The first specimens of crayon engraving were presented in 1757 to the Académie Royale de Peinture, which, an official document informs us[48] "highly approved of the method, as being well fitted to perpetuate the designs of good masters, and multiply copies of the best styles of drawings." For the reproduction of drawings, the new process was certainly better than etching, at least as practised to that end by the Count de Caylus and the Abbé de Saint-Non. The misfortune was, that in the eighteenth century as in the first years of the nineteenth, the crayon engravers appear to have thought far less of "perpetuating the designs of good masters" than of suiting their choice of originals to the prevailing fashion. As a matter of fact, however skilful they were in execution, the only cause served by Demarteau's innumerable fac-similes was that of the Bouchers and Fragonards, and of kindred experts in "the most distinguished school of drawing." Reproduced by engraving, the crayon studies of these persons became the ordinary means of instruction in academies and public schools; and from the first the popularity of these wretched models was such that, even after the revolution effected in art by David, on through the Empire, and as late as the Restoration, art students generally remained subject to the regimen adopted for their predecessors in the days of Louis XV. and XVI.
Then lithography made its appearance, and in no great while was applied to the production of drawing-copies, once the monopoly of crayon engraving. Nor was this the only quarter from which the method of François and Demarteau was assailed. By degrees it fell out of use for the production not only of drawing-copies, but of fac-similes of drawings by the masters for artists and amateurs; or, if occasionally practised, it was—as in the subjects engraved some thirty years back from drawings in the Louvre and the Musée de Lille—with so many modifications, and in combination with such a number of other processes, as reduced it from supremacy to the rank, till worse should befall, of a mere auxiliary. In our own time it has had its death-blow in the advance of photography; and as, after all, its one object was the presentation of an exact likeness, the absolute effigy, of its original, the preference of a purely mechanical process of reproduction is, if we consider the certainty of the results, no more than natural. In proportion as, by its very nature, photography is powerless to take the place of engraving, when the work to be reproduced, be it picture or mural decoration, presupposes in the interpreter, in whatsoever degree, the power of translating what is before him, just so far is it capable of fulfilling the one condition imposed upon the copyist of a drawing or an engraving—that of perfect fidelity in imitation.
The object attempted by François, Demarteau, Bonnet, and others—the production by engraving of a sort of optical illusion, the exact fac-simile of a drawing—had been started before them by Jean Christophe Leblond, an artist born of French parents at Frankfort, who, moreover, had sought to extend to the imitation of colour what his successors were content to restrict to the imitation of monochrome. Very early in the eighteenth century, Leblond succeeded in producing prints in several tints, by a method which he called "pastel engraving," and to which custom has given the more general name of "colour engraving." For the second half of this title, it might, perhaps, have been better to use the word "printing." What is called "colour engraving" is not really a special engraving process. Its whole originality consists in the production of a single proof from several plates (generally four), in the preparation of which the rocker, the roulette, and sometimes even the burin, have been used. From these plates, each inked with a single colour, the effect of which is relieved or modified by the subsequent addition of those tints with which the other three are covered, there results in the proof, by the use of points of correspondence, an ensemble in colour which is similar in appearance to that of painting in pastel, in water-colour, or in gouache. This was pretty much the process, and the results were in some sort comparable with those obtained by chromo-lithography. The older method had, however, the advantage of the other in that, by the very variety of the preparation to which the plate was subjected, its results were not so liable to present the appearance, either coarse or dull, of common hand-tinted work.
Some of Leblond's engravings, particularly a large, half-length "Louis XV.," enable us to estimate to the full the capacities of his invention. Leblond, indeed, must be counted an inventor, inasmuch as it was his to discover a secret which, before him, had been only dimly foreseen, or at most half-guessed. Still, the essays in the first years of the seventeenth century of the Dutchman Lastmann, and a little later of Seghers the Fleming, should not be completely overlooked; nor would it be just to refuse recognition to the practical improvements made in colour engraving, after Leblond, by Gautier Dagoty, in Paris, and by Taylor, in London. In proportion to the relative importance of the two discoveries, Leblond played the same part in the history of the colour process as Daguerre in the history of heliography. They each effected so great an advance as to close the period of groping and darkness, and to some extent determine the course of progress. But it does not follow, therefore, that they owed nothing to the attempts of their predecessors; and if their claim to inventors' honours is fairly established, it is because they solved a problem they were by no means the first to attack.
Leblond, indeed, got nothing from his discovery but the honour of making it. He sought in vain to turn it to account in London, and succeeded no better in Paris. In the latter city he lived for some years in great distress, and in 1741 he died there, in the hospital.
Some years after the invention of colour engraving, another sort of engraving, or rather another sort of pictorial reproduction, the method called "au lavis," was invented, and very skilfully used from the outset, by Jean Baptiste Leprince; and in no great while the series of innovations in the practice of the art, from the end of the seventeenth century, was completed by the invention of aquatint.
The first of these two processes is apparently of extreme simplicity. The line once engraved and bitten in, as in ordinary etching, it only consisted in brushing the plate with acid, as a draughtsman washes in on paper with sepia or Indian ink. The preliminary work, however, required a great deal of care and skill, and even a certain amount of scientific knowledge. The particular quality of the copper, the composition of the varnishes and acids, and many other conditions impossible to discuss in detail, made the new process somewhat difficult of employment; and before long the ardour of those practitioners who had essayed to imitate Leprince's results was very sensibly diminished.
In spite of the value of these results, and the personal skill of the inventor; in spite, too, of the technical explanations contained in the "Plan du Traité de la Gravure au Lavis" presented by him (1750) to the Académie Royale, it was evident that the French engravers thought lightly of Leprince's discovery, and did not care to investigate its capabilities. It only got a fresh start in France when, notably modified and improved by the initiative of foreign engravers, it had been transformed in London into what is known as aquatint engraving. Then, however, in the hands of Debucourt[49] and of Jazet later on, it acquired a popularity all the greater that its productions, by their very nature and quality, were more intimately in harmony with the inspiration and style of fashionable art. Jazet, for instance, contributed greatly to the triumph of aquatint in France, by applying it, from the first years of the Restoration, to the interpretation of the works of Horace Vernet. Such plates as "Le Bivouac du Colonel Moncey," the "Barrière de Clichy," the "Soldat Laboureur," and many others, were tolerated among Frenchmen for the sake of the associations they awakened at least as much as for their artistic merit.
It is possible that since then the engraver has reckoned a little too much on the world-wide reputation of his painter; or it may be that he has been somewhat too conscious of the advantages of a rapid and facile method, and has sacrificed the ideal of delicacy and correctness to the enhancement of a reputation for fertility. Certain it is that Jazet, as is proved by his early engravings, and especially the "Barrière de Clichy," was more capable than any one else of raising work in aquatint to the level of art; and it is much to be regretted that his somewhat careless ease should have hindered the full development of his talent. It is still more to be regretted that, in spite of the laudable efforts of Messrs. Prévost, Girard, and others to maintain the process in the better way, it should have been dishonoured and deprived of all but a purely commercial importance by the production of multitudes of plates, whose only merit is their cheapness. If we consider the so-called Biblical scenes done in aquatint for exportation, the heroines of romance, the half-naked women described (by way of commentary) as "Love," "Souvenir," "Pleasure," "Desire," and all the terms of the erotic vocabulary, it is hard to say whether the intention or the execution is the more unpleasant. What is certain is that such things have nothing to do with art except as examples of its degradation and destruction. That section of the public sensible of their charm is certainly not that which is impressed by beauty, and it is useless to care about winning its approbation; but when ugliness is everywhere it is to be feared that everybody may grow used to the sight, and forget to look elsewhere. The danger to which pure line engraving is thus exposed by the deplorable exigencies of competition is not the only one which threatens the art. A glance at its several phases since 1800 and at its present state is enough to show that the line of talents has never once been interrupted; that those of to-day are every whit as vigorous and accomplished as those of the past; but that for opportunities of displaying their full power, and being appreciated at their true worth they have not seldom to wait in vain.