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Old Master Art PrintsOld master art prints are works of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition (European or New World). A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period where prints are covered by this term. The main techniques concerned are woodcut, engraving and etching, although there are others. With rare exceptions, old master art prints are printed on paper.Many great European artists, such as Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt, and Francisco Goya, were dedicated to art prints . In their own day, their international reputations largely came from their art prints , which were spread far more widely than their paintings. Today, thanks to colour photo reproductions, and public galleries, their paintings are much better known, whilst their art prints are only rarely exhibited, for conservation reasons.
Mannerist Art Prints PrintmakingSome Italian printmakers of art prints went in a very different direction to either Raimondi and his followers, or the Germans, and used the medium for experimentation and very personal work. Parmigianino produced some etchings himself, and also worked closely with Ugo da Carpi on chiaroscuro woodcuts and other art prints .Giorgio Ghisi was the major art prints printmaker of the Mantuan school, which preserved rather more individuality than Rome. Much of his work was reproductive, but his original art prints are often very fine. He visited Antwerp, a reflection of the power the publishers there now had over what was now a European market for art prints . A number of printmakers, mostly in etching, continued to produce excellent art prints , but mostly as a sideline to either painting or reproductive printmaking. They include Battista Franco, Il Schiavone, Federico Barocci, and Ventura Salimbeni, who only produced nine art prints , presumably because it did not pay. Art Prints of France The Italian artists known as the School of Fontainebleau were hired in the 1630s by François I of France to decorate his showpiece Chateau at Fontainebleau. In the course of the art prints project, etchings were produced, in unknown circumstances but apparently in Fontainebleau itself and mostly in the 1540s, mostly recording wall-paintings and plasterwork in the Chateau (much now destroyed). Technically they are mostly rather poor - dry and uneven - but the best powerfully evoke the strange and sophisticated athmosphere of the time. Many of the best are by Leon Davent to designs by Primaticcio. Several of the artists, including Davent, later went to Paris and continued to produce art prints there. Previously the only consistent art prints printmaker of stature in France had been Jean Duvet, a goldsmith whose highly personal style seems halfway between Durer and William Blake. His plates are extremely crowded, not conventionally well-drawn, but full of intensity; the opposite of the languorous elegance of the Fontainebleau art prints , which were to have the greater effect on French printmaking. His art prints date from 1520 to 1555, when he was seventy, and completed his masterpiece, the twenty-three art prints of the Apocalypse. Art Prints of The Netherlands The Farnese Hercules, engraving by GoltziusCornelius Cort was an Antwerp engraver, trained in Cock's publishing house, with a controlled but vigorous art prints style, and excellent at depicting dramatic lighting effects. He went to Italy and in 1565 was retained by Titian to produce art prints of his paintings (Titian having secured his "privileges" or rights to exclusively reproduce his own art prints works). Titian took considerable trouble to get the effect he wanted; he said that Cort could not work from the painting alone, so he produced special drawings for him to use. Eventually, the results were highly effective and successful, and after Titian's death Cort moved to Rome, where he taught a number of the most successful art prints printmakers of the next generation, notably Hendrik Goltzius, Francesco Villamena and Annibale Carracci. Goltzius, arguably the last great engraver, took Cort's style to its furthest point. Because of a childhood accident, he drew with his whole arm, and his use of the swelling line, altering the profile of the burin to thicken or diminish the line as it moved, is unmatched. He was extraordinarily prolific, and the artistic, if not the technical, quality of his work is very variable, but his finest art prints look forward to the energy of Rubens, and are as sensuous in their use of line as he is in paint. At the same time Pieter Brueghel the elder, another Cock-trained artist, who escaped to paint, was producing art prints in a totally different style; beautifully drawn but simply engraved. He only etched one plate himself, a superb landscape, the Rabbit Hunters, but produced many drawings for the Antwerp specialists to work up, of peasant life, satires, and newsworthy events. Meanwhile numerous other engravers in the Netherlands continued to produce vast numbers of reproductive and illustrative art prints of widely varying degrees of quality and appeal - the two by no means always going together. Notable dynasties, often art prints publishers as well as artists, include the Wierix family, the Saenredams, and Aegidius Sadeler and several of his relations. Philippe Galle founded another long-lived family business. Theodor de Bry specialised in illustrating books on new colonial areas. Art Prints of The 17th century The 17th century saw a continuing increase in the volume of commercial and reproductive art prints printmaking; Rubens, like Titian before him, took great pains in adapting the trained engravers in his workshop to the particular style he wanted, though several found his demands too much and left. The generation after him produced a number of widely dispersed art prints printmakers with very individual and personal styles; by now etching had become the normal medium for such artists. Rembrandt bought a printing-press for his house in the days of his early prosperity, and continued to produce etchings (always so called collectively, although many have engraving or drypoint as well) until his bankruptcy, when he lost both house and press. Fortunately his art prints have always been keenly collected, and what seems to be a high proportion of his intermediate states have survived, often in only one or two impressions. He was clearly very directly involved in the art prints printing process himself, and probably selectively wiped the plate of ink himself to produce effects surface tone on many impressions. He also experimented continually with the effects of different papers. He produced art prints on a wider range of subjects than his paintings, with several pure landscapes, many self-portraits that are often more extravagantly fanciful than his painted ones, some erotic (at any rate obscene) subjects, and a great number of religious art prints . He became increasingly interested in strong lighting effects, and very dark backgrounds. His reputation as the greatest etcher in the history of the medium was established in his lifetime, and never questioned since. Few of his paintings left Holland whilst he lived, but his art prints were circulated throughout Europe, and his wider reputation was initially based on his art prints alone. A number of other Dutch artists of the century produced original art prints of quality, mostly sticking to the same categories of genre they painted. The eccentric Hercules Seghers and Jacob van Ruysdael produced landscapes, Nicolaes Berchem and Karel Dujardin animals in landscape, and Adriaen van Ostade peasant scenes. None were very prolific. Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione grew up in Genoa and was greatly influenced by the stays there of Rubens and van Dyck when he was a young artist. His etching technique was extremely fluent, and in all mediums he often repeats the same few subjects in a large number of totally different compositions. His early art prints include a number of bravura tratments of classical and pastoral themes, whilst later religious subjects predominate. He also produced a large series of art prints of small heads of exotically dressed men, which were often used by other artists. He was technically innovative, inventing the monotype and also the oil sketch intended to be a final product. He, like Rembrandt, was interested in chiaroscuro effects (contrasts of light and dark). Jusepe de Ribera may have learned etching in Rome, but all his fewer than thirty art prints were made in Naples during the 1620's when his career as a painter seems to have been in the doldrums. When the painting commissions began to flow again, he all but abandoned art prints printmaking. His plates were sold after his death to a Rome publisher, who made a better job of marketing them than Ribera himself. His powerful and direct style developed almost immediately, and his subjects and style remain close to those of his paintings. Jacques Bellange was a court painter in Lorraine, a world that was to vanish abruptly in the Thirty Years War shortly after his death. No surviving painting of his can be identified with confidence, and most of those sometimes attributed to him are unimpressive. His art prints , mostly religious, are Baroque extravaganzas that were regarded with horror by many 19th century critics, but have come strongly back into fashion - the very different Baroque style of another Lorraine artist Georges de la Tour has enjoyed a comparable revival. He was the first Lorraine art prints printmaker (or artist) of stature, and must have influenced the younger Jacques Callot, who remained in Lorraine but was published in Paris, where he greatly influenced French art prints printmaking. The last third of the century produced relatively little original art prints printmaking of great interest, although illustrative printmaking reached a high level of quality. French portrait art prints , most often copied from paintings, were the finest in Europe and often extremely brilliant, with the school including both etching and engraving, often in the same work. The most important artists were Claude Mellan, an etcher from the 1630s onwards, and his contemporary Jean Morin, whose combination of engraving and etching influenced many later artists. Robert Nanteuil was official portrait engraver to Louis XIV, and produced over two hundred brilliantly engraved portraits of the court and other notable French figures. Art Prints of The 18th century The extremely popular engravings of William Hogarth in England were little concerned with technical art prints printmaking effects; in many he was producing reproductive art prints of his own paintings (a surprisingly rare thing to do) that only set out to convey his crowded moral compositions as clearly as possible. It would not be possible, without knowing, to distinguish these from his original art prints , which have the same aim. He priced his art prints to reach a middle and even upper working-class market, and was brilliantly successful in this. Canaletto was also a highly successful painter, and though his relatively few art prints are veduti, they are rather different from his painted ones, and fully aware of the possibilities of the etching medium. Piranesi was primarily a art prints printmaker, a technical innovator who extended the life of his plates beyond what was previously possible. His Views of Rome - well over a hundred huge plates, were backed by a serious understanding of Roman and modern architecture, and brilliantly exploit the drama both of the ancient ruins and Baroque Rome. Many art prints of Roman views had been produced before, but Piranesi's vision has become the benchmark. Gianbattista Tiepolo, near the end of his long career produced some brilliant etchings, subjectless capprichi of a landscape of classical ruins and pine trees, populated by an elegant band of beautiful young men and women, philosophers in fancy dress, soldiers and satyrs. Bad-tempered owls look down on the scenes. His son Domenico produced many more etchings in a similar style, but of much more conventional subjects, often reproducing his father's paintings. The technical means at the disposal of reproductive art prints printmakers continued to develop, and many superb and sought-after art prints were produced by the English mezzotinters (many of them in fact Irish) and by French art prints printmakers in a variety of techniques. French attempts to produce high quality colour art prints were successful by the latter part of the century, although the techniques were expensive. Art prints could now be produced that closely resembled drawings in crayon or watercolours. Some original art prints were produced in these methods, but few major artists used them. The rise of the novel led to a demand for small, highly expressive, art prints for them. Many fine French and other artists specialised in these, but clearly standing out from the pack is the work of Daniel Chodowiecki, a German of Polish origin who produced over a thousand small etchings. Mainly illustrations for books, these are wonderfully drawn, and follow the spirit of the times, through the cult of sentiment to the revolutionary and nationalist fervour of the start of the 19th century. One of Los desastres de la guerra, aquatint by GoyaGoya's superb but violent aquatints often look as though they are illustrating some unwritten work of fiction, but their meaning must be elucidated from their titles, often containing several meanings, and the brief comments recorded by him about many of them. His art prints show from early on the macabre world that appears only in hints in the paintings until the last years. They were nearly all published in several series, of which the most famous are: Caprichos (1799), Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War from after 1810, but unpublished for fifty years after). Rather too many further editions were published after his death, when his delicate aquatint tone had been worn down, or reworked. William Blake was as technically unconventional as he was in subject-matter and everything else, pioneering a relief etching process that was later to become the dominant technique of commercial illustration for a time. Many of his art prints are pages for his books, with text and image on the same plate, as in the 15th century block-books. The Romantic Movement saw a revival in original art prints printmaking in several countries, with Germany taking a large part once again; many of the Nazarene movement were art prints printmakers. In England, John Sell Cotman etched many landscapes and buildings in an effective, straightforward style. JMW Turner, produced several art prints series including one, the Liber Studiorum, which consisted of seventy-one etchings with mezzotint that were influential on landscape artists; according to Linda Hults, this series of art prints amounts to "Turner's manual of landscape types, and a statement of his philosophy of landscape." With the relatively few etchings of Delacroix the period of the old master art prints can be said to come to an end. Art prints printmaking was to revive powerfully later in the 19th and 20th centuries, in a great variety of techniques. |
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