This section talks about the three categories of prints before the age of the camera:
General background notes
Before the invention of the camera in the mid nineteenth century, when ordinary people in the 'modern' world rarely travelled more than a short distance from home, few could read well and a knowledge of distant places and personalities could only be gained through the skill of a writer and /or artist. Only the rich could commission an artist to depict a view or person(s) and before photography became the principle method of transmitting visual information 'prints' were the only effective and economic way for the ordinary person to see secular ../images. Even after Gutenberg it still took two or three hundred years before books and prints became generally available in Europe and the New World.
The vast majority of prints produced between 1500 and 1650 were either woodcuts, engravings or etchings. After 1650 other methods of producing prints appeared which were able to reproduce tone more effectively such the mezzotint and the aquatint. Although wood engraving was known well before 1800 it was not until then that it started to be widely used. This coincided with the discovery of lithography by Senefelder.
Relief Prints: Woodcuts and Wood engravings
Woodcuts
During the thirteenth century there was a demand for designs, perhaps a simple image of a bird to be printed onto cloth. A practical way of doing this was to get a carpenter to smoothly plane a plank of soft wood and draw the image of the bird onto the plank. A wood carver then removed with a sharp knife a few millimetres of the surface of the wood carefully leaving the drawn image.
The image would therefore be in 'relief', protruding above the remaining rough cut surface of the plank. Ink was then rubbed onto the raised surface of the block. 'Woodcuts' became more commonly available in Europe during the fifteenth century when paper mills started to spring up and printing presses provided a more efficient way of transferring ink to the paper the than rubbing the back of the paper by hand.
Wood engravings
To produce a 'wood engraving' the artist uses the end of a block of hardwood such as boxwood. Instead of using a knife as used for 'woodcuts' a chisel shaped tool called a burin is used. This tool is similar to that used for engraving in copper.
Wood engraving' is normally 'black line', that is, the 'waste' area around the line drawn by the artist is cut away. The artist could form the image with a 'white' line but gouging out the drawn line. This type of wood engraving was made popular by Bewick around 1800 and is sometimes referred to as 'white line' wood engraving, since the line gouged out by the artist is not printed.
Like 'woodcuts' the printer applies ink to the surface of the wooden block and the grooves which form the image remain dry. So both 'woodcuts' and 'wood engraving' are 'relief printing' while 'engravings', normally on copper plates in which the ink lies in the grooves to form the image are called an 'intaglio' process. 'Intaglio' is Italian for 'engraving'.
The great advantage of 'relief' ../images such as 'woodcuts' in printing is that the block will sit neatly with movable type which is also a form of 'relief' printing. This is the reason why in books up to the middle of the nineteenth century, engravings or etchings were printed on separate pages to the text.
Intaglio prints: Engravings and Etchings
Engravings
The development of the 'rolling ' mangle type printing press in the fifteenth century made it possible to print engravings and etchings. Relief printing for 'woodcut' and 'wood engravings' only needed a relatively light press. The heavy 'rolling press ' was able to squeeze the ink out of the grooves in which it laid. Engravings and etching therefore, due to the pressure of the press, have a plate mark where the edge of the copper plate was pressed into the paper.
To produce an engraving the artist /engraver creates grooves by gouging out lines onto the copper plate with a miniature chisel called a 'burin'. After about 1820 steel became a competitor to the copper plate since the printer could produce many more prints from the harder steel plate. It was of course harder for the engraver to work the steel plate, however by the 1840's electrotyping enabled the artist to use a soft metal such as copper which could then be coated with a deposit of harder material to provide long print runs. You will notice however that some prints have had their original plate marks removed by close cropping the image. Sometimes the printer used a large plate to produce two or three ../images simultaneously, and when separated the plate mark may not be present even if the print has a reasonable border.
Engraving used for producing banknotes is obviously a laborious process and frequently engravers used etching to produce the initial image and perhaps subsequent ../images and only then producing the deeper groves with the burin. Thus the artist was not only able to provide the distinctive and highly prized engraving but also to provided the publisher with a longer print run. Nevertheless some plates still took six months full-time work and many engravers eyes were strained uncompromisingly.
 First used for printing ../images in 1513. Like goldsmiths, artists and engravers discovered that they could get acid to do some if not all of the hard work to produce the groves in the plate. The artist, using a copper plate covered with a coating of a type of wax, would draw the image onto the wax using a fine needle penetrating the needle down to the surface of the copper. The plate was then placed in a bath of acid which 'bit' into the copper surface exposed by the needle. By 'stopping out' some areas and additional biting the artist can achieve the image required,
Many prints designated as 'engravings' are in reality 'etchings' perhaps with some burin work, however the word 'engraving' is commonly used to describe many intaglio prints.
Etching was taken up by 'fine' artists in the late nineteenth century such as Whistler and by the 1920's etchings were highly prized. The expression 'Come up and see my etchings' was not nearly a devise for some hanky panky but also indicated the owner of the 'prints' had money since a fine etching could easily cost a years salary for a labourer.
Planographic prints: Lithographs
This process is entirely different in nature to the other techniques, as there are no grooves for the ink to sit in as in engravings or etchings. The surface of the printing 'block' is traditionally made of stone not wood or metal, and the stone remains a completely flat surface during the whole process of producing a lithograph.
This process is not as easy to understand or explain as relief or intaglio processes since it involves a complex chain of materials and activities all crucial to the final product.
The essential materials for producing a lithograph, excluding the special flat bed printing press are:
- A slab of smooth Bavarian Limestone, the size of a large family bible
- A greasy crayon which contains black pigment
- Gum arabic
- Asphaltum
- Turpentine
- Water
Activities:
To produce a lithograph, the artist draws an image onto the smooth surface of the stone using the greasy crayon.
The whole surface is covered with a thin layer of gum Aribic making the unmarked areas attractive to water when it is applied at a later stage.
The surface of the stone is then washed out with turpentine, the image nearly and alarmingly disappearing from sight! However, the mircoscopic particles which form the image are locked into the particals of the limestone.
A solution of greasy ashaltum is applied to the stone. This helps the surface of the stone to pick up the ink from the roller.
The whole surface is then dampened with a film of water. The water is repelled by the grease and when the ink roller is run over the surface, the ink is only picked up by the drawn image due to the antipathy between water and grease. This is the fundamental reason why a print can be produced in this manner.
A large sheet of paper is carefully laid onto the inked surface of the stone which is pushed under a horizontal scraper bar on the press, and the pressure from it transfers the inked image onto the paper, in reverse of course.
This process was discoved by Alois Senefelder in 1798 and it took him a decade to perfect the process. It is therefore not surprising that it is difficult to explain. The best way of understanding this process is to make a lithograph yourself! I have to admit
that my first efforts were failures since apparently I used a poor stone!
Other Types of Prints
There are several variations of prints not mentioned above, notably mezzotints, used mainly for portraits, aquatints, which replace the texture of 'watercolours' and other variations, for example stipple engravings and soft ground etchings.
The only way to be able to clearly identify the many varieties of prints is to physically handle good quality prints and look closely at the print, perhaps with a magnifying glass. Even then it is not easy in some cases to make a clear identification of the printing techniques used, for example when mixed methods were used by the artist/engraver. For those interested in the identification of prints I strongly recormend Bamber Gasciogne's 'How to Identify Prints'.
I can also recommend the following books on prints which is by no means exhaustive. However, I am sure the bibliographies of these books will enclude most other currently available books on this subject. (I will gladly supply a list of out of print books on prints on request.)
Prints and printmaking by Antony Griffiths Pub by British Museum ISBN 0-7141-2608-X
The Print in the western World by Linda .C.Hults Pub University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-229-13700-7
The English Print by Timthy Clayton pub Yale University Press ISBN 0-300-06650-3
The age of Caricature by Diana Donaldson Yale University Press ISBN 0-300-07178-7
The Mezzotint by Caral Wax pub Thames and Hudson ISBN 0-500-23583-X
The Renaissance Print by David Landau and Peter Parshall pub Yale University press ISBN 0-300-06883-2
Reading Popular Prints 1790-1870 by Brian Maidment pub Manchester University
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