Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

by comte Henri Delaborde

Fig. 93.—WOOLLETT.

Landscape. After G. Smith.

So much progress accomplished in so few years attracted the attention of statesmen and of the English Government. They saw it was time to cease from paying tribute to the superiority of French engravers, and to allow those talents to develop in London which had till then been sent to school in Paris. George III. had just founded the Royal Academy (Jan., 1769), with Reynolds for its first President. He determined still further to strengthen the impulse of art by countenancing great undertakings in engraving; and as he wished the country to reap as much commercial benefit as honour in the matter, he granted bounties on the exportation of English engravings, while the importation of French work was taxed with enormous duties.

In this way the progress of national art became a political question, and every one hastened to second the king's views. Woollett's plates had been largely subscribed for before publication, and the illustrated editions of the travels of Cook and Sir Joseph Banks were taken up in a few days. Finally, when it was proposed to engrave Copley's "Death of Chatham," the subscription at once ran up to £3,600; and when, the first proofs having been taken, the plate was returned to the engraver, he made almost as much more in less than two years. Nor did the fever of protection in any wise abate for that. On the contrary, it called a number of talents into being, and attracted to London a crowd of foreigners, all sure of the encouragement which began to fail them elsewhere. Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, Catherine Prestel, the Swiss Moser and his daughter, and a hundred other painters or engravers, came in one after another to contribute to the success of the school and the spread of English trade.[46]

Amongst these adventurers there was one—the Florentine Bartolozzi—whose works at once became the fashion, less, perhaps, for any intrinsic merit than because of the novelty of his method. The process called "stipple engraving" excluded the use of lines and cross hatchings, and consisted in the arrangement of masses of dots more or less delicate in themselves, and more or less close in order, and designed in proportion to their relative distance or nearness, to render nice gradations of tone, depth of shadow, and even completeness of outline.

Speaking exactly, this was but an application to the general execution of a work of a process adopted long before by etchers and line engravers as a means of partial execution. Jean Morin, Boulanger, Gérard Audran himself, and many others, had habitually made use of dots to supplement the work of the burin or the needle, or to effect transitions between their lights and shadows, or the larger of their outlines and subtler details of their modelling. Moreover, before their time, Jan Lutma, a Dutch goldsmith, invented a method of "engraving in dots," which, produced by means of his etching needle and aquafortis, were deepened and enlarged with chisel and hammer: whence the name of opus mallei bestowed on his results. Bartolozzi, therefore, and the English engravers who, like Ryland, made use of stippling, did but revive and extend in their own way the boundaries of a method already known. They displayed remarkable skill, it is true, but their work, like the rest of its kind, displays a feebleness of form that is almost inevitable, and is touched with a coldness inherent in the very nature of the process.

In stipple engraving, the burin and the dry point are used alternately, according to the degree of vigour or delicacy required. The parts that are to come light in proof are done with the dry-point; while those to come dark are covered with dots ploughed deeper with the burin. Round the edge of these, by the mere act of ploughing, there is raised a rim, or rampart—technically called a "burr"—which the engraver, to regain the ground thus lost, has to rub down with the burnisher. In this way he goes on dotting and burnishing till he gets a close enough grain.

Immensely successful during the last years of the eighteenth century, stipple engraving soon went out of fashion, not only in France, where it scarce survived the first attempts of Copia, but even in England, where the example of Bartolozzi and Ryland had been followed with such eager diligence. Such, too, somewhat later, was the fate of a somewhat similar process—the "crayon engraving," of which Gilles Demarteau, born in Liège, but bred and trained in Paris, may be considered, if not the inventor, at least the most active, skilful, and popular practitioner.[47]

The object of crayon engraving is to imitate the effect of red or black chalk on a coarse-grained paper, which, by the very roughness of its surface, retains no more than an uneven, and as it were a disconnected, impression of the strokes or hatchings laid upon it. In common with stipple engraving, it renders the loose and broken lines of the originals by substituting a mass of dots for the ordinary work of the burin or the needle. It differs, however, from stipple engraving in the method of working, and even in the nature of the tools employed. The outlines are traced on the varnished copper with a toothed or multi-pointed needle, while the inner hatchings are made either with the needle in question, or with what is called a roulette, which is a steel cylinder bristling with small, jagged teeth, and running on a fixed axis. The roulette, which is provided with a handle, is so directed that the teeth are brought to bear directly, and with more or less effect, on the varnished copper. Then the plate is bitten in; and when the aquafortis has done its part, the work, if necessary, is resumed with the same tools on the bare metal.