This careful drawing, from the painting by Mr. Boughton, in the Royal Academy, reproduced by the Dawson process, is interesting for variety of treatment and indication of textures in pen and ink. It is like the picture, but it has also the individuality of the draughtsman, as in line engraving.
Size of drawing about 6½ x 3½ in.
“BADMINTON IN THE STUDIO.” (FROM THE PAINTING BY R. W. MACBETH, A.R.A.)
(Royal Academy, 1891.)
The art of line-engraving is disappearing in England, giving way to the “painter-etchers,” the “dry-point” etchers and the “mezzotint engravers,” and, finally, to photogravure, a method of engraving which is so extraordinary, and so little understood (although it has been in constant use for more than ten years), that it may be worth while to explain, in a few words, the method as practised by Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., successors to Goupil, of Paris.
In the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1882, Sir Frederick Leighton’s picture called “Wedded” will be remembered by many visitors. This picture was purchased for Australia, and had to be sent from England within a few weeks of the closing of the exhibition. There was no time to make an engraving, or even an etching satisfactorily, and so the picture was sent to Messrs. Goupil, who in a few weeks produced the photogravure, as it is called, which we see in the printsellers’ windows to this day. The operation is roughly as follows:—First, a photograph is taken direct from the picture; then a carbon print is taken from the negative upon glass, which rests upon the surface in delicate relief. From this print a cast is taken in reverse in copper, by placing the glass in a galvanic bath, the deposit of copper upon the glass taking the impression of the picture as certainly as snow takes the pattern of the ground upon which it falls. Thus—omitting details, and certain “secrets” of the process—it may be seen how modern science has superseded much of the engraver’s work, and how a mechanical process can produce in a few days that which formerly took years.
What the permanent art-estimate of “photo-engraving” may be, as a substitute for hand-work, is a question for the collectors of engravings and etchings. In the meantime, it is well that the public should know what a photogravure is, as distinct from an engraving. The system of mechanical engraving, in the reproduction of pictures, is spreading rapidly over the world; but it should be observed that these reproductions are not uniformly successful. One painter’s method of handling lends itself more readily than that of another to mechanical engraving. Thus the work of the President of the Royal Academy would reproduce better than that of Mr. G. F. Watts or Mr. Orchardson. That the actual marks of the brush, the very texture of the painting, can be transferred to copper and steel, and multiplied ad infinitum by this beautiful process, is a fact to which many English artists are keenly alive. The process has its limits, of course, and photogravure has at present to be assisted to a considerable extent by the engraver. But enough has been done in the last few years to prove that photography will henceforth take up the painter’s handiwork as he leaves it, and thus the importance of thoroughness and completeness on the part of the painter has to be more than ever insisted upon by the publishers of “engravings.”
A word may be useful here to explain that the coloured “photogravures,” reproducing the washes of colour in a painting or water-colour drawing, of which we see so many in Paris, are not coloured by hand in the ordinary way, but are produced complete, at one impression, from the printing-press. The colours are laid upon the plate, one by one, by the printer, by a system of stencilling; and thus an almost perfect fac-simile of a picture can be reproduced in pure colour, if the original is simple and broad in treatment.