Old English colour prints

by Malcolm C. Salaman

Engraving in dots was, of course, no new thing; as an accessory to line-engraving it had often been called into service by the earlier artists. Giulio Campagnola, Albert Dürer, Agostino Veneziano, Ottavio Leoni, for example, had used it; we frequently find it employed by our own seventeenth-century line-men the better to suggest flesh-tones, and Ludwig von Siegen, in describing his invention of mezzotint in 1642, includes the “dotted manner” among the known forms of engraving. Then there was the opus mallei, or method of punching dots in the plate with a mallet and awl, which was successfully practised by Jan Lutma, of Amsterdam, late in the seventeenth century. This may be considered the true precursor of stipple, just as the harpsichord, with the same keyboard, but a different manner of producing the notes, was the precursor of the pianoforte; but it must have been a very laborious process, and Lutma found few imitators.

Under the ægis of Ryland and Bartolozzi, however, and with the inspiration of Angelica Kauffman’s “harmonious but shackled fancy,” as a contemporary critic put it, for its initial impetus, stipple was developed as a separate and distinctive branch of the engraver’s art. Its popularity was now to be further enhanced by the gentle and persuasive aid of colour. Ryland had seen many specimens of colour-printing in Paris, when he was with François and with Boucher; he now bethought him that, just as the public fancy had been captured by red-chalk imitations, so might it be enchanted by engraved representations of water-colour drawings actually printed in colours. Angelica Kauffman and Bartolozzi eagerly encouraged the idea, and the two engravers, after many experiments, determined the best process of colouring and printing from the plates. Apparently they rejected the multi-plate method tried six years previously by that interesting artist Captain William Baillie; and Ryland’s earliest colour-prints were partially tinted only with red and blue. Mrs. Frankau tells us, on the authority of a tradition handed down in his old age from James Minasi, one of Bartolozzi’s most trusted pupils, that an Alsatian named Seigneuer was responsible for all the earlier colour-printed impressions of Ryland’s and Bartolozzi’s stipples after Angelica Kauffman and Cipriani, that then he set up on his own account as a colour-printer, much recommended by Bartolozzi, and largely employed by the publishers, and that his printing may be traced, though unsigned, by a transparency of tone due to the use of a certain vitreous white which he imported in a dry state from Paris. Minasi must, of course, have been a perfect mine of Bartolozzi traditions, but when my father in his boyhood knew him and his musical son, the distinguished engraver would talk of nothing but music, for in 1829, with steel plates superseding the copper, and lithography triumphant, there seemed no prospect that the coloured stipples, already some time out of fashion, would eighty years later be inspiring curiosity as to how they were done. One sees, of course, many feeble colour-prints of the period, which of old the undiscriminating public accepted as readily as to-day they buy, for “old prints,” modern cheap foreign reproductions which would disgrace a sixpenny “summer number.” On the other hand, the really fine examples of the old-time colour-printing, combined with brilliant engraving—and, of course, only fine things are the true collector’s desiderata, irrespective of margins and “state” letterings, and other foolish fads—are certainly works of art, though a very delicate art of limited compass.

These colour-prints were done with a single printing, and the plate had to be freshly inked for each impression. The printer would have a water-colour drawing to work from, and having decided upon the dominant tint, with this he would ink over the whole engraved surface of the plate. Then he would wipe it almost entirely out of the incisions and punctures on the copper which had retained it, leaving just a sufficient harmonising ground-tint for the various coloured inks, carefully selected as to tints, which were next applied in the exact order and degree to ensure the right harmonies. All this required the nicest care directed by a very subtle sense of colour. Most difficult of all, and reserved for the last stage of the inking, was adding the flesh-tints, an operation of extreme delicacy. Then, before putting the plate in the printing-press, it had to be warmed to the exact degree of sensitiveness which should help the colours to fuse with tenderness and softness, without losing any brilliant quality of tone. This was not the least anxious part of the work, needing highly-trained artistic sensibility on the part of the printer. How artistically important this matter of warming the plates must have been in printing a combination of coloured inks may be judged when I say that I have been privileged to watch Whistler warming his etched plates ready for the printing-press, and seen him actually quivering with excited sensibility as the plate seemed to respond sensitively to the exigence of his own exquisite sense of tone. But, of course, no eighteenth-century colour-prints, however charming in tone, suggest that there were any Whistlers engaged in the printing of them. Perhaps that is why our modern master of the copper-plate never cared for these dainty things, as he did greatly care for Japanese colour-prints. The old printers, however, had their own definite manner of work, and their own tricks of experience for producing pleasing and brilliant effects. By the dusting of a little dry colour on to the moist, here and there, during the printing process, they could heighten tones, or by very, very lightly dragging a piece of muslin over the surface of the plate they could persuade the tints to a more tender and harmonious intimacy. Of course, when the plate was printed, the colour was taken only by the dots and lines of the engraving, the white paper peeping between. If would-be buyers of colour-prints would only remember this simple fact, and examine the stippling closely to see whether it really shows the colour, they would not so constantly be deceived into buying entirely hand-coloured prints. Whether the old printers and engravers authorised and sponsored the touching-up of the prints with water-colour which one almost invariably finds, at least to some slight extent, even in the best examples, with rare exceptions, it is impossible to determine. At all events, it is presumable that the eyes and lips were touched up before the prints left the publishers’ shops.

It must not be supposed, however, that colour had ousted from public favour the print in monochrome. As a matter of fact, it was usually only after the proofs and earlier brilliant impressions in monochrome had been worked off, and the plate was beginning to look a little worn, that the aid of colour was called in to give the print a fresh lease of popularity. Indeed, with mezzotint a slightly worn plate generally took the colours most effectively. This is why one sees so very seldom an engraver’s proof in colours, the extreme rarity of its appearance making always a red-letter moment at Christie’s. Therefore, in spite of the ever-widening vogue of the colour-print, it was always the artist and engraver that counted, while the printer in colours was scarcely ever named. And the new industry of stipple-engraving may be said to have been, in its first days of popularity, monopolised almost by Ryland and Bartolozzi, in association with Angelica Kauffman and John Baptist Cipriani.

Cipriani had, by his elegant and tasteful designs, won immediate favour on his arrival in England, and even the Lord Mayor’s coach was decorated with panels of his painting. His style prepared the way for Angelica Kauffman, and together they soon brought a new pictorial element to the service of home-decoration. Their graceful rhythmic treatment of classic fables was just what the brothers Adam wanted for their decorative schemes, and the two Italian artists were extensively employed to paint panels for walls and ceilings. In time the fair Angelica outdistanced Cipriani in popularity, and, painting panels for cabinets, commodes, pier-table tops, and other pieces of decorative furniture, her taste was soon dominating that of the fashionable world. No wonder then that, when Ryland and Bartolozzi, through the medium of their facile and adaptable engravings, made her charming, if not flawlessly drawn, compositions readily accessible, the public eagerly bought them, and, framing them, generally without any margin, according to their own oval and circular forms, found them the very mural adornments that the prevailing Adam taste seemed to suggest. In monochrome or in colours, the prints, with their refined and fluent fancies, pictured from Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Homer, and Angelica’s beautiful face and figure vivid in several, had an extraordinarily wide appeal. They flattered the fashionable culture of the day, when to quote Horace familiarly in ordinary conversation was almost a patent of gentility. On the continent they were even copied for the decoration of porcelain.

For Ryland this meant another spell of prosperity: it also meant disaster. His constant thirst for pleasure, and his ambition to shine as a fine gentleman, stimulated by such easy and seemingly inexhaustible means of money-making, led him into fatal extravagances. Accused of forging a bill, instead of facing the charge, of which he protested his innocence, he stupidly hid himself and tried ineffectually to cut his own throat. After that, some flimsy evidence procured his condemnation, and, as William Blake, looking in Ryland’s face, had predicted years before, he was hanged at Tyburn in 1783.

They could have done no worse to a highwayman; and, after all, by the introduction of stipple-engraving Ryland had certainly increased the people’s stock of harmless pleasure. In his own stippling there was a delicacy of touch, a smoothness of effect, equal to Bartolozzi’s, but with less tenderness and suppleness of tone. Evidently he formed his style to suit the designs of Angelica Kauffman, which it rendered with appreciation of their refinement. This will be seen in the charming Cupid bound to a Tree by Nymphs, among our illustrations, and many other pleasing plates, such as Venus presenting Helen to Paris, Beauty crowned by Love, The Judgment of Paris, Ludit Amabiliter, O Venus Regina, Olim Truncus, Dormio Innocuus, Juno Cestum, Maria, from Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey,” for which Miss Benwell, the painter, is said to have sat; Patience and Perseverance; Morning Amusement, a fanciful portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, embroidering at a tambour-frame, and wearing the Turkish costume which she so graphically describes in one of her letters, and in which Kneller had painted her at the instigation of Pope; fancy portraits, too, of the adventurous Lady Hester Stanhope, and Mary, Duchess of Richmond.

Although Angelica Kauffman had Bartolozzi and his numerous disciple—which meant, of course, most of the best stipple-engravers of the day—at the service of her prolific pencil, her favourite of all was Thomas Burke. In this she proved her sound judgment, for certainly no other stipple-engraver, not Bartolozzi himself, could equal Burke’s poetic feeling upon the copper, or surpass him in his artistic mastery of the medium. After studying, it is believed, at the art school of the Royal Dublin Society, he came to London to learn mezzotint-engraving under his talented countryman, John Dixon, who was winning reputation as one of Reynolds’s ablest “immortalisers,” to borrow the master’s own word. Burke soon showed that he could scrape a mezzotint with the best of them, but the pupil’s manner developed on his own lines, differing from the master’s in a more tender and luminous touch, a greater suavity of tone. These qualities are patent in his beautiful rendering of Angelica Kauffman’s Telemachus at the Court of Sparta, and it was only natural that they should suggest his adopting the stipple method. The technique he learnt from Ryland, and unquestionably he “bettered the instruction.” The painter’s sense of effect, which Dixon had taught him to translate into mezzotint, was of incalculable value to him in his use of the new medium, for, by an individual manner of infinitely close stippling suggestive of the rich broad tone-surfaces of mezzotint, he achieved, perhaps, the most brilliant and beautiful effects that stipple-engraving has ever produced. Burke, in fact, was an artist, who, seeing a picture, realised how to interpret it on the copper-plate with the just expression of all its tone-beauties. There is a glow about his engraving which shows the art of stipple at the very summit of its possibilities, and, happily, brilliant impressions of several of his plates were printed in colours. Thus, in such beautiful prints as Lady Rushout and Daughter, Rinaldo and Armida, A Flower painted by Varelst, Angelica Kauffman as Design listening to the Inspiration of Poetry, Cupid and Ganymede, Jupiter and Calisto, Cupid binding Aglaia, Una and Abra, to name, perhaps, the gems among Burke’s Kauffman prints, is shown what artistic results could be compassed when stipple-engraving and colour-printing met at their best. If, however, Angelica’s engaging fantasies inspired Burke to his masterpieces, not less exquisite was his rendering of Plimer’s miniatures of the Rushout daughters, while his art could interpret with equal charm the homely idyllic picture, as may be seen in the pretty Favourite Chickens—Saturday Morning—Going to Market, after the popular W. R. Bigg, and The Vicar of the Parish receiving his Tithes, after Singleton. But there are pictures by the masters one would like Burke to have engraved. The strange thing is that he did not do them.

Most of the engravers were now wooing the facile and profitable popularity of the stipple method and the colour-print and all the favourite painters of the day, from the President of the Royal Academy to the lady amateur, were taking advantage of the fashion. The constancy and infinitude of the demand were so alluring, and the popular taste, never artistically very exacting, had been flattered and coaxed into a mood which seemed very easy to please. It asked only for the pretty thing.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, seeing, doubtless, what delicious and popular things Bartolozzi had made of Cipriani’s Cupids and Graces, was readily induced to lend himself, in the lighter phases of his art, to the copper-plates of the stipple-engravers, pleasantly assisted by the colour-printer. Still leaving the more dignified and pictorially elaborate examples of his brush, the beautiful, elegant, full-length portraits of lovely and distinguished women and notable men, to the gracious interpretation of mezzotint, which had served him so nobly and faithfully, he found that, in the hands of such artists on copper as Bartolozzi, John Jones, Caroline Watson, Wilkin, Cheesman, Dickinson, Nutter, Schiavonetti, Marcuard, Thomas Watson, John Peter Simon, Grozer, Collyer, J. R. Smith, the delicate art of stipple could express all the sweetness, tenderness, and grace he intended in the pictures he enjoyed to paint of children and of girlish beauty. So we have such delightful prints, both in monochrome and in colour, as the Hon. Anne Bingham and Lavinia, Countess Spencer, Lady Betty Foster, The Countess of Harrington and Children, Lady Smyth and her Children, Lord Burghersh, Hon. Leicester Stanhope, Simplicity (Miss Gwatkin), The Peniston Lamb Children, all of Bartolozzi’s best; Lady Cockburn and her Children, and Master Henry Hoare, the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope as “Contemplation,” Lady Beauchamp (afterwards Countess of Hertford), A Bacchante (Mrs. Hartley, the actress, and her child), the Spencer children in The Mask, and The Fortune Tellers, Miss Elizabeth Beauclerc (Lady Diana’s daughter and Topham Beauclerc’s) as “Una,” Muscipula, Robinetta, Felina, Collina, The Sleeping Girl, Infancy, Lady Catherine Manners, The Reverie, Lord Grantham and his Brothers, Mrs. Sheridan as “St. Cecilia,” Maternal Affection (Lady Melbourne and child), Perdita (Mrs. Robinson), Mrs. Abington as “Roxalana,” The Age of Innocence, The Infant Academy, The Snake in the Grass—but the list is endless. All collectors of colour-prints know how desirable these Reynolds’ stipples are to charm their walls withal, but almost unique must be the collector who can also hang among them Keating’s joyous mezzotint of Reynolds’s famous portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire and her baby daughter, printed in colours. This is one of those rare examples which, with J. R. Smith’s Bacchante and Nature (Lady Hamilton), Henry Meyer’s Nature too, some of the Morland prints by the Wards, Smith, and Keating; S. W. Reynolds’s Countess of Oxford, J. R. Smith’s Mrs. Bouverie, and a few other important Hoppner prints, C. Turner’s Penn Family, after Reynolds, Smith’s Synnot Children, after Wright of Derby, and Mrs. Robinson, after Romney, prove that, in the hands of an engraver with a painter’s eye, mezzotint could respond to the coloured inks as harmoniously and charmingly as stipple.