Joseph Viscomi *
Robert
Essick’s review in this issue of the Blake facsimiles recently published by the
Manchester Etching Workshop, with its “thumbnail history of hand-colored
facsimiles” and insightful comments about the place of facsimiles in Blake
studies, is characteristically complete. It leaves nothing for me to say about
these new, beautiful prints except what Essick could not have known: their
origin and evolution and a few details about their production. The history of
the Workshop’s facsimiles is not especially complex or long—or not, at least,
when their three years of preparation and printing are compared to Samuel
Hurd’s eight and a half years of work on the Young & Sons 1923 facsimile of
Songs (T)—but it is curious, the
project actually beginning more by chance than design. And I think the mode of
production is also worth recording in some detail, not because it is so simple
and straightforward, and, as Essick points out (and as the notes to the present
article hopefully show), because “the activities necessary for producing a
facsimile can themselves lead to insights about the originals.”
The
Manchester Etching Workshop, located on the top floor of a Victorian clothes
warehouse in a now unfashionable area of Manchester, England, was set up in
1978 by Paul Ritchie with some assistance from the Arts Council of Great
Britain. Formerly of Peacock Printmakers, Aberdeen, Scotland, Ritchie studied
advanced printmaking at the Manchester Polytechnic and Croyden College of Art,
and since 1977 has exhibited widely throughout Great Britain, with one-man
shows in Aberdeen and Amsterdam, and with works in many public collections,
including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art. His most recent sets of etchings, produced in small editions, are
concerned mainly with landscapes and interiors, with color used in the manner
of monoprints; unlike Blake’s, these plates are very large and lightly etched,
allowing the coloring, wiping, and plate tones to be flexible and thereby—as in
Blake’s prints—critical to each separate impression. To execute such large but
subtle prints, and to employ fully the creative possbilities of continually and
radically reworking plates, in the metal, the inking, and the interaction of
ink with paper, it was necessary for Ritchie not only to have his own
workspace, but also to design and build his own presses and papermaking
equipment.
Though
built to answer the specific needs of one graphic artist, the Manchester
Etching Workshop supported itself at first by renting its studio space and
equipment to other artists and printmakers. It became financially self-sufficient
when Ritchie, with the help of up to a dozen parttime assistants (printers,
colorists, papermakers), produced three portfolios of etchings, two by Philip
Snow, a contemporary artist, each consisting of six bird colorprints, and one
by Alfred Coffrey, the late Australian etcher. The Blake portfolio, as Ritchie
recalls, “rather happened and grew instead of being planned. I had attended
a printmaking conference at Bradford, and after the conference, over a British
Rail cheese sandwich at the station, met a curator of prints at the Victoria & Albert
Museum. I later wrote to her asking if they were interested in a joint publication
project using any plates they might have. They agreed to let
me borrow some plates, amongst which were the Blake electrotypes." [1]
For reasons more practical
than aesthetic, Ritchie decided to print the electrotypes. Because they are in
relief, electrotypes are easier to ink and thus take less time to print in
large editions than intaglio plates. At first, Ritchie intended to print 500
sets of monochrome impressions on moldmade commercial paper. The initial
proofs, however, printed in black relief ink, were disappointingly stark in
comparison to original illuminated prints, resembling more closely the
impressions printed by Fredrick Tatham in the 1830’s than any printed by Blake.
[2] Like the posthumous prints,
these uncolored proofs recorded the entire plate image, that is, they showed
everything Blake drew on the plate in his “impervious liquid,” as well as the
thin borders inadvertently caused by the strips of (acid resistant) wax that
were used to dike the plate for acid. The borders, though part of the relief
line system, are not part of the printed image (except in late impressions),
because Blake wiped them clean of ink before printing the plate. Blake not only
deleted portions of the plate image, but also used colored inks and off-white
wove paper, and he washed the printed image. Thus Blake’s own impressions
actually convey less information about the appearance of plates than do electrotype proofs—which, however, like posthumous
prints, give an inaccurate idea of the appearance of illuminated prints.
Blake’s
printing process did not end with inking the plate and pulling it through the
press—and neither could Ritchie’s. The initial set of proofs, showing too much,
but telling too little, quickly revealed that electrotypes could be printed in
imitation of illuminated prints only if the paper matched Blake’s in color and
receptivity, the ink matched in color and texture, and the impressions were
hand painted in water colors. In short, as Ritchie came to appreciate fully the
beauty and subtlety of the originals, and, as with his own lightly etched
plates, the importance of careful inking and wiping, the electrotypes became
anything but easy to print—and the projected edition anything but a one-man
job. In addition to requiring a substantially larger bank loan for start-up
costs, a facsimile, as opposed to a monochrome, edition would require more
time, energy, and artistic help than originally envisaged. The “Manchester
Group,” as Essick refers to all of us involved, consisted primarily of Kate
Donnelly, who made most of the paper and assisted Ritchie with the printing,
Guy Tucker, Jacqueline Marshall, and Paul Taggart, the principal colorists,
Paul Heskell at Dorset Bookbinding Company, who made the leather portfolios and
cloth-covered conservation boxes, and hand sewed the introductory booklet, and
I, who, as technical adviser, wrote the introduction and helped to design the
format of the two different editions. [3]
Songs, copy B, an early copy in the
British Museum, was chosen as the model because of its delicate washes and
accessibility. We came to realize from the subsequent sets of hand colored
working proofs in imitation of copy B that the more we incorporated authentic
eighteenth-century materials and techniques in the inking and painting stages
of the process, the more authentic looking were the facsimiles. For us,
reproducing Blake’s illuminated prints came to mean reproducing Blake’s
illuminated printing process. But before we could even begin the
facsimile-making process, let alone fine tune it, we needed plates that could
be handled and printed in the same manner as Blake’s—which ruled out using the
very electrotype blocks upon which was based the whole idea of a fine limited
edition of Blake facsimiles.
The
sixteen electrotypes made by Clay & Son for Gilchrist’s Life of Blake (1863) were cast from ten
of Blake’s copper plates, at least six of which were etched on both sides, and
mounted type high (.918”) for relief printing. [4] The Victoria & Albert
set of electrotypes were cast from the original set, now lost, and are also
type high and lead based. Their height makes the borders of the blocks more
difficult to hand wipe and the blocks themselves far more difficult to print
on
a rolling press (the kind of press Blake used) than the original relief
etchings, which were approximately 1/16”, the standard thickness of a copper
plate. Technically, it is possible to print type-high blocks on a rolling
press, but only if the rollers are fully raised, which, because it is not the
way the press is designed to work, prevents full control over the plate and
thus over the quality of the impression. To obtain the control necessary to
recreate the tactile qualities of the originals, we needed to print
sixteen-gauge relief etchings, not type-high electrotypes. Thus, instead of
using the electrotypes to print the impressions for the edition, we used them
to print a set of embossed proofs, which were then photographed to make the
relief etched copper plates.
The
proofs were printed in a black proofing ink on an extremely soft, unsized paper
made by Kate Donnelly and Paul Ritchie from “free stuff” (as opposed to “wet
stuff,” which produces parchment-like paper). This super-receptive paper picked
up virtually all detail, and because it was soft enough to be printed dry, it
eliminated the slight distortion in image size normally caused by shrinkage,
thereby ensuring that the printed images were the exact size of the plate
images. The photographic transparencies were shot directly from these
impressions using a large-plate camera, which produced same-size negatives.
These same-size negatives were then placed directly onto the sensitized copper
plates and printed in reverse so the image is backwards. This contact method
eliminates the slight elongation of image that occurs when the image is
projected through a camera lens, as in the Trianon’s collotype process.
The
copper plates were etched by Gilchrist Brothers (!) Ltd., Leeds, with ferric
chloride
at 30° Baume. [5] After several trial
plates—and Ritchie trying the Brothers’ patience with his fastidiousness and
bewildering them with his insistence that they not correct any of the
missing characters and punctuation—they produced
excellent plates.
The
comparison between electrotype impression and workshop
impression (illus. 1 and
2) shows the accuracy and reliability of this platemaking process. Practically
speaking, there is no loss of fidelity between the generations.
As Essick has pointed out, most of the minor
differences between electrotype and authentic impressions are, like those
between any two of Blake’s impressions, due to different inking and printing
methods. Most of these differences we were able to eliminate by using the kind
of ink and printing method that Blake used. There are, though, a few letters
and marks of punctuation missing in the electrotypes themselves and thus in our
set of relief plates, but I’ve counted only seven of the eight Essick lists. [6] Blake
touched up or added missing letters in many of his illuminated prints, particularly
in the early
books, whose plates seem to have been bitten longer and deeper (if the heavily
embossed posthumous Songs are any
indication of depth) than plates after 1794 and thus were probably more
susceptible to foul biting and having pieces of the varnished text and design
lift off the plate. In any event, like Blake, we corrected the missing
characters in a matching ink on the impressions themselves, rather than correct
the electrotypes. The variations in the electrotype of the Songs of Experience title plate, however, were corrected on the
plate. This particular electrotype (illus. 3)
, which appears to have been made
from a drawing and not from the original plate, differs from Blake’s by having
too many lines in the pillars and too few in the bed’s drapery, afro-like hair
for the two young mourners, and no date (1794) in the right pillar (illus. 4). [7] Because our objective
was
to create a facsimile of the title page in copy B, that is, as it was printed
in this particular copy and not of the plate as it appears in proofs, we
decided that making a new plate from an uncolored impression, Songs of Innocence copy U, for example, would be no more
effective than “excavating” the lines in the copy B impression and altering the
lines in the electrotype to match. An embossed impression was substantially
corrected by having its incorrect lines masked out, and thus deleted, and
others reshaped and newly added by hand. In a number of places the printing is
deliberately broken, as in the tendril of the “T” of “The Author,” and the foul
printing is imitated, such as the thin border marks. A contact transparency was
then made of the doctored impression and the resulting plate printed slightly
more heavily than the others. As Essick points out, “the new facsimile plate
.
. . is much closer to the original,” with the same high fidelity as those
printed from relief plates made from unaltered electrotype impressions.
The paper for the edition
was also specially made. Using a small hydropulper and paper refiner that
Ritchie designed and built especially for the project, he and Kate Donnelly
succeeded in making from 100% cotton linters a very soft and receptive paper
(illus. 5).
This is essentially the same paper that was used to print the
electrotypes, and, although it had to be sized to accept water colors, it
remained as receptive as the first batch of paper. Irgalite paper dyes in
fairly miniscule proportions were added to the pulp at the refining stage to
make its color match that of the original paper. Each sheet (20.5 X 16.5 cm.)
was individually made by hand on a wove mold giving four deckled edges, is
watermarked Songs of Innocence or
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE, and blind embossed with Blake’s Night Thoughts monogram (illus. 6).
The watermarked paper will
prevent the facsimiles from being mistaken for originals—and prevent the
British Museum from having a future headache. For if ever the printroom should
be rearranged, the colored copy of “A Cradle Song” that will be found under
several tons of solid oak chests will not be thought of as an uncatalogeud
Blake original, but a facsimile that slipped away from Jacqueline Marshall.
Even
after being pressed in a bookpress (illus. 7) and passed through the etching
rollers, the paper, because it is only lightly sized, remains slightly rougher
and softer than Blake’s Whatman paper, or Trianon’s Arches.
And because it is
so soft, it is easily embossed, no matter how lightly printed. As Essick points
out, most of Blake’s prints do not have a pronounced platemark. There are at
least two reasons for this: (1) because the image is on and not below the
surface it transfers under light pressure; (2) because Blake’s wove paper is
made of “wet stuff” and is sized, and is thus a relatively hard support (even
when printed damp). [8] In any event, our
impressions are not as flat as Blake’s—or at least copy B—but neither are
Blake’s as flat as the finest collotype and lithographic and photomechanical
facsimiles suggest. We could have flattened the impressions after printing to
remove their very slight embossment, but this would have been to err in the
other direction. It would have been to imitate the surface image and not the
tactile quality of the original prints. We have tried, on the other hand, to
remind the reader that the poems are pages and the pages are prints, and that
as prints, by their tactile as well as illuminated nature, Blake’s poems are
“an improvement of sensual enjoyment.”
Essick
wonders why we went to all the trouble to make our own paper and suggests that
the paper’s rough texture is “unBlakean.” [9] But as mentioned, moldmade commercial papers, including the Rives that
Essick suggests, produced disappointingly stark impressions, which is why we
decided that a paper especially receptive to relief plates was needed. Blake,
as Essick reminds us, used the best “wove paper that could be procured.” This, however, did not mean just any
commercially handmade paper, but the best handmade paper of the day, paper that
was beautiful in itself and perfectly receptive to the plate. Paper is not
merely a vehicle for the image, but interacts with the image and ink and
colors. It is part of the print. In this sense, the MEW paper, which is the
best printing paper I have ever used for relief printing, is as Blakean in
body, giving a feel of the originals, as printing on the best handmade paper
that can be procured is Blakean in spirit. The historical and technical
precedents of the Trianon Press’s specially made paper in no way influenced our
decision to make our own paper. But Essick is right to suggest that the
exigencies of producing beautiful prints for a special deluxe limited edition
overruled the need for exact similitude.
The paper was soft enough
to be printed dry, and this is how it was printed for the first few sets
of
proofs. But because Blake clearly seems to have dampened his paper, we began
to dampen ours, and, not surprisingly, we obtained better, more authentic
looking
impressions. [10] We used light pressure, not much more than the weight of the top
roller, with only three blankets (two size catchers and one swanskin)
instead
of the usual four, and registered the plate on a marked sheet of paper under
the plate, thus assuring the proper margins (illus. 8). Producing impressions
with the tactile qualities of the originals, however, involved more than
getting the printing pressure right; it also involved getting the color and
composition of the inks correct, as well as devising an effective and
consistent way of inking the plates.
Because of the reticulation
and uneven strength of the ink in Blake’s printing, deciding upon the optimum
ink color/tone was possibly the most perplexing and time-consuming aspect of
the project. Blake Books describes
the color as brown, noting that Experience
is printed in an “orangish brown” and Innocence
in a “flat brown” (Blake Books,
p. 373, n. 21). The difference between Bentley’s color definition and ours is
largely one of descriptive interpretation; we refer to the “orangish brown” as
yellow, though it is really a sort of faded warm ochre, while the “flat brown”
is a color midway between brown and the ochre, and could well have been a
mixture of the two inks, made either deliberately or accidentally. Even within
the sets the shade of color sometimes appears different from one plate to
another, possibly due to printing pressure and the amount of ink Blake has
applied to the plate; e.g., “Holy Thursday” is very lightly printed, whereas in
parts of, say, “Infant Sorrow,” the inking is much heavier. It is possible that
a residue of another ink on the dabber has affected the hue on some plates.
Because of such variables, we could not use the same ink for all the plates,
but had to match separately the color of each facsimile with the original, and,
even then, arriving at a color match was maddeningly difficult because test
strips would differ and yet, depending on what part of the print was used as
the sample, all could be right.
The
first ink Ritchie experimented with was a mixture of commercially made
letterpress and intaglio inks, but this worked too well. The image transferred
from the plate to the paper without the reticulation so characteristic of
Blake’s. We reasoned that Blake, like other engravers printing their own
plates, would have made his own ink, but that this handmade ink would have been
intaglio, not relief, ink. The thicker plate oils (burnt linseed oil) used in
the former make it stiffer and more tenacious, transferring evenly only with
heavy pressure. We ground the inks on a marble slab, using first grade pigments
and oils, carefully matching the colors of the originals. Ritchie applied the
ink, however, with a roller, rather than a linen dabber, the tool Blake most
likely used. [11] We resorted to the
“unBlakean” tool (rollers were not invented till about 1813 and not in common use till mid-nineteenth century) because it
produced more consistent results. With dampened paper, light printing pressure,
and stiff handmade intaglio ink, we succeeded in duplicating the surface
texture, as well as the colors of the originals. [12]
The prints were hand colored by eight different
colorists. Jacqueline Marshall, Paul Taggart, and Guy Tucker were the principal
colorists, and they were also the artists responsible for the prototypes made
in the British Museum from the originals. This took eight weeks and three trial
sets (illus. 9 and 10). 
The colors first used were Winsor & Newton, but we
found—as we had with the ink—that we obtained more accurate results in texture
and tonality by preparing the colors by hand. The pigments were ground in a
vehicle of gum arabic, honey, and glycerine, with a drop of ox gall and phenol,
a preserver, which is, except for the last ingredient, a variation of a recipe
in Dossie’s The Handmaid to the Arts (1764). [13] The
main colors were Prussian blue, gamboge,
yellow ochre, Indian red, umbers, black, vermilion, rose madder (genuine),
and alizarin crimson, all of which,
except the last, were used by Blake. [14] Back in the
workshop, the colorists worked from their prototypes and occasionally from slides
on a
Diastar back-lit
projector to produce final masters, which were then checked against the model
and finished at the British Museum Print Room (illus. 11).
We analyzed Blake’s
water color technique with the hope of working up each print as a composite
whole, which can be quite tricky when copying, the copier not being the
original author of the work. We found it necessary to improve certain details
and modeling, as well as slightly strengthen some of the washes. The outlining,
mostly done by Tucker, was executed in a diluted India ink with a quill, or
lettering, brush—which, as Essick points out, is what was normally used in “pen
and wash.” The outlining on the master copy of “The Little Girl Lost,” plate
1, however, was executed by Marshall, whose hand slipped over the printed line
of
the woman’s hip, only then to discover that she had duplicated Blake’s “error”
of 1794!
The coloring was done after
the prints were dry, except on those plates which appear color printed, like
“Infant Sorrow,” “London,” and “Human Abstract.” As unconventional as Blake’s
color
prints are, his usual color printing method was a variation of the à la poupée technique used in England
to color print mezzotints, stipples, chalk engravings, and aquatints. In this
technique, the different colors are applied to the plate with small dabbers,
or
“dollies,” and the plate is printed just once. This technique, though, is
difficult and the results are not consistent. So we looked for an easier, more
precise technique of imitating the texture of these impressions, one that would
enable us to paint the print rather than the plate. We knew that in
conventional color printing the colors were oil-based inks, and not size-color
as in Blake’s, but that the impressions, like Blake’s, were finished in water
colors. [15] This led us to experiment
with different combinations of inks and water colors.
In the earliest trial proofs
of “Infant Sorrow,” the mottled texture of the size-color was reproduced by
stippling water color with the tip of the brush on the dry ink of the
impression. The results were labored and unconvincing. Ritchie discovered,
however, that the opaque black at the bottom of these and other plates, which
is thought to be color printed (Blake
Books, p. 373, n. 21), was washed with a fairly dry brush over the ink on
the impression, and not transferred from the plate.
He also found that other
areas that appeared color printed had the same structure, that is, a
water-based color over an oil-based ink. We reasoned that the mottled texture,
which made the paint appear to have more body than it did, was not caused by
the paper pulling away from a buttery size-color on the plate, but by the water
colors interacting with an oily surface and attaching to the exposed paper where
the ink had reticulated (illus. 12). We found, however, that we could not
reproduce this mottle effect once the ink was completely dry. By using a
slightly coarser ink, which was even closer to Blake’s and reticulated more
readily, and applying water color washes on top of it while it was still tacky,
which in effect was to manipulate the surface tension between oil-based ink and
water-based paint, we recreated the .color printed appearance of the
originals—if not actually discover one of the methods used by Blake (illus.
13).
[16] If this was the method used in Songs (B), then Blake
would have had to paint these impressions soon after printing, rather than wait
until he had a buyer, as he is known to have done with a few copies of the
illuminated books. Illumination, in other words, was not an afterthought.
We
have recreated, intentionally and inadvertently, as many of Blake’s printing
methods as possible to create high fidelity facsimiles. Our objective, however,
was not only to reproduce the appearance of Blake’s prints, but the feel of
them as well. Our mode of production, as Essick notes, has its weaknesses as
well as its strengths: no one copy looks exactly like its model in every
respect, no two copies of the edition are exactly the same—and no copy is not
labor intensive. The original plan of five-hundred monochrome copies quickly
became seventy-five after the amount of time and labor was known, and these
seventy-five copies were divided into the facsimile edition, limited to forty
copies, and the monochrome edition, limited to thirty-five copies. The
monochrome sets, which have been printed in a light brown ink without borders
and on the same paper as the facsimile edition, consists of the sixteen Innocence and Experience impressions printed without plate borders, a proof with
borders of the “The Little Girl Lost,” and two hand colored impressions of the
same, one in imitation of copy B, and one in imitation of copy T (illus. 14),
an elaborately painted late copy with frame lines. Each print is inserted in an
acid free folder and the entire set of prints is enclosed in a cloth-covered
box. The facsimile edition has one extra print, a proof with borders of “The
Lamb,” printed in black proofing ink (illus. 15). The facsimiles are loosely
mounted in corners on pages of o portfolio hand bound in full morocco, which is
enclosed in a cloth-covered box. Both editions include two blind embossed
frontispieces, one to Innocence and
one to Experience, consisting of the
title extracted from Blake’s own title plates, underneath which is “Published
by Manchester Etching Workshop 1983” in a simple, conservative typeface.
The prints are presented in
the order of copy B. Thus there are eight Innocence
and eight Experience prints, with
“Little School Boy,” which later became part of Experience, still part of Innocence.
The number of the edition is penciled in on the lower left corner, and the
prints are numbered 1-16 on the verso so that they can be removed from the
portfolio or box and returned to the same order. Both editions are accompanied
by The Art of William Blake’s Illuminated
Prints, a hand-sewn booklet of twenty-five pages explaining the technique
of illuminated printing. To make the booklet more widely available—and
affordable to scholars—125 numbered copies have been issued separately with a
monochrome impression printed without borders in light brown ink; print and
booklet are enclosed in a dark brown cloth-covered folder with Blake’s monogram
stamped in gold on the front cover and cost $35. Like the editions, the booklet
can be ordered from the Manchester Etching Workshop, 3-5 Union Street (off
Church Street), Manchester M4 1PB.
We
presented the prints as prints, and not as bound pages, to make it possible for
museums, libraries, and collectors to show them as a group, for, as M. H.
Abrams states in the Prospectus, these impressions “are also, in their own
right, delightful works of art for public or private exhibition.” And we
divided the seventy-five copies into two complementary editions to reveal the
evolution from plate to illuminated print. Like the multiple impressions of
“The Lamb” and “The Little Girl Lost,” monochrome and colored impressions of
the same plate clearly reveal what Blake could do to alter the image, and
address the issue Essick raises about different versions of the “same”
illuminated book. Perhaps the most enduring educational value of the prints,
though, is their beauty. They celebrate Blake, whether they missed a tendril or
not, whether the green is too dark or too light on this or that impression.
Here at Cornell and anywhere but the British Museum print room, students and
lovers of Blake will not be comparing them to copy B, but to Blake’s originals
in general. What they will experience is copy B2. But Essick says
this better: the Workshop’s facsimiles are “a recreation of a process as well
as a reproduction of images; as much a new edition of an illuminated book, with
its own unique qualities, as a reproduction of an existing copy.”
ILLUSTRATIONS
Heading. M.E.W. facsimile edition in leather portfolio, with cloth box, booklet,
and title pages.
1. Electrotype impression of “London” printed in black proofing ink.
2.
Workshop’s relief etched plate cast from electrotype impression of “London”
printed in brown intaglio ink.
3. Electrotype of Songs of Experience title page.
4. Workshop facsimile of title page to Songs of Experience, Songs,
copy B.
5. Forming the sheet with mold and deckle in the vat; shaking the mold to
integrate and mesh the fibers as the water drains through the mold from the
pulp.
6. Couching the sheet, i.e., transferring the sheet of pulp from mold to
felt; the pulp at this stage is very hydrated, and therefore the sheet is
very thick.
The watermark wires have impressed themselves in the pulp to produce the
watermark.
7. First pressing of paper on bookpress. This pressing, ten sheets at a time,
compresses the fibers sufficiently to allow the paper to be carefully transferred
to a second, very much heavier pressing, which we achieved by putting the
paper through the etching press.
8. Pulling a proof of the Songs of Innocence title plate on an etching
press.
9-10. Jacqueline Marshall hand coloring mater prints (between visits to the
British Museum) of “The Ecchoing Green” and “Divine Image,” from two prototypes
at the British Museum; all final masters were subsequently checked and finished
at the museum.
11. Workshop impression of “The Ecchoing Green”; no. 16 of 40 printed (Cornell
University Special Collections).
12. Test strip: “Infant Sorrow” showing reticulation of water color on top
of wet ink and opaque black water color on impression.
13. Trial proof of “Infant Sorrow.”
14. Workshop facsimile of “The Little Girl Lost,” copy T, in the monochrome
edition.
15. Trial proof of “The Lamb” with borders from the facsimile edition.