Bibliography:
Gascoigne, Bamber . How to identify prints.  New York : Thames and Hudson, c1986.

Griffiths, Antony . Prints and printmaking. [London] : British Museum Press, 1996.

Philadelphia Print Shop. Glossary of Printmaking Nomenclature and Abbreviations, 2005, http://www.philaprintshop.com/abbrtb.html

Zigrosser, Carl  and Christa M. Gaehde . A Guide to the Collecting and Care of Original Prints.   New York : Crown publishers,  1965,  p. 59-60.

Graphics Atlas

For the link to the Graphics Atlas, click here.

The Graphics Atlas is a new online resource that brings sophisticated print identification and characteristic exploration tools to archivists, curators, historians, collectors, conservators, educators, and the general public. Tools include the "Guided Tour" through individual prints in a virtual study collection that contains processes raning from the woodcut to the modern digital print, "Compare Processes" using views made with various lighting techniques and magnifications, and "Identification" with distinguishing characteristics of each process and step by step instructions on how to identify print processes. Created by IPI, the Image Permanence Institute.

The woodcut

Engraved on the plank, often in crude, splintery images.

Long association with vernacular and popular culture, and the earliest forms of illustration.

Ballads/broadsides/tracts/cries of London/ popular narratives. Appropriated by sectarians as the form of illustration for the tract in the
Late eighteenth century.

The wood engraving

‘Revival’ of end grain wood block engraving under Thomas Bewick in the last two decades of the eighteenth century.
The ‘School of Bewick’ and the establishment of the trade in London, thus forming a key element of the take-off of mass circulation
literature in the early Victorian period, and forming the dominant mode through which Victorian society represented itself and its world.
The Mirror of Literature (1821); The Penny Magazine (1832); The Saturday Magazine (1832); Punch (1841); The Illustrated London News (1842).

Issues:
i.    To what extent can wood engraving,  - a linear, largely monochrome medium – be considered a naturalistic medium – despite its widespread
use as a documentary and informative genre by the Victorians?
ii.   How far did the Victorians continue to regard wood engraving as an inferior medium to other forms of engraving and painting despite its assimilation into mainstream culture? Was there an aesthetics of wood engraving?
iii.  The emergence of a ‘fine art’ tradition of wood engraving – Pre-Raphaelites, Once A Week, Good Words, etc.

1.         COPPER ENGRAVING

INVENTED – Mid 15th. century.                   HEY-DAY – Pre 1800                       METHOD – burin + metal plate

a.         The first engraved medium.
b.         But increasingly a reprographic rather than a directly ‘expressive’ medium.
c.         Widely used in the 18th. century for explanatory diagrams, accounts of machinery, encyclopaedia.
d.         A wholly linear medium where the control of tone (cross-hatching, etc.) is difficult
e.         Extremely laborious and skilled.
f.          Artist dependent on the skill of a specialist engraver.

2.         ETCHING

INVENTED – Early 16th. century                  HEY-DAY – 1600 on                                    METHOD – acid/stopping out/metal plate

a.         Freedom of line.
b.         ‘Direct’ presence of the artist’s marks on the plate.
c.         Hugely labour saving compared to copper.
d.         Amenable to tonal control through working/holding back the process of the acid’s erosion of the plate.
e.         Widely used for caricature and comic illustration in the later eighteenth century.
f.          Frequently combined with other media – e.g. aquatint.

3.         DRY POINT

INVENTED – 16th. century               HEY-DAY – Late nineteenth century           METHOD – needle like point + metal plate

a.         Artist has total control of the surface of the plate – it is like drawing as a technique.
b.         Thus good technique for representing/imitating drawings.
c.         A quick method of producing dense tonal area through the disruption (the ‘burr’) caused to the surface of the plate by the needle.
d.         Evinces a ‘scratchy’ quality which suggest the power and effort with which the line is made.

4.         STEEL ENGRAVING                    

INVENTED – c. 1820 as a substitute for copper engraving.       HEY-DAY - 1820-1880            METHOD – as copper engraving.

a.         Almost exclusively a nineteenth century form, used in more genteel or ambitious contexts than wood engraving.
b.         Particularly associated with gift books, genteel annuals and topographical illustration.
c.         Capable of a very fine and delicate engraved line – overall produces a greyer, less incisively linear image than copper engraving or etching.
d.         Can be combined with etching.

5.         MEZZOTINT

INVENTED – mid. 17th. century                   HEY-DAY – Late 18th. century = 19th. on steel and combined with etching
METHOD – a copper or steel plate is entirely roughened with a ‘rocker’ so that it will hold ink (this takes time and effort). The plate is thus entirely ‘burr’. Then the burr is smoothed out in graduated ways to create greys and whites.

a.         Only technique that works from black back towards light or white
b.         Outstanding at creating velvety blacks and a broad tonal range
c.         Creates unique textures and effects – a bravura technique.
d.         Fantastically laborious and complex even if an apprentice roughens the plate with the rocker.
e.         Mainly used for portraits, often with strong and dramatic tonal contrasts, but occasionally used for caricatures.
f.          The plates are very fragile – although they can be re-worked.  

6.         AQUATINT

INVENTED – 17TH. century but not popular until the late eighteenth century.    HEY-DAY – 1770-1830  
METHOD – an etching technique, but the plate is protected by a ‘ground’ which filters the acid and and thus affects the nature of the etched line. Grounds can be of various substances and density  and spread over the plate in various ways. Usually combined with conventional etching, but doesn’t have to be.

a.         Key medium for landscapes, as the less continuous and dense line imports more tonality and variation into the etching.
b.         Produces speckled and grainy textures.
c.         A medium much used  by Goya.

 7.         STIPPLE ENGRAVING

INVENTED – developed in the late eighteenth century     HEY-DAY  - 1770-1810 (Bartolozzi).
METHOD – a ‘roulette’ or spiked wheel is used instead of  conventional engraving tools, especially to provide tonally rich areas. The outcome is a speckled or ‘dotty’ effect in the print.

a.         Meant to imitate chalk drawing by using dots rather than lines as the basic unit of draughtsmanship.
b.         Mainly used in conjunction with conventional etching.

8.         SOFT GROUND ETCHING

INVENTED                           HEY-DAY – 1740-1820
METHOD – the normal wax ground of etching has tallow added to it making the ground tacky. The artist draws on paper laid on this ground. Lifting the paper also lifts the ground, but leaves the lines available to the acid.

a.         Again developed as a means to imitate chalk drawing – hence often used for instruction manuals and drawing books.
b.         Encourages a subtle line and freedom of drawing.

9. LITHOGRAPHY        

INVENTED 1798 (Senefelder)     HEY-DAY  1800-1900
METHOD – a prepared stone is drawn upon with crayons, and areas of the drawing are stooped out with ink resistant varnishes. For colour lithography the image is built up from repeated inkings in different colours, with the stone repositioned exactly for each printing.

Immediately exploited commercially because it was:
a.         cheap
b.         versatile
c.         looked genteel and sophisticated however vulgar the image
d.         involved a ‘natural’ method of drawing on stone
e.         could imitate all other reprographic media
f.          stone can be wiped clean or ground down and re-used.

Widely used for caricature in France – Daumier, Gavarni, etc. – where it mimicked chalk and pencil drawing.

Associated mainly in Britain with landscapes and portraits, but there is a strong if largely unacknowledged popular caricature tradition in the 1820s and 1830s, especially interested in urban life.

1. Vicesimus Knox ‘On the Effects of Caricatures exhibited at the Windows of Printsellers’ in Winter Evenings (London: 2 vols. Charles Dilly 3rd. ed. 1795) 139-144.

139 Poison may be converted into medicine; and ridicule, which, when directed against morality and religion, operates like a pestilence, may be used to expose vice and folly with peculiar efficacy.

The mode of ridiculing by prints has some advantages over that by writing and argument. Its effect is instantaneous; and they who cannot read, or [140] have not sense enough to comprehend, a refined piece of raillery, are able to see a good caricatura, and to receive a powerful impression from it.

The lower classes in London, it might be supposed, have not time, inclination, or ability, to read much, but their minds are filled with ideas, not only by the multitude of occurrences, but also by the prints that are obtruded on their notice, in the windows of shops conspicuously situated in the most frequented streets. And I believe, they often receive impressions, either favourable, or unfavourable, to their honesty and happiness as they loiter at a window, with a burden on their backs, and gape, unmindful of their toil, at the comical productions of the ingenious designer.

[Knox then argues that ‘corrupting and misleading’ prints and indecent prints should not be shown. He argues that political caricatures ‘contribute to diminish or destroy that reverence, which is always due to legal authority, and established rank, and which is confessedly useful and conducive to the most valuable ends of human society’.

He lists ‘kennel-rakers, shoe-blackers, chimney-sweepers and beggars’ as likely spectators, of little consequence in themselves he argues, until they are linked to the Gordon Riots where they ‘made their power felt in the memorable month of June 1780’.

141   Goes on to discuss the libel laws and the oversight that meant that the laws didn’t apply to caricature. Expresses outrage at the mocking of ‘personal deformity’ and artists who ‘render an irregularity, or defect, which would pass unnoticed, eminently and ridiculously conspicuous’.  Then argues that caricature upsets the families of those depicted, and is ‘injurious to religion’. Caricaturists should ‘confine their ridicule to vice and villainy’, and not upset ‘public tranquillity’.   ‘The prevalence of wanton assaasination’. 

2. From W.S.Lewis ‘Scrapbook of Advertisements’ at the Lewis Walpole Library.

[Pasted into back cover, a ‘miseries’ short piece clipped from an unidentified newspaper or magazine. Undated (circa 1790?).]
LONDON STREETS, their UNWALKABILITY and other deliciae.

1. In passing along a street well frequented with carriages, but narrow in the footpath, you come to that barrier called a Print-Shop. Besides the usual three rows of gapers, you have here an agglomeration of two or three journeyman bakers, with [sic] heir baskets reaching two feet beyond their shoulders, the whole group of dutiful admirers of the arts surmounted by a coal-heaver, whose feet fill up the last inch of the pavement, and whose pointed shovel project three feet over it. At every attempt you make to double this promontory, the pole of a coach, ready to bob you under the chin, corrects your impatience, and keeps you within the sphere of the fine arts.

3. The Minstrel or Songster’s Miscellany (J.Duncombe March 30th. 1812) Vol. 2, 23.
‘Darby McShane’s Visit to London’ sung by Mr. R.L.Jones with great applause.

In a shop full of pictures I stopp’d for to stare
When a thief pick’d my pocket, and faith he took care
To leave not a  copper for Darby McShane!

4. Metropolitan Grievances or a Serio-comic glance at Minor Mischiefs in London (Sherwood, Neeley and Jones 1821)106-107.
GRIEVANCE XLVI – PRINT SHOPS

‘What! Attack the arts! No, not exactly but the crowds who assemble and block up the pavement, (extending even into the kennel) before shops exhibiting caricature. A great annoyance and obstruction to men of business, - aye – and to women of business, too, and to other print incurious passengers. What is worse, those arehouses of comic sketches, or, of the minor arts, if you please, are the rendezvous of pickpockets, who, while the spectators are grinning, gaping, and staring, at some ridiculous exposure of vice or folly, in the prominent characters of the day, make an excellent harvest, by reaping from the incautious and silly victims of vice or folly, their money, watches, or pocket-handkerchiefs. Then the indecency of some of these pretty pictures, such as the protuberant Hottentot Venus, and many other nudity contours…..

I have nothing further to say, but with a character in Lady Wallace’s d…d comedy of ‘D.L.O.’; (‘D…me I’m off’) except you will honour me by perusing the following lines on a country gentleman having his spectacles snatched off his nose by a bot, while looking into a print shop window:

As a saunt’rer, with spectacles fixed on his nose
The various devices of art would disclose,
His glasses were stol’n, with this hint from a spark –
A Cam’ra Obscura seen best in the dark.

5. Transcript of a report on a trial at the Guildhall from The Times (1832)

GUILDHALL. – Yesterday, Mr. Henry Davis, a mineral water manufacturer, was charged before Mr. Alderman HUGHES with assaulting Thomas Carter, one of the city policemen, in the execution of his duty. Mr. Jenkins, and artist, his friend, was charged with attempting to rescue the prisoner; and John Malcolm, a labouring man, with exciting a crowd of persons against the police, byt crying, “Shame, shame,” and by telling the other prisoners to take care of their pockets, as though they were in danger of having them picked by the officers.

At the last sessions, the print-shop in Cheapside, at the corner of Wood-street, was indicted by the city as a nuisance, and a verdict was obtained, but the judgment was deferred until next session, to give Mr. Tregear an opportunity of abating the nuisance. Not having done this, however, those who have the direction of the city police have stationed four men and a serjeant about the windows, who compel persons that stop to gaze at the pictures to keep moving. On the other hand, Mr. Tregear stands at his door, and tells those who are interrupted by the police that they have a right to stay, and altercations ensue.

Carter stated, that while he was on duty at this shop yesterday, Mr. Davis and his friend stopped at the window, and he told them he could not allow anybody to stop and look in that window – they must move on.

Mr. Alderman HUGHES desired Carter to be particular in repeating the words he used, and asked if he said nothing else?

Carter said he did not.

Alderman HUGHES. – Did you say the moment they looked in?

Carter. – Yes, sir.

Alderman HUGHES. – And what was the consequence?

Carter. – The gentleman struck me, and I took him into custody.

William Marden, another policeman, said that the gentlemen had been looking at the prints from two to three minutes, before they were requested to move on, and the form in which they were addressed by him was, “Will you have the goodness to move on, if you please.” When they refused to go, and Carter began to move them, Mr. Davis struck him, and when he was seized, his friend attempted to drag him away.

Mr. Alderman HUGHES said this gave the case a different complexion, as it did not appear that the gentleman had been accosted so abruptly and instantly as Carter had represented; but still he conceived that he had exceeded the instructions given to him, for he could not conceive that a person could be prevented from looking in at the window for a short time. If, however, several persons stopped, it became a serious obstruction and nuisance.

Mr. Walters, a solicitior, who attended on the part of Mr. Tregear, said, that the stationing of the policemen around the house, to prevent anyone from stopping for a moment at the window, was a monstrous invasion of the rights of the subject, as respoected the public, who were driven from the window, and the citizen, whose trade was ruined by the driving away of his customers. It was a fact, that Mr. Tregear used to take 60l. a week, but since the house had been surrounded with policemen, he had taken only 10s. a day. Mr. Tregear had in fact abated the nuisance, by diminishing the number of prints exhibitied in his window. His show was formerly of the valuse of 100l.; it was noworth but 14s., and was smaller than that of any other print shop in the city. The power assumed by the police was most dangerous, as it was as applicable to a haberdasher, or to any other tradesman whose show of bargains might attract a crowd, as to a print shop.

Mr. Alderman HUGHES thought there was no danger of falling into mistakes upon this matter. Mr. Tregear’s shop-window was notoriously a nuisance, - a resort for offenders of every description, and much be suppressed.

Mr. Jenkins denied that he had attempted to rescue his fiend, and Mr. Davis complained that Carter had dragged him along roughly, and expressed a longing to thrash him.

Carter allowed that he said, as the prisoner had struck him, he should like tot thrash him.

Mr. Walters produced two witnesses to prove that the policeman had not been struck.

Mr. Alderman HUGHES declined, however, to examine them, as he meant to dismiss the case, after admonishing the officer. It was a duty, the exercise of which required great discrimination; and Carter’s zeal to please his employers had overcome his dscretion. He had certainly overstepped his instructions, and shown a want of temper which rendered him unfit to be trusted with the duty, and he very regretted the inconvenience the gentlemen had suffered…..

WILLIAM THACKERAY 

 ‘AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS OF GEORGE CRUIKSHANK’

First published in the Westminster Review  vol. XXXIV(June 1840) 1-60. Reprinted as a separate pamphlet with additional illustrations by Henry Hooper in 1840, and then reprinted both as a separate publication and as part of Thackeray’s works. My edition is the Smith Elder ‘Biographical Edition’ in Thirteen Volumes (a fourteenth was added later). All citations are to volume XIII of this edition Ballads and Miscellanies (Smith Elder 1902).

[on printshops]

1. Knight’s, in Sweeting Alley; Fairburn’s, in a court off Ludgate Hill; Hone’s,  in Fleet Street – bright, enchanted palaces, which George Cruikshank used to people with grinning, fantastical imps, and merry, harmless sprites, - where are they? Fairburn’s shop knows him no more; not only has Knight’s disappeared from Sweeting’s Alley, but as we are given toi understand, Sweeting’s Alley has disappeared from the face of the globe. Slop, the atrocious Castlereagh, the sainted Caroline (in a tight pelisse, with feathers in her head), the “Dandy of Sixty,” who used to glance at us from Hone’s friendly window – where are they?
2. …and there make one at his “charming gratis” exhibition. There used to be a crowd round the window in those days, of grinning, good-natured mechanics, who spelt the songs, and spoke them out for the benefit of the company, and who received the points of humour with a general sympathising roar.   Where are these people now? You never hear any laughing at HB.; his pictures are a great deal too genteel for that – polite points of wit, which strike one as exceedingly clever and pretty, and cause one to smile in a quiet, gentle-man like kind of way.

LEWIS WALPOLE ‘MASTERCLASS’ 2010

CARICATURE AND THE COMIC IMAGE 1800-1850

What follows is an annotated reading list for those of you who want to begin thinking through some of the issues we will be discussing during our forthcoming class. Cindy Roman from the Lewis Walpole Library has arranged for copies of these texts, where possible, to be made available for you in the reading room at the Yale Centre for British Art. I am grateful to Cindy and to the staff at YCBA for organising this facility. The books will also be available for you in Farmington during the class. You don’t have to read anything in advance, but obviously it will help you to gain all you can from it. I have organised the reading into a few rudimentary categories so that you can see where alternatives are available. I am looking forward to meeting with you soon. Brian (Maidment).

Print techniques and how to identify them.
Bamber Gasgoigne’s How to Identify Prints, first published in 1986 is my preferred option – it is comprehensive, attractive and well informed. But there are other good guides such as Antony Griffiths’s Prints and Printmaking (1980 and extensively reprinted) based on the British Museum collections. We will spend much of the first day of the class making sure we can identify the differing techniques that are used to make prints, and to think a little about their cultural history and impact.

The caricature tradition and its impact 1800-1850

Diana Donald’s The Age of Caricature (1996) provides the standard overview of the eighteenth century British caricature tradition. M. Dorothy George’s Hogarth to Cruikshank – Social Change in Graphic Satire (1967), written by one of the compilers of The British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, focuses precisely on the period we will be studying and traces the shift away from political to broader social themes in comic visual culture at this time. Vic Gattrell’s City of Laughter – Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London, written to some extent as a riposte to Donald’s view of caricature as a ‘democratic’ art, has an important concluding chapter on sociability, the city and humour. Mark Bills’s The Age of Satire – London in Caricature (2006) traces the urban interests of caricature through from the eighteenth century to the present day, and contains much useful information about the social geography of the caricature trade.

General histories of the print.
Sheila O’Connell’s The Popular Print in England (1999) is a good introduction covering a broad historical span and a wide variety of print modes and genres. Tim Clayton’s The English Print 1688-1802 (1997) and Mark Hallett The Spectacle of Difference; Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (1999) between them offer a comprehensive account of the comic and satirical print in the years leading up to 1800. An extremely useful account of the assimilation of the comic image broadly into print culture in the early nineteenth century can be found in the second edition (1981) of Simon Houfe’s ‘Introduction’ to his Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800-1914. Unfortunately earlier and later editions of this book don’t include Houfe’s excellent overview. Patricia Anderson’s The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860 (1991) remains the most useful consideration of visual culture, literacy and the emergence of a mass readership in the early Victorian period, but it has a lot of inaccuracies and is far from comprehensive. Louis James’s elderly anthology Print and the People (1976) is both visually and intellectually more exciting. Celina Fox’s Graphic Journalism in England During the 1830s and 1840s (1988) connects the graphic image with the emergence of social reportage, a connection we will be examining during the class.

The interpretation of prints for non-specialists.
Obviously, there is an ever growing literature that seeks to help students and scholars from a range of disciplines to use visual material as part of their work, including my own book Reading Popular Prints 1790-1870 (1996) which was aimed at undergraduate and post-graduate students. In dealing with comic and satirical images I have found Frank Palmeri’s chapter ‘The Cartoon: the Image as Critique’ in ed. Sarah Barber and C. Peniston-Bird History Beyond the Text – A student’s guide to approaching alternative sources (2009) a very useful introduction to working with satirical images. It is aimed primarily at students with a history background. I’ll try to circulate copies of this chapter to you before the class, as well as another piece I’ve just finished on graphic satire as a resource for the study of urban culture in the early nineteenth century. But obviously there is a huge range of available approaches to nineteenth century visual culture ranging from Walter Benjamin’s still suggestive essay on ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ through ‘cultural studies’ approaches to concepts of centrality, marginality and dissent derived from the Bhahktinian ‘carnivalesque’, (like, for example, White and Stalybrass’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression) through to Jonathan Crary’s influential studies of nineteenth century visuality. William Ivins Prints and Visual Communication (1953) remains an important point of reference for the study of prints. More specifically on caricature, see Kenneth T. Rivers Transmutations – Understanding Literary and Pictorial Caricature (1991).

Individual artists and their work.
Apart from many books on George Cruikshank, there are remarkably few studies of individual comic artists from the first half of the nineteenth century. Luckily, Robert Patten’s two volume biography of Cruikshank (George Cruikshank’s Life, Times and Art 1992 and 1996) contains an enormous amount of information about Cruikshank’s contemporaries. Vogler’s 1968 collection of Cruikshank’s Graphic Works for Dover Books offers a useful introduction to a wide range of his astonishing output. Graham Everitt’s English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century, first published in 1893, remains the best source of basic information for the period. Entries on other significant artists we will be looking at, such as Henry Heath, William Heath, Charles Jameson Grant, Robert Seymour, and Joe Lisle, can be found in various dictionaries like Houfe’s (mentioned above) but they remain shadowy figures – this, of course, is part of the pleasure of working on this period.

Brian Maidment
March 2011