Printmaking in the 17th century
- Key People:
- Julie Mehretu
- Rembrandt
- William Blake
- Pablo Picasso
- Edgar Degas
- Related Topics:
- stenciling
- rubbing
- monotype
- cliché-verre
- relief printing
Portrait engraving
France
The end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th were dominated by ornamental engravers and illustrators, who were working under Flemish influence; by the middle of the 17th century, however, a distinctly French school of portrait engraving had emerged. Although this school did not produce a major master, it represents a significant phase of European printmaking.
Michael Lesne, a French portraitist whose influence was considerable, worked for a time in the Rubens workshop, later returning to France. Claude Mellan, another major influence, was trained in Rome. Technical virtuosity dominated his prints; for example, the modelling of a face with one continuous spiral.
A superb engraver and a fine draftsman, Robert Nanteuil is considered the undisputed master of French portrait engraving. His style is simple, elegant, and free of the mannerism characteristic of his contemporaries. He and his two rivals—Gerard Edelinck, who was born in Antwerp but studied and developed his style in France, and Antoine Masson, who engraved portraits in the grand style—represented the dominant forces in 17th-century French portrait engraving.
Germany
After the glories of the 15th and 16th centuries, German graphic genius was dormant for nearly three centuries. Historically, Ludwig von Siegen, a minor painter and medalist, is important for his invention of the mezzotint printing method. But the perfecting of this tonal technique increased the reproductive facility of printmaking, thus contributing to the decline of artistic creativity.
Like France, Germany produced a school of portrait engravers; but, although competent technicians, they failed to develop a distinctly national school comparable to the French. Of this group, two are significant: Jeremias Falck, a student of Hondius, and Bartholomäus Kilian, who studied in Paris and later introduced French influence into German printmaking.
The Netherlands
Portrait engraving in Holland was on a higher level than in Germany. Cornelis van Dalen was a fine engraver who immigrated to England and died there. More gifted than his father, Cornelis van Dalen II was an artist of considerable stature, who engraved some of the most powerful portraits of his time.
Abraham Blooteling, a pupil of van Dalen II, was also a fine portrait engraver. His major contribution, however, was in the development of the new technique of mezzotint—specifically, the invention of the rocker, the tool used in the technique. He also introduced the mezzotint into England, where it was adopted with such success that it later became known as the “English Manner.”
England
In the 17th century, English printmaking produced a portrait engraver of considerable stature, William Faithorne. He studied in France and initially was under the influence of Mellan and Nanteuil; in his late work, however, he developed a style independent of theirs. Faithorne was England’s only major native printmaker during this period, when most prints were reproductive engravings. By the end of the century, engraving was in total decline, replaced by the fashionable mezzotint.
Flemish printmaking
One of the dominant figures of European art was Peter Paul Rubens, who was a painter, diplomat, and businessman. Quickly recognizing the commercial potential of printmaking, Rubens organized a graphic workshop where, under his supervision, reproductions of his work were produced. Only one etching, St. Catherine, is considered as his own. The quality of this one print indicates how great was the loss to the art of printmaking that this great draftsman did not make more original etchings.
Rubens’s pupil Anthony Van Dyck was one of the most distinguished portrait painters of his time. At age 27 he undertook a very ambitious project: the etched portraits of the 100 most famous men of his day. For this set of prints, known as the “Iconography,” he completed 18 portraits. But only five of these (Peter Brueghel the Younger, Snellinx, Erasmus, Suttermans, and Josse de Momper) remained unchanged; another five were retouched by professional engravers, and the rest were completely reworked by them.
European etching
Like the Van Dyck portraits, nearly all of the outstanding prints produced in the 17th century were etchings. Etching emerged as the dominant technique for many reasons. The fact that engraving had become a completely commercialized, reproductive method and that mezzotint had never been anything else alienated many artists. As an unexploited and relatively unexplored medium, etching intrigued the experimentally oriented. Furthermore, the fluid, flexible technique of etching was a lure for the creative painter, whose own medium had become freer and more spontaneous.
Italy
At the beginning of the 17th century, there was more etching in Italy than in any other European country. Strangely enough, probably the three most important etchers—Jacques Callot, Claude Lorrain, and José de Ribera—were foreign-born.
The Bolognese school was formed around Guido Reni, whose delicate etching style of light lines and dots became a standard technique for most Italian etchers of his time. His school, however, did not produce any superior printmakers.
The Spanish painter José de Ribera was the dominant figure of the Neapolitan school. Though he was the first major realist painter in Italy and a strong influence against the idealizing trend, both his paintings and his etchings were outside the mainstream of Italian art.
Next to Ribera, Salvator Rosa, an Italian, was the most notable artist of the Neapolitan school, producing a large number of etchings that are full of charm but of no great importance.
Born in Nancy, France, Jacques Callot left home as a teenager to study art in Italy. Of all the artists engaged in 17th-century Italian printmaking, he was historically the most significant, for he was one of the first to use repeated bitings on his plates to achieve tonal variations. His drawing style represented a transition between engraving and etching: using a specially shaped etching needle of his own invention, he imitated the swelling and tapering characteristics of the engraved line. His illustrations record and ironically comment upon the customs, historical events, and morals of his time. Callot’s work was often decorative and manneristic; but, at his best, as in the series The Miseries and Misfortunes of War (1632–33), he transcended mere illustration and achieved powerful images of universal significance.
Claude Lorrain, also French-born, was one of the finest landscape painters in Italy, and he had an intuitive understanding of the etching medium. His spontaneous interpretation of the atmospheric quality of his subject foreshadows the Barbizon school and Impressionism in the 19th century.
The Netherlands
In the beginning of the 17th century, Holland suddenly exploded into a frenzy of creativity in etching. The sensitive, atmospheric etchings of the brothers Esaias and Jan van de Velde can be considered the beginning of the Dutch landscape school. Others were Adriaen van Stalbent, Pieter de Molijn, and Willem Buytewech—all fine printmakers, but all eventually overshadowed by the dramatic personality of Rembrandt. Before him, however, another artist appeared who was so original that no historical precedent could anticipate him. Hercules Seghers is one of the most interesting and mysterious figures in the history of printmaking. He was a lonely, tragic man, an experimenter who was so far ahead of his time that it took centuries for the real significance of his work to become apparent. It is known that Rembrandt appreciated his work. He owned some of Seghers’s prints and even reworked one of his plates, Tobias and the Angel (c. 1633); keeping the landscape, he changed the figures, making it The Flight into Egypt (1653).
Seghers was the first real experimenter in intaglio colour printing. His methods were completely unorthodox: he printed on tinted canvas, tried light lines on a dark background, and also mixed printing with hand colouring. Seghers’s etching technique was itself very unorthodox. His eroded lines, so well suited to his subject matter, are unlike any etched line made before him, which has led some experts to the conclusion that Seghers invented the lift ground, an aquatint technique.
Most of Seghers’s etchings represent craggy, arid landscapes. Everything he drew—landscapes, still lifes, even figures—seems to be made of stone. It is a world suspended in the timelessness of death.
Even among the supreme artists of the world, Rembrandt van Rijn occupies a very special place. One of the most eminent painters of all time, he also left a graphic oeuvre of heroic proportions both in quantity and quality. A great innovator, he was the first artist to fully explore the possibilities of the etched line.
Rembrandt made approximately 300 plates. His subject matter represents practically every aspect of human existence: he rendered religious and historical subjects; he explored themes of love and death; and he created profound portraits and sensitive landscapes. Everything that was part of life concerned him, from the highest ideals to the most mundane activities.
While Rembrandt’s early prints are pure etchings, his later works frequently combine the techniques of etching and drypoint. Since he often reworked his plates between printings, there are sometimes enormous variations between proofs. Rembrandt’s immediate influence on his students and followers was not very productive, for his personality was so overpowering that those close to him fell under his spell and simply imitated his style. Associated artists such as J.G. van Vliet, who copied and reworked many of the master’s plates, and Jan Lievens were mere shadows of Rembrandt. Among those closely associated with Rembrandt, probably Ferdinand Bol was the strongest, but even he is dwarfed by comparison.
Also active during Rembrandt’s time and somewhat overshadowed by him was Adriaen van Ostade, one of the most gifted of Dutch genre painters. The subjects of both his paintings and prints were taken mainly from the daily lives of simple people, usually peasants. In spirit, his work represented an important departure from the heroic orientation of historic and religious painting, reflecting a crucial social change—the emergence of a middle class in Europe. For the first time, common people replaced the clergy and the nobility as a source of inspiration for an artist. Van Ostade’s etching technique was influenced by the early Rembrandt, but his drawing style was personal. It was simple, undramatic, and direct—well suited to his intimate subject matter.
Throughout the 17th century, landscape painting and etching thrived in Holland. Jan van Goyen and Roelant Roghman both made fine landscape paintings and etchings. In this group the most interesting figure is Jacob van Ruisdael, whose sensitive, luminous landscape etchings foreshadowed the Barbizon school.
Toward the end of the century, a strong Italian influence invaded Holland. Since the earthiness of the Dutch temperament did not mix well with the Italian tendency toward idealization, the result was an eclecticism that drained Dutch art of much of its vitality.
Japanese ukiyo-e prints
Until the 17th century, Japanese painting was completely dominated by Chinese influence. The Japanese silk paintings and screens of idealized landscapes were hardly distinguishable from their Chinese counterparts. Then, in the early 17th century, an artist of aristocratic origin, Iwasa Matabei, started to paint images related to his environment and personal experience. Although this era of Japanese art history is rather obscure, he is credited with being one of the founders (along with Iwasa Matabei II and Iwasa Matabei of Otsu) of ukiyo-e, whose woodcuts of the “floating world” or the world of everyday life represented a drastic break with the classical tradition. Of the three artists Matabei of Otsu was the most original and had the strongest influence on the development of Japanese printmaking. By standards of Western taste, the images the ukiyo-e school produced are highly stylized and thoroughly refined. Cultured Japanese, however, found them shockingly vulgar. The very fact that ordinary landscapes and the daily life of common people, actors, and courtesans were the inspiration for the ukiyo-e artist represented a startling departure from tradition. Just as the emerging middle class revolutionized taste in Europe, the prosperous city dwellers of Edo, Kyōto, and Ōsaka developed their own aesthetic subculture. The development of the popular Kabuki theatre, as distinct from the aristocratic Noh drama, parallels the blossoming of Japanese printmaking.
The first great master of Japanese printmaking was Hishikawa Moronobu. A creative innovator, he was the first to use street scenes, peddlers, and crowds as his subject matter and to make his prints available to the common people. As a result, he was looked upon by many as the inventor of printmaking. He illustrated more than 100 books, mirroring the culture and customs of his time. Moronobu’s style was a perfect harmony of rhythm, delicacy, and monumental simplicity, leading the way toward the great flowering of Japanese printmaking in the 18th century.
Printmaking in the 18th century
Italy
In the 18th century, Italy was the most fertile soil in Europe for printmaking. The first outstanding printmaker of the century was the Rococo master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. His lightly bitten, spontaneous plates reveal superb draftsmanship. With rhythmic, delicate textures, he created a living, luminous space. His 50 plates represent a major contribution to the development of etching—a contribution that was further enhanced by his influence on Goya (see below Spain). Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, the son of Battista, produced a greater quantity of prints than did his father but remained under his influence all his life.
One of the most original printmakers of the period, Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) created lyrical etchings that were charged with the misty atmosphere of Venice. Inexhaustible in linear and textural invention, they are perfect examples of the simulation of colour and light by purely graphic means. His nephew and pupil, Bernardo Bellotto (Canaletto), who assumed his name, was a prolific printmaker, but, again, he remained under his uncle’s influence.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was the greatest architectural printmaker of his time and probably of all time. Trained as an architect, he was passionately interested in Roman antiquities. Of the approximately 3,000 large etchings completed by Piranesi, all are brilliant, and many rise above documentation. His most important work is the series Imaginary Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione). The plates, which were made in his youth (published c. 1750 and a second edition in 1761), are personal, rich, and evocative, far surpassing anything he created after them.
England
Until the 18th century, English printmaking was dominated by foreign influences. William Hogarth, the first major English printmaker, created not only a personal style but a national school. He was a gifted pictorial satirist, belonging in some respects to the tradition of Callot and Goya. He is, however, more earthy than Callot and lacks the savagery of Goya. Hogarth was a printmaker of the people, whose work was so popular that to protect it from imitators he instigated the first engraving copyright act of 1735. Although his drawing was rather pedestrian, Hogarth’s prints reveal a sharp observation, projected with robust vitality.
Next to Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson is the most significant representative of English satire. A brilliant draftsman and a deft caricaturist, he spoofed the moral and social life of England with great humour.
William Blake is by far the most interesting figure in English printmaking. Poet and experimental printmaker, he was a visionary, creating his works totally outside the mainstream of art history. His printed work consisted primarily of book illustrations. Original and inventive in technique, he used a great range of media, from wood and metal engraving to relief etching. In the latter he devised a transfer method that enabled him to etch the text and the illustration on the same plate. Many of his prints were hand coloured, but he also printed colour by an offset method of his own invention.
Thomas Bewick was a provincial illustrator who made a great number of charming wood engravings, primarily of animals and rural genre scenes. He was a pioneer in the technique of wood engraving, introducing tonal variations by slightly varying the level of his blocks.
To reproduce the fashionable paintings of the day, commercial engravers perfected a whole arsenal of reproduction techniques, such as mezzotint, stipple engraving and etching, and crayon manner.
Spain
Spanish printmaking in the 17th century had been dominated by Flemish and French influences, and no printmaker of importance emerged during the period.
In the 18th-century artist Francisco de Goya, Spain had not only its first truly great printmaker but also the only printmaker whose etchings rival Rembrandt’s. Moreover, he is the most eminent satirist printmaking has produced. His visual comments on human folly, war, and religious persecution are devastating.
Goya created four major cycles of prints. The first, Los caprichos (published 1799; “Caprices,” or “Follies”), consists of 80 enigmatic prints commenting on all phases of life. In 1810 he began the 82 plates of The Disasters of War, a strong visual protest against the brutality of war. After this came La tauromaquia (1815–16), a brilliant series on the art of bullfighting. The last important series was Los disparates (“Absurdities”), or Proverbios (c. 1816–24; 22 prints), a biting, though often humorous, interpretation of human folly.
Technically, the Goya etchings are simple and direct. He usually combined line etching with aquatint; his masterful control of the latter, a relatively new technique, has never been surpassed. Toward the end of his life, he also made a few rich, powerful lithographs.
France
Most 18th-century French etchings were drawings transferred to copper, in which the effects of pencil, pen, or chalk were imitated. Although some distinguished painters, such as Antoine Watteau, made etchings, no prints of importance were produced. Jean-Honoré Fragonard made a few lovely etchings reminiscent of Tiepolo. They have a luminous, transparent quality and express the Rococo spirit but are nevertheless minor works of a major painter. Two artists are notable for technical achievements: Jean-Charles François developed the crayon manner, and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince is credited with the invention of aquatint.
Japan
The first Japanese artist to produce single prints in quantity was Torii Kiyonobu, who specialized in portraits of actors and theatre posters. His school, the Torii, dominated printing for the theatre for two centuries. Another imaginative innovator of the early 18th century was Okumura Masanobu, who experimented with inks, embossing, and gold and silver overlays. He also invented the two-colour print and generally standardized colour printing. His studio greatly influenced the evolution of colour woodcut. Suzuki Harunobu, one of the most charming masters of Japanese woodcut, created prints of infinite delicacy and grace. In this respect he is a forerunner and rival of Utamaro. A highly gifted colourist, he was one of the first to exploit the nishiki-e, or full-colour print. He was also the first to colour print backgrounds and to use blind embossing extensively to give his prints three-dimensional textures. Katsukawa Shunshō is notable for his austere portraits of actors, which he designed with much strength and intensity. Some of his portraits are among the finest in Japanese printmaking.
The period from 1780 to 1790 was dominated by Torii Kiyonaga, whose work represents the ukiyo-e at its height. He was a great draftsman and designer and could harmonize in his prints the two seemingly contradictory qualities of elegance and power. Kiyonaga was one of the first to experiment with the compositional possibilities of the diptych, triptych, and pentaptych formats. Although he conceived each block as a self-contained unit, they functioned together in harmony. Kitagawa Utamaro can justly be called the supreme poet of Japanese art. Utamaro’s prints are the most perfect expression of a tender, loving contemplation of nature, which included not only birds and flowers but women as well. At age 50 he was put in jail for an offending print; broken in spirit, he died shortly after his release.
During his lifetime he produced over 600 series of books and albums. Toshusai Sharaku is not only one of the most distinguished but also one of the most mysterious figures of Japanese art. Seemingly out of nowhere, his magnificent, powerful portraits of actors suddenly appeared on posters. The boldness of the portraits, verging on caricature; their psychological insight; their richness in colour all represented a daring new attitude. The originality of these prints disturbed the authorities to such an extent that the police prohibited them. In less than two years of working life, Sharaku had produced approximately 145 portraits; then the prodigious flow of work stopped, and he disappeared again.
