
'certainly not', I must withdraw and be elected associate painter.
Hoppner tried to persuade him to enter the
Academy as an engraver and 'make a fortune', but Ward replied: 'Does Hoppner say that I cannot climb up to the painters? Then
I'll try.'"'
When Ward did try, he fell under the spell of Rubens' great picture of the Chateau de Steen and
painted his large Fighting Bulls at St Donat's Castle,
which some of his colleagues considered a great improvement on his
original. 'You have thrown the gauntlet at Rubens, and you have beaten him',
said Henry Tresham. But the King, George III, was more
realistic. 'How! How! How! Mr. Ward. how is this', he spluttered, 'That you, so fine an
engraver, should turn painter, and landscape painter too. Why, I am sure that
it cannot pay you as well as engraving?' To which Ward replied, on behalf of
many of his more ambitious contemporaries: 'An please your Majesty, I engrave
to live and I paint for the pleasure of the art.'-2
Such
aspiration could not be content, of course, with fighting bulls or any of the cattle with which Ward had by 1807
made a name. The hierarchy of aesthetic importance penetrated even the byways of animal-painting: Henry Bernard Chalon taunted 'Ward can paint rustic horses, but can no
more paint blood horses than my boot.' We are told that Ward 'never
forgot nor wholly forgave' this jibe.-3
He proved that he could indeed paint blood horses, and went on to execute a
commission for a large allegory of Wellington's triumph at Waterloo. This was
his undoing. and its exhibition at the Egyptian Hall in 1822 was a failure. Much reduced in
reputation and circumstances, he turned once more to printmaking, and in 1823–4 produced a set of lithographic
drawings of 24 portraits of pedigree horses. He dedicated them to George IV, who received him
graciously, talking to the artist 'as an equal', and even 'placed his hand familiarh
on his shoulder, a gracious action that lingered long in Ward's memory...'=3
Such was the power of the print; and indeed, Ward's set of lithographs deserved
such recognition: his vigorous draughtsmanship is recorded
there in one of the outstanding groups of animal pictures of the romantic
period; like Martin he benefited from the concentration, the elimination of
infelicitous handling, that converted overblown paintings into vivid and
entirely satisfactory works of art. One critic was prompted to the following
eulogium:
Mr Ward's series of lithographic
studies is now before us, and we are gratified in having another opportunity of
expressing our admiration of these masterly evidences of
the utility of this style
of multiplying the compositions of a distinguished painter, by the ingenuity of his own hand. It is proclaimed
abroad, to the
reproach of our school, that drawing in England is neither practised
nor well understood. In the delineation of the horse, however, we have long
been able to boast of the superiority of our painters over those of all
nations, ancient or modern: for that anatomical knowledge of the noble animal,
without which the strength, character and beaut
of his proportions can never be truly and gracefully represented. originated
with the English school,
in the taste and scientific research of the late Mr
Stubbs, whose
magnificent folio volume on the horse, engraved by himself, is a production
that stands alone in art.
George Stubbs had not only made the series of
engravings for his Anatomy of the Horse; he had also issued a
number of exceptionally sensitive mezzotints (and plates in which mezzotint is
mixed with other techniques) which rank among the first great Romantic prints.lti The oscillation between scientific
accuracy and Romantic
expressiveness in Stubbs is a hallmark of the period: Girtin's
panoramas of London and Paris, for instance, embody the same qualities. And
another animal-draughtsman, Thomas Bewick, achieved in wood-engraving an
eminence parallel to that of Stubbs in painting and mezzotint. The scientific nature of Bewick's depictions of birds and quadrupeds, for his two
books devoted to them, is manifest in the careful descriptive texts that
accompany them. Their value as art lies in their exploitation of sophisticated
and sensitive wood-engraving techniques, both 'white-line' and 'black-line', to
convey not only the character and physical appearance of the creatures themselves,
with all their variation of texture and movement, but also the very atmosphere
of their habitats. The frosty field in which the fieldfare presides, beside
ash-buds that echo the pattern of his dog-tooth breast; the summer garden,
shimmering in the warm breeze beneath the bright eve of the spotted flycatcher
– these are perceptions of the artist and not of the scientist. Bewick's depiction of the plumed tail of the barnyard cock
shows that he completely grasps the principle of treating black and
white as colours. And his tailpieces, humorous and
poignant reflections on the life of the countryside in general, are
among the great romantic statements about English landscape. The reaper,
pausing in the field to gaze at the nest of eggs that he has just unwittingly orphaned with
his scythe, is an extraordinarily touching vignette; the two gunmen who meet each other
with their dogs across a snowy meadow: the man and
woman who wade out to
rescue a pig in deep water; or the shall black devil who smokes a pipe behind a
rock as he observes at a distance a crowd round a gallows:`' the life of rural
England is richly presented, with a combination of delicacy, boisterousness and
compassion that even in the age of romantic landscape is all too rare.
The
success of these modest illustrations is reinforced by the complete absence of
that sense of friction between medium and subject matter which as we have seen
underlies so many prints of the period. There is no suggestion that great ideas
are struggling within the confines of too
narrow a medium; nor that the technical difficulties of printmaking
raise obstacles to the understanding of the artist's conception. Another series
of wood-engravings, however, was to exemplify just such an incompatibility:
William Blake's set of illustrations to
Ambrose Philips' Pastoral in
Imitation of Virgil, which Robert Thornton published in his Virgil
Primer of 1821. When Thornton apologised to the
public for these designs, with his famous
distinction –'they display less of art than genius' – he put his linger
on the central conundrum of the Romantic print: what do we admire in a great
artist? his artistry – his mastery of a particular
medium? or his mind – the inspired insights into human existence that he provides us? The Romantic period
was one in which both commodities enjoyed unprecedented respect, and, as has
become clear to us, it had become the bugbear of the printmakers that they
could not persuade the world that their technical virtuosity adequately compensated for their lack of direct inspiration.
Blake, acknowledged by many in his own time to enjoy genuine, if inscrutable, inspiration, stamped that
inspiration too ravel upon his woodblocks for Thornton's taste. Printmaking
required greater refinement, and for Blake that refinement was, by definition,
an interrupter, an adulterer, of inspiration.
Nevertheless, Blake was all his life a professional
engraver in line, and
had proved himself quite capable of orthodox work reproducing masters past and
present like Watteau, Fuseli
or Stothard. He was well qualified to judge
the technical merits of the great eighteenth-centur line-engravers, but
his violent outbursts against Strange and Woollen as
mere 'Ignorant Journeymen' are unfortunately no real guide to his own position
as an engraver, springing more from personal prejudice born of his early
association with another printmaker of that period, James Basire,
than from any
well-founded objections to their methods._' In fact, Blake's own work is often reminiscent of the variegated and inventive
processes of Woollen and could hardly have come into
existence without them. It is odd that his passionate – one might say
ideological – commitment to clear outline in the neo-classical spirit did not
reveal itself more explicitly in his translations of Flaxman's designs for Hesiod,
where he adopts a delicate, stippled technique rather than the firm calligraphic and truly
'engraved' line of Piroli: but there is no doubt that when he was expressing
his own ideas in the
medium, he brought a vigour and intensity to
line-engraving which none could equal. Even setting aside the technical
originality of the stereotype plates, or the white-line experiments on copper
which prelude the wood-engravings for Thornton, his pure line work in the
designs for the Book
()Bob or the
unfinished set of plates for Dante's Inferno is astonishing in its energy and spiritual resonance. For
Blake's engravings bring into focus the fundamental problem of line-engraving:
the inhibiting nature of the very arduous process of digging repetitive
parallel lines into copper. Rich as its effects were, it could not easily be made
to respond to the promptings of direct inspiration. The professionals were
perhaps shielding themselves from this difficulty by their insistence that accurate reproduction
of finished works was
precisely the chief merit of their medium. Blake, like Mantegna
and Durer before him, needed no such excuse. His use
of the burin is an extraordinary marriage of the traditional processes with a
personally charged expressive force; and in his adaptation of the conventional
systems of hatching in job or the Canterbur' Pilgrims he creates shimmering areas of tone
that seem exactly to transcribe the finer hatched and iridescent atmosphere of
his visionary watercolours. Here again, perhaps, we
encounter in an important context the contemporary awareness of the parallel
significance of colour and monochrome.
Such
exceptional work apart, the medium that seemed to act most impartially and purer as a channel for the
artist's own inspiration was etching.
This rapid, sharp technique, capable of reproducing the most spontaneous marks of the draughtsman's needle, had been raised
to the highest pitch of art by Rembrandt, whose etchings were much admired and
collected from his lifetime onward. It is no coincidence that two artists in
particular used the etching medium to express some of their most important
ideas; both of them connected to Blake. One was James Barr,
whom Blake greatly admired, the other Samuel Palmer who was an admirer of Blake
himself. There is little in common between the rough-hewn, large-scale etchings
by which Barry chose to disseminate his most complex historical subjects and
the richly worked, delicate filigrees of line with which Palmer
reproduced his own later watercolours;
but both men surely responded to the forceful directness imparted by
the action of the acid on the needled line and sought in it the fulfilment of their passionate and densely packed response to the world. Etching, with its Romantic
process of acid biting (many
professional engravers were seriously injured by constant exposure to the fumes
of the acid bath), its rich and subtle response to inking, and its feeling of
intimacy and spontaneity, has always been par excellence the virtuoso medium, and its
revival in the Romantic period for 'personal' statements by artists was, in a
sense. to be expected. The adoption of an etching style based on that of the
little Dutch masters by landscapists such as John Crome
and his Norwich School followers is entirely in keeping with this view of the
technique. The foundation of the Etching Society in the 1840s was a late
manifestation of the same sentiment and led naturally to the emergence of
Whistler and a new school of virtuoso etchers in the second half of the
century.
In this
context, it is odd that Bonington was not an etcher.
He is. in many ways,
the true precursor of Whistler– his warm virtuosity, his cool, spacious compositions
devised for aesthetic reasons alone: all this is Whistlerian: but Bonington made only two true etchings, and otherwise
confined his printmaking to soft-ground and lithography. The earliest
cataloguer of his prints, Aglaiis Bouvenne,
summed up the particular quality of lithography as opposed to engraving and
etching: 'La gravure etale a I'oeil tout son travail, long, minutieux, complique; le curieux et ('amateur sont egalement seduits par les merveilleuses combinaisons de la Pointe, du
burin, de la roulette; la lithographic, vite faite, chacun le sait, ntst pour la plupart
qu'un dessin plus ou moins reussi'.
But, he goes on: 'on reconnaitra qu'en
question d'art le procede importe
peu, que le resultat est tout'.'-"' This
explains well enough the attraction of lithography for the youthful Bonington; indeed, it seems to define the transition from
'old master' to modern printmaking which the romantic movement brought about.
It is significant. perhaps, that the second half of Whistler's career as
printmaker was largely dedicated to the production of lithographs.
Bonington's associate and follower in Paris, Thomas Shotter
Bovs, continued where he left off, stopped in mid
career by death at the age
of twenty-six. Bovs, too, looked back to the
soft-ground outline
panorama of Paris that had been Girtin's last
testament at a similarly premature demise: 'I have a folio of good
"material" I am about a work on Paris to follow up Girtin's, for it has never been done but by him & his sketches
are so correct there is not a line out. Nash's, Batty's, Pugin's, Skelton's & all the french
. . . are the damnest, lying, ill got up, money
getting clap-trap possible[.] I intend to do 'Paris as it is' & I flatter myself I
have some
picturesque
bits . . . but I am a bit soured with publishers so must do it myself.'"
However, the effect of soft-ground was obtainable with greater fidelity to the pencil
medium by means of lithography. and it was an entirely logical step for Boys to adopt the newer method
for his architectural subjects in northern France and, later. in London. In his
Picturesque
Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Antwerp, Rouen &c., 1839, he developed a sensitive form of colour-printed
lithography which accompanies some of the most imaginatively conceived subjects
of their type.
The
relationship between the picturesque topographers and printmaking was a special
one, conditioned partly by their traditional association with the illustrated
tour, accompanied as it was by engraved or
aquatinted plates, and partly by the fashionable preoccupation with such
subjects by the amateur draughtsmen and women who
abounded. Every picturesque or topographical artist was either in fact or in
intention the master of a large 'school' of eager pupils, and soft-ground,
aquatint and lithography were well suited to the business of reproducing
drawings or watercolours accurately enough for
principles of technique to be grasped. A long
line of instructive manuals by Francis Nicholson, John Farley. David
Cox, Samuel Prout, J. D. Harding and many others
stretches through this period as a constant reminder of the function
of the print neither as reproduction nor as illustration but as exemplar.
Indeed, as it was one of the boasts of the printmakers, when then put their point of' view. that prints brought art to
the people. the power of the print to teach people to draw and paint was a /await
worthy of particular emphasis. 'The lithographic works of Prout
alone, we feel assured', one enthusiast wrote in 1834, have created a very extensive love for topographical drawings. The bold
and picturesque gestures of these masterly imitations of his pencil sketches
are too obvious to be misunderstood. Many young persons, the children of the
wealthy, diffident of their talents, who would not have dared to attempt to
copy more elaborate works, struck with the simplicity of his style, have set
sedulously to work 'to draw from Prout'; and from
these their willing essays, having exceeded their own expectations, and those
of their friends, have proceeded with a zeal and interest in the pursuit, that
has led them to attempt to draw similar objects from nature - and have thus
become enthusiastic in the delightful study of topography. Amateurs like these
become the friends and patrons of the professors, and purchase their finest
pictures and drawings, to improve themselves in art. Those, moreover, who
commence by admiring the picturesque charms of these bold sketches, will
proceed, until they feel the refined sentiment, and comprehend the beauty and
skill displaced in the elaborate engravings of the Cookes,
the Le Keuxs, of Pve, and
many others of our school of engravers'.31
Despite the agonisings of the engravers and the ambitions of the
painters, there existed, then, a fertile cycle of prints and paintings,
artists, patrons and pupils which to a large extent supplied society with what
it required. It was a cosy ecology that was to be
largely destroyed by the arrival of photography in the 1850s; after that,
printmaking could not hold the same place in the community again. But it was no
more doomed to extinction than was painting itself: we have already noticed
that Whistler imparted new energy to the etching tradition at precisely this
moment: and the print, shorn altogether of its badge of servitude as
'reproduction' rather than original, was unequivocally: reinstated as the
expressive creative medium that so many artists had proved it to be.
But line-engraving
as a medium of reproduction was, of course, redundant. The subtleties of oil
painting could far better be convened by the camera. By a poignant historical
irony, the printmakers won their independence at the cost of the very medium
which had been so confident of its superiority to all the rest, and which had
led the ideological battle of the Romantic period on their behalf.
|
|
|
ANDREW |
|
NOTES |
15. |
Though Farington, an
influential Academician, records his friendly |
|
1. John Pye, Evidence relating to the Art of
Engraving, taken before the Select |
|
relations with John Landseer
and admiration for his lectures at the |
|
Committee of the House of Commons, on Arts, 1836, 1836, p. 11. |
|
Royal Institution. |
|
2. John Landseer, Lectures on the Art of
Engraving, delivered at the Royal |
16. |
The relationship between Constable and Lucas is fully documented in |
|
Institution of |
|
R. B. Becket, John Constable's Correspondence,
Vol. X. 1966, pp. 314‑ |
|
3. Joseph Farington, Diary, ed. |
|
443. |
|
p. 3664, 4J une 1810. |
17. |
W. Blake, Complete
Writings, ed.
Geoffrey Keynes, 1966 (paperback |
|
4. Pye, Evidence, p. 18, evidence of John Burnet. |
|
edition), p. 585. |
|
5. Ibid.. p. 28, evidence of John Pye. |
18. |
See William Feaver, The Art of
John Martin.
1975, p. 86. |
|
6. Landseer, Lectures, p. 177. |
19. |
Ibid., p. 84. |
|
7. Somerset House Gazette, no. XXXVI, 19 June 1824, p. 157. |
20. |
Ibid. |
|
8. Joseph Strutt, A Biographical Dictionary;
containing an Historical Account |
21. |
C. Reginald Grundy, James Ward, RA. 1909. p. xxix. |
|
of all the Engravers, from the earliest period of the
Art of Engraving to the |
22. |
Ibid., pp. xxxiii, xxxv. |
|
Present Time, 2 vols., 1785, Vol. I, Preface, p. v. |
23. |
Ibid., p. xxxv. |
|
9. Cited by Pye. Evidence, p. 5, note. Strange received his
Knighthood in |
24. |
Ibid.. p. xlvii. |
|
1787. |
25. |
|
|
10. Horace Walpole, A Catalogue of Engravers, who have been born or
resided |
26. |
See Basil Taylor, The Prints of
George
Stubbs, 1969. |
|
in |
27. |
All the examples cited are headpieces or tailpieces in Bewicks' History |
|
Vertue, 1763; 2nd edn,
1786, p. 4, note. |
|
of British Birds, 1799, Vol. 1. |
|
11. T. Fisher in the Gentleman's Magazine, March 1808, p. 193. Fora full |
28. |
Blake. Complete Writings, p. 593. |
|
account of the invention and development of lithography
see Michael |
29. |
Aglans Bouvenne,
Catalogue de l'Oeuvre grave et lithographie
de R. P. |
|
Twyman, The History of Lithography
1800-1850, 1970. |
|
Bonington, Paris, 1873, p. 4. Bouvenne cites the lithographs of |
|
12. Fisher, in Gentleman's Magazine, March 1808, p. 193. |
|
Delacroix as exemplifying these romantic
principles. |
|
13. Landseer, Lectures, p. 143. |
30. |
Quoted in Patrick]. Noon. 'Bonington
and Boys: Some Unpublished |
|
14. See Hilary Beck. Victorian Engravings, |
|
Documents at Yale', |
|
1973. |
31. |
|