Old English colour prints

by Malcolm C. Salaman

These literary influences are important to consider for any true appreciation of these old colour-prints, which, being a reflex in every respect of the popular spirit and character of the period in which they were produced, no other period could have bequeathed to us exactly as they are. And it is especially interesting to remember this, for, from the widespread popularity of these very prints, we may trace, in the pictures their great vogue called for, the origin of that abiding despot of popular English art which Whistler has, in his whimsical way, defined as the “British Subject.”

That the evolution of the colour-print, from its beginnings in chiaroscuro, can boast a long and fascinating history has been proved to admiration in the romantic and informing pages of Mrs. Frankau’s “Eighteenth-Century Colour-Prints”—a pioneer volume; but my present purpose is to tell the story only in so far as it concerns English art and taste.

Now, although during the seventeenth century we had in England a number of admirable and industrious engravers, we hear of no attempts among them to print engravings in anything but monochrome; so that, if they heard of the colour-experiments of Hercules Seghers, the Dutch etcher, whom Rembrandt admired, as doubtless they did hear, considering how constant and friendly was their intercourse with the Dutch and Flemish painters and engravers, none apparently thought it worth while to pursue the idea. But, after all, Seghers merely printed his etchings in one colour on a tinted paper, which can hardly be described as real colour-printing; and, if there had been any artistic value in the notion, would not the enterprising Hollar have attempted some use of it? Nor were our English line-engravers moved by any rumours they may have heard, or specimens they may have seen, of the experiments in colour-printing, made somewhere about 1680, by Johannes Teyler, of Nymegen in Holland, a painter, engraver, mathematical professor and military engineer. His were unquestionably the first true colour-prints, being impressions taken from one plate, the engraved lines of which were carefully painted with inks of different hues; and these prints may be seen in the British Museum, collected in all their numerous variety in the interesting and absolutely unique volume which Teyler evidently, to judge from the ornately engraved title-page, designed to publish as “Opus Typochromaticum.”

The experiment was of considerable interest, but one has only to look at these colour-printed line-engravings, with their crude juxtaposition of tints, to feel thankful that our English line-engravers were not lured from their allegiance to the black and white proper to their art. Doubtless they recognised that colour was opposed to the very spirit of the line-engraver’s art, just as, a hundred years later, the stipple-engravers realised that it could often enhance the charm of their own. In the black and white of a fine engraving there is a quality in the balancing of relative tones which in itself answers to the need of colour, which, in fact, suggests colour to the imagination; so the beauty and dignity of the graven line in a master’s hands must repel any adventitious chromatic aid. A Faithorne print, for instance, with its lines and cross-hatchings in colours is inconceivable; although one might complacently imagine Francis Place and Gaywood having, not inappropriately, experimented with Barlow’s birds and beasts after the manner of those in Teyler’s book. If, however, there were any English engravings of that period on which Teyler’s method of colour-printing might have been tried with any possibility of, at least, a popular success, they were surely Pierce Tempest’s curious Cryes of the City of London, after “Old” Laroon’s designs, which antedated by just over a hundred years the charming Wheatley “Cries,” so familiar, so desirable, in coloured stipple. But this was not to be, and not until the new and facile mezzotint method had gradually over-shadowed in popularity the older and more laborious line-engraving was the first essay in colour-printing made in England. In the year 1719 came Jacob Christopher Le Blon with his new invention, which he called “Printing Paintings.”

This invention was in effect a process of taking separate impressions, one over the other, from three plates of a desired picture, engraved in mezzotint, strengthened with line and etching, and severally inked each with the proportion of red, yellow, or blue, which, theorising according to Newton, Le Blon considered would go to make, when blended, the true colour-tones of any picture required. In fact, Le Blon practically anticipated the three-colour process of the present day; but in 1719 all the circumstances were against his success, bravely and indefatigably as he fought for it, influentially as he was supported.

Jacob Christopher Le Blon was a remarkable man, whose ingenious mind and restless, enthusiastic temperament led him through an artistic career of much adventure and many vicissitudes. Born in Frankfort in 1667—when Chinese artists were producing those marvels of colour-printing lately discovered by Mr. Lawrence Binyon in the British Museum—he studied painting and engraving for a while with Conrad Meyer, of Zurich, and subsequently in the studio of the famous Carlo Maratti at Rome, whither he had gone in 1696, in the suite of Count Martinetz, the French Ambassador. His studies seem to have been as desultory as his way of living. His friend Overbeck, however, recognising that Le Blon had talents which might develop with concentrated purpose, induced him in 1702 to settle down in Amsterdam and commence miniature-painter. The pictures in little which he did for snuff-boxes, bracelets, and rings, won him reputation and profit; but the minute work affected his eyesight, and instead he turned to portrait-painting in oils. Then the idea came to him of imitating oil-paintings by the colour-printing process, based on Newton’s theory of the three-colour composition of light, as I have described. Experimenting with promising results on paintings of his own, he next attempted to reproduce the pictures of the Italian masters, from which, under Maratti’s influence, he had learnt the secrets of colour. Without revealing his process, he showed his first “printed paintings” to several puzzled admirers, among them Prince Eugène of Savoy and, it is said, the famous Earl of Halifax, Newton’s friend, who invented the National Debt and the Bank of England. But, sanguine as Le Blon was that there was a fortune in his invention, he could obtain for it neither a patent nor financial support, though he tried for these at Amsterdam, the Hague, and Paris.

His opportunity came, however, when he met with Colonel Sir John Guise. An enthusiastic connoisseur of art, a collector of pictures (he left his collection to Christchurch College, Oxford), an heroic soldier, with a turn for fantastic exaggeration and romancing, which moved even Horace Walpole to protest, and call him “madder than ever,” Guise was just the man to be interested in the personality and the inventive schemes of Le Blon. Easily he persuaded the artist to come to London, and, through his introduction to many influential persons, he enlisted for Le Blon the personal interest of the King, who granted a royal patent, and permitted his own portrait to be done by the new process, of which this presentment of George I. is certainly one of the most successful examples, happiest in tone-harmony. Then, in 1721, a company was formed to work under the patent, with an establishment known as the “Picture Office,” and Le Blon himself to direct operations. Everything promised well, the public credit had just been restored after the South Sea Bubble, the shares were taken up to a substantial extent, and for a time all went well. An interesting prospectus was issued, with a list of colour-prints after pictures, chiefly sacred and mythological, by Maratti, Annibale Carracci, Titian, Correggio, Vandyck, some of them being identical in size with the original paintings, at such moderate prices as ten, twelve, and fifteen shillings. Lord Percival, Pope’s friend, who, like Colonel Guise, had entered practically into the scheme, was enthusiastic about the results. Sending some of the prints, with the bill for them, to his brother, he wrote: “Our modern painters can’t come near it with their colours, and if they attempt a copy make us pay as many guineas as now we pay shillings.” Certainly, if we compare Le Blon’s Madonna after Baroccio—priced fifteen shillings in the prospectus—for instance, with such an example of contemporary painting as that by Sir James Thornhill and his assistants, taken from a house in Leadenhall Street, and now at South Kensington, we may find some justification for Lord Percival’s enthusiasm. For colour quality there is, perhaps, little to choose between them, but as a specimen of true colour-printing, and the first of its kind, that Madonna is wonderful, and I question whether, in the later years, there was any colour-printing of mezzotint to approach it in brilliance of tone. Then, however, accuracy of harmonies was assured by adopting Robert Laurie’s method, approved in 1776, of printing from a single plate, warmed and lightly wiped after application of the coloured inks.

Discouragement soon fell upon the Picture Office. In March 1722 Lord Percival wrote:—“The picture project has suffered under a great deal of mismanagement, but yet improves much.” In spite of that improvement, however, a meeting of shareholders was held under the chairmanship of Colonel Guise, and Le Blon’s management was severely questioned. The shareholders appear to have heckled him quite in the modern manner, and he replied excitedly to every hostile statement that it was false. But there was no getting away from figures. At a cost of £5,000 Le Blon had produced 4,000 copies of his prints—these were from twenty-five plates—which, if all had been sold at the prices fixed, would have produced a net loss of £2,000. Even Colonel Guise could hardly consider these as satisfactory business methods, and the company had already been reorganised, with a new manager named Guine, who had introduced a cheaper and more profitable way of producing the prints. It was all to no purpose. Prints to the value of only £600 were sold at an expenditure of £9,000, while the tapestry-weaving branch of the business—also Le Blon’s scheme—showed an even more disproportionate result. Bankruptcy followed as a matter of course, and Le Blon narrowly escaped imprisonment.

The colour-printing of engravings, though artistically promising, while still experimental, had certainly proved a financial failure, but Le Blon, nothing daunted, sought to explain and justify his principles and his practice in a little book, called “Coloritto, or the Harmony of Colouring in Painting, reduced to mechanical practice, under easy precepts, and infallible rules.” This he dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole, hoping, perhaps, that the First Lord of the Treasury, who had just restored the nation’s credit, might do something for an inventive artist’s. Next he was privileged to submit his inventions to the august notice of the Royal Society. Le Blon had always his opportunities, an well a his rebuff from fortune, but his faith in himself and his ideas was unswerving; moreover, he had the gift of transmitting this faith to others. At last a scheme for imitating Raphael’s cartoons in tapestry, carried on at works in Chelsea, led to further financial disaster and discredit, and Le Blon was obliged to fly from England.

In Paris he resumed his colour-printing, inspiring and influencing many disciples and imitators, among them Jacques Fabian Gautier D’Agoty, who afterwards claimed to have invented Le Blon’s process, and transmitted it to his sons. In Paris, in 1741, Le Blon died, very, very poor, but still working upon his copper-plates. It was doubtless during Le Blon’s last years in Paris that Horace Walpole met him. “He was a Fleming (sic), and very far from young when I knew him, but of surprising vivacity and volubility, and with a head admirably mechanic; but an universal projector, and with, at least, one of the qualities that attend that vocation, either a dupe or a cheat: I think the former, though, as most of his projects ended in the air, the sufferers believed the latter. As he was much an enthusiast, perhaps like most enthusiasts he was both one and t’other.” As a matter of fact, Le Blon was neither a dupe nor a cheat; he was simply a pioneer with all the courage of his imagination and invention; and no less an authority than Herr Hans W. Singer, of Vienna, has considered him, with all his failures and shortcomings, of sufficient artistic importance to be worthy of a monograph.