Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

The genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds is of a totally different order. In the sense of consisting in the sentiment of effect and the masterly arrangement of tones it is essentially picturesque, and presents such a boldness of character as engravers could easily appreciate and reproduce. There is no far-fetched significance, no accessories tending to destroy the unity of the whole. On the contrary, the work proceeds by synthesis; it is all largely schemed, and built up in masses where the details are scarcely indicated. The expression lies not so much in niceties of physiognomy as in the whole attitude of the sitters and the characteristic pose and contour of the faces represented. The painter's imagination is brilliant rather than delicate; sometimes, indeed, it degenerates into bad taste and eccentricity. But far more frequently it gives his attitudes an air of ease and originality, and the general aspect of his portraits breathes a perfect dignity. The vigorous contrasts, the freedom and wealth of colour which are their primary characteristics, as they are those of Gainsborough's work likewise, are qualities to whose translation the free and flowing stroke of the graver is hardly fitted, but which mezzotint would naturally render with ease and success. And, as we have said before, it is to the influence of the famous painter that must be attributed the immense extension of the latter process in England during the latter part of the eighteenth century.

The landscape and mezzotint engravers began, therefore, to vitalise the English school: the former especially lent it real importance by their talent. From 1760 or thereabouts Woollett published, after Richard Wilson or after Claude, those admirable works which, on account of their suave harmony of effect, their transparency of atmosphere, and their variableness of colour, are less like engravings than pictures.45 Shortly afterwards he completed his fame by work of another sort: the reproduction, first, of West's "Death of Wolfe," and then of his "Battle of La Hogue," the American's best picture, and the finest historical plate ever engraved in England. Lastly about the same time, Robert Strange, a pupil of Philippe Le Bas, engraved in line, after Correggio and Van Dyck, the "Saint Jerome" and the "Charles I.;" as well as other prints after these masters, which are quite as charming, and should, indeed, be unreservedly admired if the correctness of their drawing were only equal to their elegance of modelling and flexibility of tone.

So much progress accomplished in so few years attracted the attention of statesmen and of the English Government. They saw it was time to cease from paying tribute to the superiority of French engravers, and to allow those talents to develop in London which had till then been sent to school in Paris. George III. had just founded the Royal Academy (Jan., 1769), with Reynolds for its first President. He determined still further to strengthen the impulse of art by countenancing great undertakings in engraving; and as he wished the country to reap as much commercial benefit as honour in the matter, he granted bounties on the exportation of English engravings, while the importation of French work was taxed with enormous duties.

In this way the progress of national art became a political question, and every one hastened to second the king's views. Woollett's plates had been largely subscribed for before publication, and the illustrated editions of the travels of Cook and Sir Joseph Banks were taken up in a few days. Finally, when it was proposed to engrave Copley's "Death of Chatham," the subscription at once ran up to £3,600; and when, the first proofs having been taken, the plate was returned to the engraver, he made almost as much more in less than two years. Nor did the fever of protection in any wise abate for that. On the contrary, it called a number of talents into being, and attracted to London a crowd of foreigners, all sure of the encouragement which began to fail them elsewhere. Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, Catherine Prestel, the Swiss Moser and his daughter, and a hundred other painters or engravers, came in one after another to contribute to the success of the school and the spread of English trade.46

Amongst these adventurers there was one – the Florentine Bartolozzi – whose works at once became the fashion, less, perhaps, for any intrinsic merit than because of the novelty of his method. The process called "stipple engraving" excluded the use of lines and cross hatchings, and consisted in the arrangement of masses of dots more or less delicate in themselves, and more or less close in order, and designed in proportion to their relative distance or nearness, to render nice gradations of tone, depth of shadow, and even completeness of outline.

Speaking exactly, this was but an application to the general execution of a work of a process adopted long before by etchers and line engravers as a means of partial execution. Jean Morin, Boulanger, Gérard Audran himself, and many others, had habitually made use of dots to supplement the work of the burin or the needle, or to effect transitions between their lights and shadows, or the larger of their outlines and subtler details of their modelling. Moreover, before their time, Jan Lutma, a Dutch goldsmith, invented a method of "engraving in dots," which, produced by means of his etching needle and aquafortis, were deepened and enlarged with chisel and hammer: whence the name of opus mallei bestowed on his results. Bartolozzi, therefore, and the English engravers who, like Ryland, made use of stippling, did but revive and extend in their own way the boundaries of a method already known. They displayed remarkable skill, it is true, but their work, like the rest of its kind, displays a feebleness of form that is almost inevitable, and is touched with a coldness inherent in the very nature of the process.

In stipple engraving, the burin and the dry point are used alternately, according to the degree of vigour or delicacy required. The parts that are to come light in proof are done with the dry-point; while those to come dark are covered with dots ploughed deeper with the burin. Round the edge of these, by the mere act of ploughing, there is raised a rim, or rampart – technically called a "burr" – which the engraver, to regain the ground thus lost, has to rub down with the burnisher. In this way he goes on dotting and burnishing till he gets a close enough grain.

Immensely successful during the last years of the eighteenth century, stipple engraving soon went out of fashion, not only in France, where it scarce survived the first attempts of Copia, but even in England, where the example of Bartolozzi and Ryland had been followed with such eager diligence. Such, too, somewhat later, was the fate of a somewhat similar process – the "crayon engraving," of which Gilles Demarteau, born in Liège, but bred and trained in Paris, may be considered, if not the inventor, at least the most active, skilful, and popular practitioner.47

The object of crayon engraving is to imitate the effect of red or black chalk on a coarse-grained paper, which, by the very roughness of its surface, retains no more than an uneven, and as it were a disconnected, impression of the strokes or hatchings laid upon it. In common with stipple engraving, it renders the loose and broken lines of the originals by substituting a mass of dots for the ordinary work of the burin or the needle. It differs, however, from stipple engraving in the method of working, and even in the nature of the tools employed. The outlines are traced on the varnished copper with a toothed or multi-pointed needle, while the inner hatchings are made either with the needle in question, or with what is called a roulette, which is a steel cylinder bristling with small, jagged teeth, and running on a fixed axis. The roulette, which is provided with a handle, is so directed that the teeth are brought to bear directly, and with more or less effect, on the varnished copper. Then the plate is bitten in; and when the aquafortis has done its part, the work, if necessary, is resumed with the same tools on the bare metal.

The first specimens of crayon engraving were presented in 1757 to the Académie Royale de Peinture, which, an official document informs us48 "highly approved of the method, as being well fitted to perpetuate the designs of good masters, and multiply copies of the best styles of drawings." For the reproduction of drawings, the new process was certainly better than etching, at least as practised to that end by the Count de Caylus and the Abbé de Saint-Non. The misfortune was, that in the eighteenth century as in the first years of the nineteenth, the crayon engravers appear to have thought far less of "perpetuating the designs of good masters" than of suiting their choice of originals to the prevailing fashion. As a matter of fact, however skilful they were in execution, the only cause served by Demarteau's innumerable fac-similes was that of the Bouchers and Fragonards, and of kindred experts in "the most distinguished school of drawing." Reproduced by engraving, the crayon studies of these persons became the ordinary means of instruction in academies and public schools; and from the first the popularity of these wretched models was such that, even after the revolution effected in art by David, on through the Empire, and as late as the Restoration, art students generally remained subject to the regimen adopted for their predecessors in the days of Louis XV. and XVI.

Then lithography made its appearance, and in no great while was applied to the production of drawing-copies, once the monopoly of crayon engraving. Nor was this the only quarter from which the method of François and Demarteau was assailed. By degrees it fell out of use for the production not only of drawing-copies, but of fac-similes of drawings by the masters for artists and amateurs; or, if occasionally practised, it was – as in the subjects engraved some thirty years back from drawings in the Louvre and the Musée de Lille – with so many modifications, and in combination with such a number of other processes, as reduced it from supremacy to the rank, till worse should befall, of a mere auxiliary. In our own time it has had its death-blow in the advance of photography; and as, after all, its one object was the presentation of an exact likeness, the absolute effigy, of its original, the preference of a purely mechanical process of reproduction is, if we consider the certainty of the results, no more than natural. In proportion as, by its very nature, photography is powerless to take the place of engraving, when the work to be reproduced, be it picture or mural decoration, presupposes in the interpreter, in whatsoever degree, the power of translating what is before him, just so far is it capable of fulfilling the one condition imposed upon the copyist of a drawing or an engraving – that of perfect fidelity in imitation.

The object attempted by François, Demarteau, Bonnet, and others – the production by engraving of a sort of optical illusion, the exact fac-simile of a drawing – had been started before them by Jean Christophe Leblond, an artist born of French parents at Frankfort, who, moreover, had sought to extend to the imitation of colour what his successors were content to restrict to the imitation of monochrome. Very early in the eighteenth century, Leblond succeeded in producing prints in several tints, by a method which he called "pastel engraving," and to which custom has given the more general name of "colour engraving." For the second half of this title, it might, perhaps, have been better to use the word "printing." What is called "colour engraving" is not really a special engraving process. Its whole originality consists in the production of a single proof from several plates (generally four), in the preparation of which the rocker, the roulette, and sometimes even the burin, have been used. From these plates, each inked with a single colour, the effect of which is relieved or modified by the subsequent addition of those tints with which the other three are covered, there results in the proof, by the use of points of correspondence, an ensemble in colour which is similar in appearance to that of painting in pastel, in water-colour, or in gouache. This was pretty much the process, and the results were in some sort comparable with those obtained by chromo-lithography. The older method had, however, the advantage of the other in that, by the very variety of the preparation to which the plate was subjected, its results were not so liable to present the appearance, either coarse or dull, of common hand-tinted work.

Some of Leblond's engravings, particularly a large, half-length "Louis XV.," enable us to estimate to the full the capacities of his invention. Leblond, indeed, must be counted an inventor, inasmuch as it was his to discover a secret which, before him, had been only dimly foreseen, or at most half-guessed. Still, the essays in the first years of the seventeenth century of the Dutchman Lastmann, and a little later of Seghers the Fleming, should not be completely overlooked; nor would it be just to refuse recognition to the practical improvements made in colour engraving, after Leblond, by Gautier Dagoty, in Paris, and by Taylor, in London. In proportion to the relative importance of the two discoveries, Leblond played the same part in the history of the colour process as Daguerre in the history of heliography. They each effected so great an advance as to close the period of groping and darkness, and to some extent determine the course of progress. But it does not follow, therefore, that they owed nothing to the attempts of their predecessors; and if their claim to inventors' honours is fairly established, it is because they solved a problem they were by no means the first to attack.

Leblond, indeed, got nothing from his discovery but the honour of making it. He sought in vain to turn it to account in London, and succeeded no better in Paris. In the latter city he lived for some years in great distress, and in 1741 he died there, in the hospital.

Some years after the invention of colour engraving, another sort of engraving, or rather another sort of pictorial reproduction, the method called "au lavis," was invented, and very skilfully used from the outset, by Jean Baptiste Leprince; and in no great while the series of innovations in the practice of the art, from the end of the seventeenth century, was completed by the invention of aquatint.

The first of these two processes is apparently of extreme simplicity. The line once engraved and bitten in, as in ordinary etching, it only consisted in brushing the plate with acid, as a draughtsman washes in on paper with sepia or Indian ink. The preliminary work, however, required a great deal of care and skill, and even a certain amount of scientific knowledge. The particular quality of the copper, the composition of the varnishes and acids, and many other conditions impossible to discuss in detail, made the new process somewhat difficult of employment; and before long the ardour of those practitioners who had essayed to imitate Leprince's results was very sensibly diminished.

In spite of the value of these results, and the personal skill of the inventor; in spite, too, of the technical explanations contained in the "Plan du Traité de la Gravure au Lavis" presented by him (1750) to the Académie Royale, it was evident that the French engravers thought lightly of Leprince's discovery, and did not care to investigate its capabilities. It only got a fresh start in France when, notably modified and improved by the initiative of foreign engravers, it had been transformed in London into what is known as aquatint engraving. Then, however, in the hands of Debucourt49 and of Jazet later on, it acquired a popularity all the greater that its productions, by their very nature and quality, were more intimately in harmony with the inspiration and style of fashionable art. Jazet, for instance, contributed greatly to the triumph of aquatint in France, by applying it, from the first years of the Restoration, to the interpretation of the works of Horace Vernet. Such plates as "Le Bivouac du Colonel Moncey," the "Barrière de Clichy," the "Soldat Laboureur," and many others, were tolerated among Frenchmen for the sake of the associations they awakened at least as much as for their artistic merit.

It is possible that since then the engraver has reckoned a little too much on the world-wide reputation of his painter; or it may be that he has been somewhat too conscious of the advantages of a rapid and facile method, and has sacrificed the ideal of delicacy and correctness to the enhancement of a reputation for fertility. Certain it is that Jazet, as is proved by his early engravings, and especially the "Barrière de Clichy," was more capable than any one else of raising work in aquatint to the level of art; and it is much to be regretted that his somewhat careless ease should have hindered the full development of his talent. It is still more to be regretted that, in spite of the laudable efforts of Messrs. Prévost, Girard, and others to maintain the process in the better way, it should have been dishonoured and deprived of all but a purely commercial importance by the production of multitudes of plates, whose only merit is their cheapness. If we consider the so-called Biblical scenes done in aquatint for exportation, the heroines of romance, the half-naked women described (by way of commentary) as "Love," "Souvenir," "Pleasure," "Desire," and all the terms of the erotic vocabulary, it is hard to say whether the intention or the execution is the more unpleasant. What is certain is that such things have nothing to do with art except as examples of its degradation and destruction. That section of the public sensible of their charm is certainly not that which is impressed by beauty, and it is useless to care about winning its approbation; but when ugliness is everywhere it is to be feared that everybody may grow used to the sight, and forget to look elsewhere. The danger to which pure line engraving is thus exposed by the deplorable exigencies of competition is not the only one which threatens the art. A glance at its several phases since 1800 and at its present state is enough to show that the line of talents has never once been interrupted; that those of to-day are every whit as vigorous and accomplished as those of the past; but that for opportunities of displaying their full power, and being appreciated at their true worth they have not seldom to wait in vain.

CHAPTER IX.

ENGRAVING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

At the beginning of the nineteenth century some of the most celebrated artists of the French school of painting belonged, by the nature of their talent as well as by the date of their chief successes, to the ante-revolutionary period. Greuze, Fragonard, Moreau, Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, Vien even, notwithstanding his intentions of reform, Regnault and Vincent, in spite of their influence as professors on the new generation – all seemed rather to recall the past than to herald the future. One man, Louis David, personified the progress of the epoch. His pictures, "Les Horaces," and the "Brutus," had appeared some years before, and the approaching exhibition of "Les Sabines" was impatiently expected. At this time the younger artists and the public unanimously regarded David as the regenerator of national art and a master justly supreme. Architecture, painting, furniture, even fashion in dress, were all subjected to his absolute sway; everything was done in imitation of the antique, as understood and interpreted by him. Under the pretexts of pure beauty and a chaste style, nothing but a soulless body, a sort of coloured statue, was represented on canvas; while sculpture became no more than an imitation of Greek or Roman statuary. Since Lebrun, indeed, no single influence had so completely tyrannised over French taste.

Engraving, though fated like the other arts to accept the dictatorship of David, was at any rate the first to throw off his yoke. Before the Restoration, whilst the painter of Marat, then painter to the Emperor, was still in the fulness of his power, the great Italians, whose pictures crowded the Louvre, had already been interpreted with more respect for the memory of the old manner than submission to the requirements of the newer style.

The most talented of these new artists, Boucher-Desnoyers, when working at his "Belle Jardinière," after Raphael, or his "Vierge aux Rochers," after Leonardo, probably thought much less of contemporary work than of the French engravers of the seventeenth century; while on their part Bervic and Tardieu, who had long before given proof of their power, faithfully maintained the great traditions: the one in an austerity of execution and a firmness of touch hereditary in his family, the other in his scientific ease of handling. These three were of the race of the older masters, and their work, unjustly forgotten some years later during the rage for the English manner, deserves a better fate than to be confounded with the cold and formal prints published in the France of the First Empire. The engravings after David, by popularising his work, obtained some success in their day, but have failed to secure a lasting reputation. The fault, however, is not altogether with the engravers: in spite of the apparent conscientiousness of the painter, his real indecision of method must count for something in the mediocre achievements of his interpreters.

Free to impose his own system on all other artists, David might have enforced his artistic authority on his contemporaries; and even if it were beyond his power to restore the French school of engraving, he might at least have regenerated its principles, and, combining separate efforts under the synthesis of his own personal conception, have breathed into it a fresh spirit of unity. This he never attempted; and it is even hard to guess at what he expected from his engravers. It might be supposed that his own fondness for precision of form would have led him to require from them insistence as to the drawing, and not much attention to colour and effect; yet most of the prints after his pictures – amongst others those by Morel and Massard – are heavy in tone and feeble in drawing. There is in them no trace either of the precise manner of David, or of the large method of the old school; it is therefore not in these commonplace works, and still less in the barren engravings composing the great "Commission d'Égypte," that we must look for signs of such talent as then existed in France.

The few painters who, like Regnault, were more or less independent of David's influence, or, like Prud'hon, had ventured to create an entirely original method, were admired by so small a public that their pictures were not generally reproduced in engraving and thus could do little for the progress of the art. Some, however, of Prud'hon's drawings and pictures met, under the Directory and the Empire, with excellent interpreters in Copia and in Barthélemy Roger; while in the last years of the eighteenth century Bervic's engraving of Regnault's "Éducation d'Achille" had obtained at least as much success as the original had won in the Salon of 1783. To give a companion to this justly celebrated piece, Bervic soon after published his "Enlèvement de Déjanire," after Guido. This work, to which the judges of the Decennial Competition awarded the prize in preference to any engraving published in France from 1800 to 1810, by confirming the engraver's reputation, caused his fellow-craftsmen to return once more to the old path of progress.

It must not, however, be supposed that Bervic did not himself diverge somewhat from the way of the masters: it may even be said that he was always more inclined to skirt it than to follow it resolutely. At the outset he was not sufficiently alive to the perils of facility; and later on he was apt to attach too much importance to certain quite material qualities. Yet it must be added that he never went so far as to entirely sacrifice essentials to accessories, and that more than once – in his fine full-length of Louis XVI. for instance – he displayed an ability all the more laudable as the original was by no means inspiring.

From the engraving it is hard to suspect the mediocrity of Callet's picture. This, now at Versailles, is insipidly coloured and loosely and clumsily drawn; the print, on the contrary, is to be admired for its solid appearance, and its easy yet unostentatious handling. Lace, satin, velvet, all accessories, indeed, are treated with a largeness of touch by no means at variance with delicacy, and the general tone is harmoniously luminous. Here and there, however, is already visible a certain artifice of manner which threatens to degenerate into an unwise cultivation of fine line, and end in an abuse of skill. This, indeed, is what happened. Bervic, henceforth, thought of little else but dexterity, and ended in his "Laocoon," perhaps the best known of all his works, by a display of common technical fireworks, to a certain extent surprising, but by no means to be unreservedly admired. The care with which he set himself to imitate the grain of marble by minute workmanship is only trifling with his subject; and though a group of statues cannot be treated in the same way as figures painted on canvas, it was more important, and more desirable in every respect, to reproduce the character and style of the original than to imitate the substance in which it was wrought.