Stipple engraving

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Giulio Campagnola, The Astrologer, c. 1509, with areas such as the dark foreground, the man's bald head, and the tree trunks created by a burin stippling technique. Giulio campagnola, l'astrologo.jpg
Giulio Campagnola, The Astrologer, c.1509, with areas such as the dark foreground, the man's bald head, and the tree trunks created by a burin stippling technique.
An example of the mastery of coloured stipple engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) "Cupid Binding Aglaia to a Laurel", detail, after Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807) Cupid and Aglaia.jpg
An example of the mastery of coloured stipple engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) "Cupid Binding Aglaia to a Laurel", detail, after Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807)

Stipple engraving is a technique used to create tone in an intaglio print by distributing a pattern of dots of various sizes and densities across the image. The pattern is created on the printing plate either in engraving by gouging out the dots with a burin, or through an etching process. [1] Stippling was used as an adjunct to conventional line engraving and etching for over two centuries, before being developed as a distinct technique in the mid-18th century. [2]

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The technique allows for subtle tonal variations and is especially suitable for reproducing chalk drawings. [3]

Early history

Stipple effects were used in conjunction with other engraving techniques by artists as early as Giulio Campagnola (c.1482 – c.1515) and Ottavio Leoni (1578–1630), although some of Campagnola's small prints were almost entirely in stipple. [4] In Holland in the seventeenth century, the printmaker and goldsmith Jan Lutma developed an engraving technique, known as opus mallei, in which the dots are punched into the plate by an awl struck with a hammer, while in England the faces of portraits were engraved with stippled dots by William Rogers in the sixteenth century and Lucas Vorsterman in the seventeenth. [2]

Eighteenth century

The Duchess of Richmond, a stipple engraving portrait by William Wynne Ryland after Angelica Kauffman (1775) Duchess of Richmond, 1775 stipple engraving.jpg
The Duchess of Richmond, a stipple engraving portrait by William Wynne Ryland after Angelica Kauffman (1775)

An etched stipple technique known as the crayon manner, suitable for producing imitations of chalk drawings, was pioneered in France. Gilles Demarteau used in 1756 goldsmith's chasing tools and marking-wheels to shade the lines in a series of Trophies designed by Antoine Watteau. Jean-Charles François who was a partner of Demarteau further developed the technique and used it to engrave the whole plate. François engraved in 1757 three etchings directly on copper in crayon manner. He then used the technique to etch three plates using different-size needles bound together. Other people who contributed to this new engraving technique included Alexis Magny and Jean-Baptiste Delafosse. [3] [5] William Wynne Ryland, who had worked with Jean-Charles François, [2] took the crayon manner to Britain, using it in his contributions to Charles Roger’s publication A Collection of Prints in imitation of Drawings, [3] and developing it further under the name of "stipple engraving". [2]

The process of stipple engraving is described in T.H. Fielding's Art of Engraving (1841). To begin with an etching "ground" is laid on the plate, which is a waxy coating that makes the plate resistant to acid. The outline is drawn out in small dots with an etching needle, and the darker areas of the image shaded with a pattern of close dots. As in mezzotint use was made of roulettes, and a mattoir to produce large numbers of dots relatively quickly. [6] Then the plate is bitten with acid, and the etching ground removed. The lighter areas of shade are then laid in with a drypoint or a stipple graver; Fielding describes the latter as "resembling the common kind, except that the blade bends down instead of up, thereby allowing the engraver greater facility in forming the small holes or dots in the copper". The etched middle and dark tones would also be deepened where appropriate with the graver. [7]

In France the technique fed a fashion for reproductions of red chalk drawings by artists such as Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. Gilles Demarteau etched 266 drawings of Boucher in stipple, for printing in an appropriate sanguine-coloured ink and framing. [8] These prints so resembled red chalk drawings that they could be framed as little pictures. They could then be hung in the small blank spaces of the elaborately decorated paneling of residences. [9]

A group of soldiers, in crayon manner technique by Gilles Demarteau after Charles Andre van Loo Gilles Demarteau (after Charles Andre van Loo) - A group of soldiers standing on the right and looking as one of them is talking to a sailor.jpg
A group of soldiers, in crayon manner technique by Gilles Demarteau after Charles André van Loo

In England, the technique was used for "furniture prints" with a similar purpose and became very popular, though regarded with disdain by producers of the portrait mezzotints that dominated the English portrait print market. Stipple competed with mezzotint as a tonal method of printmaking, and while it lacked the rich depth of tone of mezzotint, it had the great advantage that far more impressions could be taken from a plate. [8]

During the late eighteenth century, some printmakers, including Francesco Bartolozzi, began to use colour in stipple engraving. Rather than using separate plates for each colour, as in most colour printing processes of the time, such as Jacob Christoph Le Blon's three-colour mezzotint method, the different colours were carefully applied with a brush to a single plate for each impression, [2] a highly skilled operation which soon proved economically unviable. [1] This method is also known as à la poupée after the French term for the small cotton pads used for the inking. [10]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Printmaking</span> Process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Engraving</span> Incising designs by cutting into a surface

Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing images on paper as prints or illustrations; these images are also called "engravings". Engraving is one of the oldest and most important techniques in printmaking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mezzotint</span> Printmaking technique

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aquatint</span> Tonal printmaking technique

Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. It has also been used historically to print in colour, both by printing with multiple plates in different colours, and by making monochrome prints that were then hand-coloured with watercolour.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Old master print</span> Work of art made printing on paper in the West

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giulio Campagnola</span>

Giulio Campagnola was an Italian engraver and painter, whose few, rare, prints translated the rich Venetian Renaissance style of oil paintings of Giorgione and the early Titian into the medium of engraving; to further his exercises in gradations of tone, he also invented the stipple technique, where multitudes of tiny dots or dashes allow smooth graduations of tone in the essentially linear technique of engraving; variations on this discovery were to be of huge importance in future printmaking. He was the adoptive father of the artist Domenico Campagnola.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cliché verre</span> Photograph made from a hand-drawn negative

Cliché verre, also known as the glass print technique, is a type of "semiphotographic" printmaking. An image is created by various means on a transparent surface, such as glass, thin paper or film, and then placed on light sensitive paper in a photographic darkroom, before exposing it to light. This acts as a photographic negative, with the parts of the image allowing light through printing on the paper. Any number of copies of the image can be made, and the technique has the unique advantage in printmaking that the design can be reversed just by turning the plate over. However, the image loses some sharpness when it is printed with the plain side of the glass next to the paper.

Carol Wax is an American artist, author and teacher whom the New York Times called "a virtuoso printmaker and art historian" for her work in mezzotint and her writings on the history and technique of that medium.

<i>À la poupée</i> Inking method in colour printmaking

À la poupée is a largely historic intaglio printmaking technique for making colour prints by applying different ink colours to a single printing plate using ball-shaped wads of cloth, one for each colour. The paper has just one run through the press, but the inking needs to be carefully re-done after each impression is printed. Each impression will usually vary at least slightly, and sometimes very significantly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gilles Demarteau</span> French etcher, engraver and publisher (1722–1776)

Gilles Demarteau or Gilles Demarteau the Elder was an etcher, engraver and publisher who was active in Paris for his entire career. He is one of the persons to whom has been attributed the invention of the crayon manner of engraving. He is recognized as playing an important role in the development of this engraving technique. He was one of the key reproductive engravers and publishers of the work of François Boucher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Surface tone</span>

In printmaking, surface tone, or surface-tone, is produced by deliberately or accidentally not wiping all the ink off the surface of the printing plate, so that parts of the image have a light tone from the film of ink left. Tone in printmaking meaning areas of continuous colour, as opposed to the linear marks made by an engraved or drawn line. The technique can be used with all the intaglio printmaking techniques, of which the most important are engraving, etching, drypoint, mezzotint and aquatint. It requires individual attention on the press before each impression is printed, and is mostly used by artists who print their own plates, such as Rembrandt, "the first master of this art", who made great use of it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European printmaking in the 18th century</span>

European printmaking in the 18th century grew greatly in quantity, and generally had high levels of technical skill. But original artistic printmaking declined, with reproductive prints becoming the majority. Many printmakers mixed intaglio printing techniques on the same plates with great skill. The generally reduced level of artistic creativity in printmaking changed at the end of the century with the great print series of Goya, whose career stretched into the 1820s but is all covered here. Goya is usually taken as the end of the old master print era, to which the 18th century added relatively little.

References

  1. 1 2 Pankow, David (2005). Tempting the Palette: a survey of color printing processes. RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press. p. 12. ISBN   978-1-933360-00-3.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Salaman, Malcolm C. (April 2005). The Old Engravers of England in Their Relation to Contemporary Life and Art. pp. 204–07. ISBN   9781417951192.
  3. 1 2 3 Verhoogt, Robert (2007). Art in Reproduction: Nineteenth-Century Prints after Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jozef Israels and Ary Scheffer. Amsterdam University Press. p. 77. ISBN   978-90-5356-913-9.
  4. Mark J. Zucker in Kristin L. Spangenberg (ed), Six Centuries of Master Prints: Treasures from the Herbert Greer French collection, Cincinnati Art Museum, 1993, nos 39 & 40, ISBN   0-931537-15-0
  5. Gerald W. R. Ward, 'The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art', Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 153
  6. Griffiths, 78
  7. Fielding, T.H. (1841). The Art of Engraving. London: Ackerman & Co. pp. 63–64.
  8. 1 2 Griffiths, Antony, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques, pp 81, British Museum Press (in UK), 2nd ed., 1996 ISBN   0-7141-2608-X; Mayor, Hyatt A., Prints and People, Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton, 1971, no. 587-588, ISBN   0-691-00326-2
  9. Alpheus Hyatt Mayor, Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1 January 1971, p. 589
  10. NGA Washington