Prints: A Brief Review of Their Technique and History

by Emil H. Richter

In the early nineteenth century two new processes demand recognition: wood-engraving and lithography. The former, reviewed in the preceding chapter with reference to its development in America, speedily gained in technical perfection at the hands of English engravers. It spread far and wide in Europe, adapting itself to the charming illustrations of Ludwig Richter and doing full justice to the expressive, accurate line of Adolph von Menzel’s pen-and-ink work. Light and vivacious in the vignettes of Tony Johannot, Gigoux, Célestin Nanteuil, it grows somber in Doré’s designs for the Bible and for Dante’s “Divina Commedia.”

CHRIST DISPUTING WITH THE DOCTORS

Adolph von Menzel

Shortly after the advent of wood-engraving, lithography appears, and offers the tempting inducement of utmost technical simplicity to the artist. The drawing is made on the stone or on transfer paper with lithographic ink or crayon; the transferring and preparation of the stone (or metal plate) with acid, gum, and water is left to the printer. No wonder that the process found wide favor and that it was put to a great variety of uses: innumerable portraits, endless series of views, costume plates, music titles, reproductions of pictures. In the hands of artists the process proves its merit by such prints as “Christ Disputing with the Doctors,” by Adolph von Menzel, that untiring pioneer of realism in Germany. The scene with its masterly characterization is astonishing in the play of expression on each face and figure. In France both processes burst into profuse bloom with the awakening of romanticism. The thirties and forties bring a wealth of notable lithographic productions, the work of Delacroix, Isabey, Géricault, Decamps, Diaz, and a host of other artists. Gavarni uses this easy medium to portray in thousands of sketches the life of all Paris. Daumier portrays the frailties of humanity in his cartoons for “Charivari” and “La Caricature,” or else wields his crayon as a formidable political weapon; in the print selected for illustration he shows us Louis Philippe at the death-bed of a political offender “who can now be released, being no longer dangerous.”

CARTOON ON LOUIS PHILIPPE

Honoré Daumier

The fortunes of France, fraught with conquest under the first Napoleon, sink to humdrum levels with the Restoration. For years all recollection of the Emperor and his Grande Armée is embittered by the final disaster. But passing years restore the luster of former great exploits, and gradually these become a favorite subject for illustration. The field is well covered by Charlet’s military scenes, though none of these approach the grandeur and skill displayed by Auguste Raffet. In his “Midnight Review” we see innumerable hosts of shades, passing in review before the phantom emperor on his white charger; an immense concourse insensibly merging into the mists of night.

In the forties there is a welcome revival of etching, Charles Jacque being one of the pioneers, skillful alike in his handling of acid and dry-point. His theme is the peasant’s life, his setting the wooded, undulating region about Barbizon: broad, sunny fields, thriving farms, pastures with cattle, sheep, and pigs, for which he shows an especial predilection. The peasant, here, is no longer the joyous, carousing, merry being of Ostade’s fancy. In the plates of Millet and Jacque we see him at his daily labors and the woman at her household tasks, as in the “Woman Churning,” by Jean François Millet, drawn in sober, telling lines, and evoking by some subtle magic a sense not only of the scene before us, but of her surroundings and her whole labor-laden life.