Old English colour prints

by Malcolm C. Salaman

If, by a more judicious selection of pictures for copying, Le Blon had been able to create a popular demand, and to ensure general encouragement for his venture, how different might have been the story of colour-printing, how much fuller its annals. For Le Blon’s ultimate failure was not owing to the comparative impossibility or getting infallibly the required harmonics of his tones with only the three cardinal colours, and the necessity to add a fourth plate with a qualifying black, or to the difficulty in achieving the exactness of register essential to the perfect fusing of the tones of several plates. Those were serious obstacles, certainly, hindering complete artistic success; but, judging from the surprising excellence of the best of Le Blon’s actual achievements, they would doubtless have been surmounted for all practical purposes. The real cause of the failure was, I suggest, that the pictures actually reproduced made no appeal to the people of England, consequently there was no public demand for the prints. It was a close time for the fine arts in this country. The day of the public picture-exhibition was nearing, but it had not yet arrived. The aristocratic collector and the fashionable connoisseur represented the taste of the country, for popular taste there was none. Romance and sentiment were quite out of fashion, and the literature of the day was entirely opposed to them. Nor were there any living painters with even one touch of nature. The reign of George I. was indeed a depressing time for the graphic arts. Society, heavily bewigged and monstrously behooped, was too much concerned with its pastimes and intrigues, its affectations, caprices and extravagances, to cultivate any taste or care for beauty. Kent, the absurdly fashionable architect, was ruling in place of the immortal Wren, and Kneller was so long and so assuredly the pictorial idol of the country that Pope, its poet-in-chief, could actually write of him that “great Nature fear’d he might outvie her works.” Then, all else of pictorial art meant either Thornhill’s wearisome ceilings and stair-cases, or the stiff and tasteless portraiture, with stereotyped posture, of the lesser Knellers, such as Jonathan Richardson, Highmore, and Jervas, whom Pope made even more ridiculous by his praises.

With only such painters as these to interpret, what chance had even such admirable engravers as John Smith, George White, John Simon, Faber, Peter Pelham, whose mezzotints even were beginning to wane in favour for lack of pictorial interest? It is no great wonder then that, seeing Le Blon’s failure, in spite of all his influence and achievement, the engravers in mezzotint were not eager to try the principles of his “Coloritto” in their own practice, and so colour-printing suffered a set-back in this country. But Le Blon’s prints are of great value to-day. What, then, has become of those 9,000 copies printed by the Picture Office? The £600 worth sold before the bankruptcy must have represented about a thousand, yet these impressions from Le Blon’s fifty-plates are of extreme rarity even in the museums of the world, and it has been suggested by Herr Singer, and also by Mr. A. M. Hind, in his valuable “History of Engraving and Etching,” that many copies of the large prints, varnished over, may be hanging in old houses under the guise of oil paintings, thus fulfilling their original purpose. It is an interesting conjecture, and how plausible one may judge from the varnished copies in the British Museum.

Le Blon’s really important venture inspired no imitators in England, but it was followed by a few experimental attempts to embellish engravings with colour. These were chiefly adaptations of the old chiaroscuro method, surface-colour being obtained by using several wood-blocks in combination with engraved copper-plates. Arthur Pond and Charles Knapton, painters both, imitated a number of drawings in this manner, the designs being etched; while, some years earlier, Elisha Kirkall (“bounteous Kirkall” of the “Dunciad”) had successfully used the coloured wood-blocks with mezzotint plates, strengthened with etched and graven lines. His pupil, J. B. Jackson, however, engraved only wood for his remarkable prints. But these experiments were merely sporadic; they led to nothing important and continuous in the way of colour-printing.

Meanwhile, the prints of Hogarth, with their marvellous pictorial invention, mordant satire, and moral illumination, took the fancy of the town without the lure of colour, and cultivated in the popular mind a new sense of picture, concerned with the live human interest of the passing hour. Other line-engravers, too,—Vivares, Woollett, Ravenet, Major, Strange,—with more masterly handling of the graver, were, through the new appeal of landscape, or the beauties of Rembrandt and the Italian masters, or the homely humours of Dutch genre, winning back the popular favour for their art.

Though the call for the colour-print had not yet arrived, the way was preparing for it. With this widening public interest in pictorial art, a dainty sense of tone was awakened by the porcelain now efflorescing all aver the country. Then, when Reynolds was bringing all the graces to his easel, the urbane influence for beauty spread from the master’s painting-room at 47, Leicester Fields—as the Square was then called—to all the print-shops in town. And the year—1764—that saw the death of Hogarth was the year in which Francesco Bartolozzi came to England, bringing with him into the engraving-world fresh influences of grace and delicacy which gradually ripened for colour.

II.

The sentimental mood for the storied picture was now being fostered by the universal reading of the novel, which in its mid-eighteenth-century form gave its readers new experiences in the presentation of actual contemporary life, with analysis of their feelings and cultivation of there sensibilities. Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, Sophia Western and Amelia, Olivia, Maria, were as living in interest as any of the beautiful high-born ladies whose portraits in mezzotint, translated from the canvasses of the great painters, appealed from the printsellers’ windows in all the monochrome beauty of their medium. The public, steeped now in sentiment, wanted to see their imaginary heroines in picture: nor had they long to wait. The Royal Academy had become a vital factor in forming public taste, and the printsellers’ shops were its mirrors. But not all its members and exhibitors were Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses. There were, for instance, Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, with their seductive Italian graces of design; there was Bartolozzi, with his beautiful draughtsmanship, and his brilliant facile craft on the copper-plate, but the medium that should bring these into familiar touch with popular taste was still to seek. However, it was at hand, and the man who found this medium, and brought it to the service of popular art, was William Wynne Ryland, “engraver to the King.”

Whether the so-called crayon method of engraving, in imitation of soft chalk drawings, was invented by Jean Charles François, or Gilles Demarteau, or Louis Bonnet—all three claimed the credit of it—it was, at all events, from François, whose claim had obtained official recognition, that Ryland, the pupil of Ravenet and Le Bas, and, in a measure, of Boucher, learned the method while he was still a student in Paris. Only later in his career, however, long after he had left behind him his student days in Paris and Rome, and achieved prosperity in London as a line-engraver and printseller, with royal patronage, and with social success as a man of fashion and pleasure, did he remember the process that François had imparted to him. Then, in his necessity, when his extravagances had brought him to bankruptcy, he called the dotted crayon manner to memory, and saw in stipple-engraving, if suitably employed, a possible asset of importance. Compared with line and even with mezzotint it was a very easy and rapid way of engraving, and though, of course, it could not compare with either in nobility, richness and brilliance of effect, Ryland realised that its soft rendering of tones by artistically balanced masses of dots might be adapted to dainty and delicate drawings. The most fortunate opportunity for proving this was at hand. He had some personal acquaintance with Angelica Kauffman, whom Lady Wentworth had brought to London some ten years before, and whose beauty, talents and personal charm had meanwhile made her a fashionable artistic idol, with Society and its beauties flocking to her studio to be painted or to buy her pictures. Having first tested his stippling with his own designs, gracefully French in manner, which he published soon afterwards as “Domestic Employments,” Ryland suggested the idea of stipple-engraving to the sympathetic young painter. When he had experimented with one or two of her drawings, she gladly recognised that stipple was the very medium for the interpretation of her work to the public. The first prints sold “like wildfire,” and so satisfied was Ryland of the profitable prospect, that, on the strength of it, he promptly re-established himself in a printselling business at 159, Strand. His confidence was amply justified, the public being quick to show their appreciation of the new method, introduced as it was with all the persuasion of the fair Angelica’s graceful, fanciful designs of classic story and allegory. This was in 1775, and within a very short time Ryland found that, rapidly as she designed and he engraved, he could scarcely keep pace with the demand for these prints, which, the more readily to crave the popular fancy, he printed in red ink, to imitate red chalk, later to be known as the “Bartolozzi red.”

Ryland had called Bartolozzi into consultation, and the gifted Italian engraver, with his greater mastery of technique, his delicate sense of beauty, and his finer artistic perceptions, had seen all that might be done with the new way of stipple; he saw also its limitations. With enthusiasm Bartolozzi and Ryland had worked together till they had evolved from the crayon manner of François a process of engraving which proved so happily suited to the classes of fanciful and sentimental prints now fast becoming the vogue, that it simply jumped into a popularity which no other medium of the engraver’s art had ever attained.

The stipple method may be thus described. The copper-plate was covered with an etching-ground, on to which the outlined picture was transferred from paper. Then the contours of the design were lightly etched in a series of dots, all the dark and middle shadows being rendered by larger or more closely etched dots, the later engravers using even minute groups of dots. This accomplished, the acid was next applied with very great care, and all the etched dots bitten in. The waxen ground was then removed from the plate, and the work with the dry-point and the curved stipple-graver was commenced. With these tools the lighter shadows were accomplished, and the bitten portions of the picture were deepened and strengthened wherever required, to attain greater fulness or brilliance of effect.