COLORING OF ANTIQUE PRINTS
of hand color in Natural
in the 17th Century and
in the 18th to mid 19th Century.
The main application
of color to
black & white
prints was with delicate
watercolor brushes. Hand
was extremely costly, often tripling
or quadrupling the price
work, so that many early
botanicals were offered
with or without hand-coloring.
It is rewarding to look at a hand-colored print with a 10x magnifier.
You may observe where the watercolor ran outside the printed line.
You will always see broad bands of color, never a matrix of dots
which is a telltale sign of modern photo-offset printing. Many
reproductions of antique prints use this method. Modern copies
of original antique prints are ubiquitous and becoming more difficult
to discern, especially if the print is behind glass. 20th Century
copying methods range from the collo-type process which looks
like colored-felt under 10X magnification to photo-off-set and
computer scanning. None of these modern copies, however, look
like hand-water-coloring under magnification.
Many uncolored antique prints are now being colored. These prints
would be said to have modern color, not original color. Early
botanicals are especially susceptible to modern hand-coloring
since almost all up to the mid-18th century were published without
with original color, that is prints colored
at the time of publication, are of course
more valuable. Some of the first
botanicals to receive hand color were Basiluis
large plates from the Hortus Eystettensis.1613, only a few copies
of which were published with color-plates, those copies being
reserved for people of importance. Most copies of his work were
published uncolored, thus, almost all of the large Basilius Besler
botanical prints on the market today bear modern color. Eleazar
Albin’s A Natural History of Birds 1731-38 was the first
English book with hand colored bird prints followed closely by
the great work by Mark Catesby. Johann W. Weinmann’s Phytanthoza
Iconographia 1735-1745 was one of the earliest
18th century botanical works to be published
totally with colored plates. Today many
original antique black and white prints are
sold with modern hand coloring.
ANTIQUE COLOR PRINTING
Some original natural history prints were color
printed by directly applying colors to the etched
metal plate just before it was run through the
press. This method was often referred to as the
a la poupee process, a French description of
the color dauber which looks like a small doll.
One method favored by the English would apply all the colors
of the print to the engraved metal plate. The French, however,
would often apply different colors to identical copper plates
(as in a chromolithograph) printing them onto the paper one after
another. The great works of Levaillant, Thornton and Redoute
were partially color printed and finished by hand. If you look
at these prints under magnification you will often see areas
of solid color without the underlying black lines of the etching.
ORIGINAL ANTIQUE PRINTS
With the flood of modern reproductions of most antique nature
prints, it becomes important to discuss the difference between
an original antique print and a modern reproduction. The 10x loupe
or magnifier (available at most camera stores) is an essential
tool, as is an understanding of paper and watermarks. Often early
antique prints were made using handmade paper bearing watermarks
or counter-marks. The watermark could be images, names with dates
or abbreviations of the paper-makers, made by placing a wire shape
against the paper mould. The great folio Birds of America prints
used paper bearing the watermark, J. Whatman (and a date) or J.
Whatman, Turkey Mill (and a date). Not all antique prints were
on watermark paper.
itself can give an indication of age. Early paper before the
was called “laid”. When held
up to the light, this handmade paper exhibits lines called “chain
lines”, where the larger wires of the paper mould bound
its smaller mould wires together.
Wove paper was introduced at the end of the 18th century. It
does not exhibit chain lines. This paper was 100% cotton rag
as was laid paper and sometimes bears a watermark as in the Double
Elephant Audubon work.
By the mid
19th century, pulp paper (made from trees) was beginning to be commercially produced. This
unfortunately exhibits acidic qualities,
which, over time, weaken the paper and make it brittle.
Some of Audubon’s
Double Elephant Chromolithographs by Julius
Bien were printed on pulp paper. Many of
these prints have been lined with acid
free paper to strengthen the print.
NOTE ON THE PUBLICATION OF GREAT COLOR-PLATE
books were exceedingly costly and therefore, usually the provenance
of the aristocracy and institutions.
work of etching metal plates and individually
hand-coloring each print took years to complete.
Natural History took 18 years to complete.
At a cost of 22 guineas for a complete
set, it was one of the most expensive publications
of the 18th century.
Audubon’s The Birds of America took 12 years
to publish and cost $1000.00 in 1838, as much
as the cost of a substantial house at the time. All Natural
books took long periods to produce and for
that reason were usually published by subscription. Each subscriber
agreed to purchase
the work and periodically received a group
of prints, known as a “part”. Upon receipt of the “part”,
the money the subscriber paid to the publisher
was then used to publish the next “part.” Color-plate
books were collections of prints, often with
text pages, that were accumulated over time and then privately
bound for protection, storage and
readability. Only a few publications have survived
in their unbound state. The Audubon prints
owned by Queen Adelaide, Queen of England,
shown on my web site, are some of the most
HISTORY PRINT ABBREVIATIONS
Plates of natural history prints usually bear legends, information
under the printed image, i.e., artist, engraver, publisher, name
of species, etc..
These credits are often Latin abbreviations:
Del.: delineavit – Latin
for he/she/they drew. The name precedes it, usually found on
the bottom left side of the plate.
Dir.: direxit – persons
supervising the engraving. The name precedes it.
Exc.: excudit – engraved
Imp.: impressit – means
printed by, often found below the title of the print.
Lith.: Lithographer, whose name follows it.
Pinx.: pinxit – means
del. Pinx.: sometimes denotes the hand-colorist.
Sculp.: sculpsit - means engraved by. It
follows the engraver’s name. Usually
found on the bottom right-hand side of a
A method of tone etching used in conjunction
with etching, which creates tiny ring-like
patterns of shading. Produced by covering
a copperplate with resin powder and then
gently heating it, to create tiny dots of
particles within the resin. The interstices
between the minute particles expose the metal
plate allowing the etching acid to “bite” away
the copper and produce small, dark, irregular
circles, which create shading or tone. The
shading of the aquatint also creates depth
in the printed image. Audubon’s great
folio work, The Birds of America (1826-38),
was produced using etching and aquatint by
the master engraver, Robert Havell, Jr.;
thus, this edition is often referred to as
the Havell edition.
This is the process by which lithographs are color printed.
As many lithographic stones, each with an identical
image, were used as colors were needed, each
stone carrying different colors on the replicated drawing.
Often colors were overprinted
to get different tones or colors (blue and
yellow make green). While chromolithography was employed to
save money over of costly
hand-coloring, it was often a difficult process
that required skilled “chromistes” who knew the
art of color-mixing. Alignment or registration of the paper
on each separate stone
also required great skill so that the final
printed image did not appear blurred. Sometimes as many as
a dozen or more stones
each bearing the same image drawn with a waxy
crayon were colored and overprinted. The first large chromolithographs
done in the
U.S. were by Julius Bien, a German immigrant,
for the sons of John James Audubon who published what is known
as the Bien edition
of the Birds of America 1858-60.
ENGRAVING: An intaglio
process (French/Italian: meaning to engrave, cut or carve)
in which a design is cut into a metal plate (often
a soft metal, such as copper) by use of a tool
called a burin. The artist’s original drawing was usually traced onto the
metal plate and the lines dug out by hand using the burin. The
sunken cut lines (similar to a plow creating a furrow in a field)
hold ink that is transferred onto paper under the pressure of
a press producing a black and white print. Tonal qualities are
produced by cross-hatching, dots and the use of lines cut close
to each other. The term engraving is often used to mean any intaglio
process. Engraving was first used in an English book in 1521
and by1580 copper plate engraving was overtaking the woodcut
as a method for illustrating books.. Francis Willughby and John
Ray’s Ornithology (1678) was the first engraved English
ETCHING: A process
to cut lines into a metal plate by the use of nitric acid instead
of a tool (burin). An image is drawn,
or traced, from the artist’s drawing, onto a “ground”,
which is a material often containing beeswax and asphaltum to
coat the metal to protect it from the acid. An etching needle
is used to cut through the ground following the lines of the
drawing exposing the metal plate. The plate is placed in a bath
of nitric acid until the finest lines in the exposed metal were “bitten” or
eaten away by the acid. To create tonal values
of darker areas, portions of the etched plate which were to remain
protected by varnish (stopped out) so that
the plate could be immersed in acid as many times as necessary
to achieve the required
darker tonal values. Each time the unprotected
(unvarnished) parts of the plate were exposed to the acid more
of the metal
would be eaten away, creating larger and deeper
depressions that could hold more ink and print darker. The plate
was then inked
and wiped so that only the recessed areas held
ink. As in an engraving, dampened paper was pressed onto the
plate to pick
up the ink and produce a black and white print,
which then could be hand water-colored.
by accident in 1796 by the Austrian Alois Senefelder, and based
on the principle that water and oil repel
each other, lithography became the primary
method of producing Natural History prints in the 19th Century.
Instead of a metal
plate, a large smooth faced closely grained
piece of limestone was used. The artist’s original drawing was traced onto
the stone (the same method as the intaglio process). A waxy crayon
outlined the transferred image. The stone was then wetted, the
limestone absorbing water, which the waxy crayon repelled. The
stone was then inked and the reverse happened. The watered stone
repelled the inking while the waxy crayon drawing absorbed it.
The stone could then be printed in the usual manner producing
a black and white image, ready for hand coloring. Audubon’s
small work, the Octavo edition of The Birds
of America 1840-44 and his great Folio (1845-48) and Octavo (1849-54)
works on American
mammals were produced by lithography.
MEZZOTINT: An intaglio
method not using acid. By this method, a metal plate is roughened
in all directions by the use of a “Rocker”(a
tool shaped like a half–moon and covered with teeth which
was then “rocked” back and forth across the plate).
The “Rocker” was manipulated to cut out bits of the
plate evenly across the surface, resulting in a metal plate that
would hold sufficient ink to print very dark or black. The artist’s
drawing was then transferred to the plate, as in all printing
always in reverse, with a scraper, which reduced the roughened
areas to smooth areas. The smooth areas would not hold ink and
thus print as the white space between dark areas. Mezzotinted
plates were often color-printed as were stipple-etched plates.
Dr. Robert J. Thornton’s great work, The Temple of Flora
(1799-1807), employed mezzotint as well as
aquatint and etching.
ORIGINAL PRINT: A
Print is an impression made by transferring a master image
onto paper by a device. And what do we mean by
an “Original Print”? We mean that the artist conceived
of the picture and drew it himself. Although
he may have hired someone else to do the engraving, lithography
or the hand-coloring,
the work was always done under his supervision.
Not all antique prints were signed, and those that were signed
had the signature
engraved in the metal or lithographed on the
stone. No photographic process was ever used. Consequently the
prints were limited in
number merely by the wearing away of the master
image on the stone or on the metal plate, and by the extensive
work of the
artist to hand color each individual print.
STIPPLE: A form of
etching in which small dots, instead of lines, were punched
through the ground of the metal plate. Shade was
achieved by the close placement of dots, more
widely spaced dots produced a lighter effect. Redoute’s
famous flower prints employed stippling.
WOODCUT: One of the earliest intaglio methods (Chinese woodcuts
were done in the 9th century) by which tools are employed to
chisel away areas of wood that are to remain white. The areas
remaining, which are the raised areas, will hold ink and will
print the image. This is the reverse of metal engraving and etching,
in which the recessed areas hold the ink. Woodcuts are thus black-line
WOOD-ENGRAVING: A white-line woodcut print where the area gouged
out represents the drawing and prints white. A very hard wood,
like boxwood, was often employed with the wood block cut across
the grain to enhance hardness. The lines were cut into the block
using tools similar to metal engraving. Thomas Bewick (1753-1828)
used this method for the plates in his turn of the 18th century
work, British Quadrupeds 1790 and A History of British Birds.
SOURCES AND RECOMMENDED READING
Blunt, Wilfred & Stearn, William T., The Art of Botanical
Illustration. Antique Collectors Club and The
Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, 2000.
Dance, S. Peter, The
Art of Natural History: Animal Illustrators and Their Work. The Overlook Press, 1978.
Desmond, Ray, Great
Natural History Books & Their Creators.
The British Library & Oak Knoll Press, 2003.
Arts: a selection of articles from the 14th Edition
of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1933.
Jackson, Christine E., Bird Etchings: The
Illustrators and Their Books 1655-1855. Cornell University Press, 1985.
Myers, Amy R. & Pritchard, Margaret Beck, Empire’s
Nature, Mark Catesby’s New World Vision. Colonial Williamsburg
Rhodes, Richard, John
James Audubon: The Making of an American.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Sitwell, Sacheverell, Great
Flower Books 1700-1900. Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1990.
Bird Books. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990.