Lasting Impressions

The Invention of Lithography

Lithography was discovered in Munich between 1796 and 1799 by Aloys Senefelder, a dramatist seeking a cheap way to duplicate his plays. Through a lucky chance, Senefelder discovered that an image drawn in a greasy medium on a block of fine-grained limestone became bonded to its surface when treated with a gum and acid mixture. Once the treated surface was moistened with water, the greasy image accepted printing ink, while the undrawn areas of the wet stone rejected it. The novelty was that these ink-accepting and ink-rejecting areas existed in the same plane, so no part of the printing surface had to be cut away as was necessary in all other methods of printing. At first, Senefelder called his invention 'chemical printing', but it was eventually named lithography, from the Greek words ‘to write on stone’.

The First Artists' Lithographs

Through Senefelder’s association with an astute businessman. Johann Anton André, the lithographic process spread rapidly' through the German states and was taken to both England and France within a couple of years.

By September 1799 the inventor, who had secured exclusive rights to the process in Bavaria, had developed sufficient business in music and jobbing printing to employ his two brothers, plus two apprentices. André paid Senefelder 2000 florins for permission to exploit the process and for Senefelder to convert his music presses in Offenbach to the new method. Senefelder also spent seven months in England obtaining British patents. Back in Offenbach on 10 August 1801, he assigned these to André as well for a further 3000 florins although a day later a disagreement ended their association.

In London, Senefelder had helped André’s brother, Philipp, to set up the first press outside the German states, giving personal instruction in drawing and printing. Called 'polyautography' in England, lithography was not used primarily for commerce as in Germany, but was presented to artists as a method for multiplying original drawings. In April 1803, Philipp André published the first Specimens of polyautography, including pen lithographs by the President of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, and Academicians Henry Fuseli, Thomas Stothard and James Barry. Although André and his successor had abandoned the English press by 1807, discouraged by low sales, 165 artists' lithographs made in England before 1810 have been catalogued.

In 1813-14, D.J. Redman, a former assistant to the English press, started his own workshop in Bath and helped Thomas Barker to produce two remarkable sets of pen lithographs — one set depicting 'rustic figures', the other featuring scenery in the west of England. Although the Bath press gave rise to a slim treatise on lithography by Henry Bankes, Redman never mastered the more difficult printing of lithographic chalk. The process did not therefore progress in England until Senefelder's treatise was published there in 1819, at about the same time that Charles Joseph Hullmandel set up another press.

Although, after their disagreement with Senefelder they worked without the inventor's guidance, Johann André and his relatives continued to promote lithography. André's cousin, Franqois Johannot, produced competent chalk lithographs as early as 1802 and the following year assisted the isolated Berlin artist Wilhelm Reuter. Like many early lithographers, Reuter found printing difficult, as the faint patches in his neo-classical depiction of Pluto’s rape of Persephone reveal. Between 1804 and 1808, however, after receiving Johannot’s help, Reuter published Polyautographic drawings by outstanding Berlin artists, based on the English example.

Senefelder explored calico printing in Vienna for five years from 1801 , and found several presses infringing his exclusive rights when he returned to Munich. In 1809 the inventor obtained a well-paid sinecure at the most important of the pirate presses, and this gave him time to develop his invention. His own press passed to Johann Christian von Mannlich, Court Painter and Director of the Royal Bavarian Galleries. Until his death in 1822, von Mannlich oversaw the high-quality reproduction by Strixner and Piloty of many of the paintings in his care. His portfolios set the standard for tint lithography in Germany, a technique that employed two stones, one carrying the black printing, the second an all-over colour, usually buff, out of which white highlights (in fact, unprinted paper) had been reserved.

Frédéric, yet another of André’s brothers, received permission to import lithography into France on 11 February 1802, but his inexperience, not to mention the Napoleonic wars, impeded his progress and he abandoned his efforts in 1809. A quantity of music was produced in the early days, decorated with vignettes by Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, but attempts to establish lithography in France proved abortive. Fortunately several influential Frenchmen learnt about the process while visiting Munich, including Napoleon's brother, two of his officers, and Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, Director-General of the Imperial Museums. Most important of all, Charles Philibert de Lasteyrie and Godefroy Engelmann, destined to become the first successful Parisian printers, also took instruction in Munich. After the cessation of hostilities in 1815, these two men ensured France's domination of artists' lithography for the rest of the century.

The Lithographic 'Grand Tour'

Lithography was used for many purposes in the nineteenth century, one of the most common being to multiply sketches made in unfamiliar places at home or abroad. Views were published as single prints, in albums, and as book illustrations, for public enjoyment and information.

When twenty-five years of war in Europe ended with Napoleon's defeat in 1815, many artists toured the Continent, drawing its scenery, people, towns and ancient remains. Although the aristocratic tradition of the 'Grand Tour' continued, the experiences of travel could now be shared more widely with those who stayed at home, through the relatively inexpensive means of artists' lithographs.

The Orient was a major theme in art at this time, and lithography proved a speedy way to disseminate scenes from the mysterious East. For the French, North Africa was the next frontier of empire. Battles against the Mamelukes (the Turkish military rulers of Egypt) contained all the elements required by Romanticism: adventure, heroism, and a fantasy world of sheikhs and harems. Baron Gros did not even need to travel there – imagination was enough. Géricault's Mameluke chieftain possesses dynamic qualities perhaps lacking in most Europeans; boldness and strength are communicated in his twisting torso and monumental pose.

Exotic scenes and peoples from Arabia and the Middle East provided exciting subject matter, a different world to explore. In The Holy Land of 1842-49, David Roberts portrayed the area as culturally significant, the setting for Biblical events still strewn with historic stones. David Wilkie's Turkish sketches concentrated on individuals, while striving for authenticity in costumes and manners.

Artistic and historical enrichment were amongst the aims of Baron Taylor. His ambitious series documenting scenery and mediaeval architecture, Picturesque and Romantic Journeys in Ancient France, was published in nineteen volumes between 1820 and 1878. Bonington's Rouen street scene displayed a feeling for the past while recording it in the present, successfully combining the romantic with the archaeological.

Hullmandel, the leading British lithographic printer, and author in 1824 of The Art of Drawing on Stone, excelled in the production of tint lithographs such as those in James Duffield Harding's portfolio Sketches at home and abroad of 1836. Figures and buildings are picturesque elements in nature or civilization, revealed to the viewer through the eyes of artist and lithographer, and thus seen by many instead of the few.

In Australia, lithography was adopted slowly, although it was useful for topographical purposes. Sir Thomas Brisbane set up a press at Parramatta in 1822, and Hullmandel sent a press and stones to Tasmania in 1830. Nevertheless, London lithographers and printers were entrusted with the production of South Australia Illustrated in 1846—47, despite the artists George French Angas and S.T. Gill having settled in the new colony. The publication's purpose was to attract free immigrants, and the hand-coloured lithographs presented Aboriginal people and the unfamiliar landscape as welcoming, with Adelaide a thriving, civilized centre.

While the documentary aspect of lithography increasingly became the province of photography, its interpretative, Romantic landscape tradition continued, ranging from Alexandre Calame's moody study of the Reichenbach River, published in 1852, to Corot's elegiac and tranquil recollections of Italy, drawn in 1871.

Masterpieces in Black and White

Despite the slow start, lithographs produced in France quickly eclipsed most of those produced elsewhere. By the early 1820s there were eighteen presses in Paris and twenty-six in the provinces. In Bordeaux in 1825, the elderly Goya, partially blind and in voluntary exile from Spain, made four magnificent bullfight scenes, setting his stone up on an easel like a canvas and wielding a blunt crayon with a profound understanding of light and shade.

England’s earliest dated pen lithograph of 1801 by West is, for all its vitality, dominated by the cross-hatching typical of engraving. The first outstanding original masterpiece in Germany was the grand pen drawing of a Gothic church in an oak grove, made in 1810 by Friedrich von Schinkel, who was an architect of the classical revival and a stage designer. Few contemporary German lithographers could match von Schinkel, but in 1851 Adolph von Menzel, using a liquid lithographic drawing medium called tusche, made six inventive Experiments on Stone with Brush and Scraper. In his study of bears at the zoo, a fine tool has picked out highlights from the painted tusche to convey the animals' furriness.

Godefroy Engelmann’s lavis (wash) did not involve liquid, but soft crayon rubbed into the stone, parts of which had been made impermeable to grease by a coating of gum. Géricault used this method for his wonderful little drawing of a horse being shod, which is similar to The Flemish tarrier, printed by Hullmandel during the artist’s trip to London two years earlier. The Australian art historian Robert Smith has published an elegant argument that while he was in England, Géricault copied onto stone the portraits of four English aristocrats drawn by Ingres. Although the evidence is circumstantial, there were no English draughtsmen capable of the task, and an inexplicable gap exists between 1815, when Ingres drew the original portraits in Rome, and Hullmandel’s printing of them in 1820-21.

Géricaults superb horse lithographs inspired the English Romantic artist James Ward to make his own horse series in 1824: his Adonis, pawing the ground as an approaching thunderstorm darkens the sky, has the same pent-up energy as Eugene Delacroix’s magnificent Royal tiger, drawn five years later. The Romantic imagination was also greatly excited by sublime landscape, and Eugéne Isabey’s lithographs build up chalk in such a way that the atmosphere in his prints of the Auvergne district becomes almost palpable.

Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet and his pupil, Auguste Raffet, were famous for their consummately skilful use of chalk, with which they kept alive the Napoleonic legend. Charlet portrayed the ordinary soldier as immortal hero, while Raffet, who a century later might have designed epic film sets, marshalled his troops through innumerable military campaigns. Both artists were individually honoured in the 1890s and then exhibited at the historical Centennial Exhibition of 1895, when France celebrated the birth of lithography some three years prematurely.

The works made in the middle of the century were very varied. While Achille Devéria achieved a line as elegant and incisive as that of Ingres in his many portrait masterpieces, Théodore Chassériau produced a single master-work — a Venus once described as 'the most chaste drawing ever made of a woman’s form'. The idiosyncratic Rodolphe Bresdin detailed every blade of grass in the fantastic landscape of The Good Samaritan, without losing sight of the whole.

Bresdin powerfully influenced Odilon Redon, who helped Henri Fantin-Latour save lithography from falling into the doldrums in the 1870s. Fantin created his famous bouquet of roses, and the exquisite print of lovers walking in a woodland glade, by beginning on transfer paper and then — once his drawings were on stone —working into them with a scraper. His prints attempt to reconcile reality with the world of his imagination; Redon, using similar techniques, had similar aims. Both men achieved a grey scale of extraordinary range, moving between shadow and luminosity in a way that demonstrates the power of black to suggest all colour. Monochrome was deemed so fundamental to graphic art that various nineteenth-century exhibiting societies banned colour, but the movement to popularize art through lithography in the 1890s proved ultimately persuasive.

The Development of Colour Lithography

Colour lithography was the subject of much experimentation in the first decades of the nineteenth century and became a substitute for hand-colouring. Early attempts included Senefelder's use of up to eleven separate stones, with colours placed side by side rather than being overprinted. Techniques employing buff tint stones could reproduce only partially the rich and velvety depths of oil painting.

It was only when Engelmann developed chromolithography that 'litho colour printing; or lithographs in colour imitating painting' (as he described it in a patent application in 1837) was aesthetically and technically successful. Transparent colours from three stones, inked with the primary hues of yellow, blue and red, were superimposed, while a fourth stone was printed in black. The patent was granted on the condition, which Engelmann fulfilled, that at least 1000 impressions be produced. In the United States, Germany and Great Britain, an industry arose from this kind of colour printing.

In England, Hullmandel printed a landmark volume in 1839: Thomas Shotter Boys's Picturesque Architecture in Paris, Ghent, Antwerp, Rouen. The artist-lithographer's skilled hand shows in the subtle, resonant colour obtained by transparent inks. These lithographs have continued to receive the critical approval withheld from Engelmann's version of chromolithography — the dominant medium from 1840 to 1880 — which was seen as vulgar, brash and inartistic.

With their dense, brilliant colour and popular subjects, 'chromos' reached out to a new audience. The descriptive and informative plates in books on London's Great Exhibition of 1851 , especially those by Mathew Digby Wyatt and J.B. Waring, display decorative objects from many lands with the kind of obsessive detail characteristic of the Victorian thirst for knowledge.

Pattern books to be used by architects and decorators reached a high point with Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament of 1856. Jones classified and pictured decorative schemes and elements from Egyptian to Gothic, Chinese to Aztec. Often picked out with gold or silver, the vibrant colours and abstract designs provided a rich source for artists and craftspeople, as well as exciting prints.

In the 1890s, artists' colour lithography in France came into its own. Inspired after 1880 by the flickering line and chromatic strategies of advertising posters by Jules Chéret, artists saw the possibilities of colour lithography as an art form. Instead of imitating the effects of oil and watercolour painting, they exploited the medium's own characteristics, especially the vibrancy of flat areas of clear colour.

As photomechanical methods of printing were perfected, the struggle between supporters of 'original' and 'reproductive' prints intensified. Collaboration with talented printers permitted artists to extend the boundaries of technique, and much experimentation occurred.

Neo-Impressionist colour theorists Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross experimented with lithography as well as paint. Instead of mixing complex hues in advance, they divided the image into separate touches of pure colour from the light spectrum, applying them in small strokes or patches next to each other so that they mixed in the viewer's eye. The shimmering scenes of landscape or Parisian life that resulted were enhanced by the areas of white paper allowed to show through.

Popularization

Throughout the century lithography made art and artists popular in many different ways. It became the ideal means to illustrate the popular press in France from the 1830s onwards, and particularly suited caricature because the artist was able to draw images with relative spontaneity using lithographic crayon. These lithographic drawings could then be transferred onto several other stones, enabling the printing of large editions.

Following the introduction of censorship laws in France in 1835, political caricature gave way to social caricature by artists such as Honoré Daumier. This dominated the popular press for nearly forty years and had considerable popular appeal. By mid-1846 sales of the satirical illustrated journal Le Charivari [Uproar] had grown to 2740 in Paris, with 1705 provincial subscribers. Although editions remained comparatively small compared to Parisian newspaper sales, Le Charivari catered to a far greater audience than the number sold suggests. For those who could not afford the paper, the latest copies could be viewed in the publisher's window or found in cafés and public reading rooms; there were 215 of these in Paris by 1844. In this way, lithographs by Daumier reached a wide audience, and he took as his subjects many social issues affecting ordinary people. One such issue was the serious housing shortage brought about by Napoleon III’s reconstruction of Paris in the 1850s. In a veiled criticism of Napoleon, Daumier drew lithographs of Parisians cramped in attics or cellars as the Paris of old was destroyed around them.

The new Paris, with its improved sewerage, grand buildings, and wide boulevards suitable for the movement of troops and the quelling of riots, became the setting for Chéret's posters advertising theatrical venues and performances, or manufactured goods and services. Popular with the general public as well as with artists, they soon became collectors' items.

Just as artists in Bavaria like Strixner had reproduced beautiful copies of old master paintings, so the British Arundel Society, driven by an almost missionary zeal, was established to popularize and preserve a record of Italian Renaissance art. The Society revived interest in Giotto, Masaccio, Filippino Lippi, Michelangelo and others by reproducing their work for an annual subscription of one guinea. Largely through these efforts, many Victorian homes and churches were decorated with coloured lithographs after Renaissance artists.

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, lithography, particularly chromolithography, had, in the eyes of some critics, acquired a stigma because of its association with a flood of poor-quality commercial printing. The urge to draw a distinction, often quite false, between a chromolithograph and a colour lithograph, increased. In the 1890s, as part of the attempt to resurrect the idea of the lithograph as an independent art form, several French publishers, among them André Marty and Ambroise Vollard, invited major artists of the day to contribute to graphic portfolios. From 1893 to 1895, for example, Marty produced quarterly portfolios in a series entitled L'Estampe originale [The original print]. Although other print techniques were used, the majority were lithographs. One contributor was Pierre Bonnard, who drew an intimate family scene of great subtlety in four clear colours, producing an effect very different from contemporary commercial usage. Another mainly lithographic publication, L'Estampe moderne [The modern print], was published from May 1897 to April 1898 in monthly sets of four prints priced at less than one franc apiece. The publication was intended to reach an even wider audience with an edition of 2000, but because it tried to cater to all tastes, it was criticized as commercial and banal.

With lithography's acceptance as an art form came its appearance in the decorative arts for screens, fans and wallpaper. Journals containing original colour lithographs proliferated towards the end of the nineteenth century, allowing the circulation of beautiful prints by major artists. The portrait of Mlle. Marcelle Lender, which Toulouse-Lautrec drew for the first volume of the international art magazine Pan in 1895, appeared in over 1200 copies. Unfortunately, this lithograph was considered so risqué, and was so technically ambitious (and therefore costly), that Pan's editor was dismissed.

For a variety of reasons — overproduction, the economics of colour printing, and the enthusiasm for other techniques shown by early twentieth-century artists —lithography entered a period of disfavour. Then, after a brief monochrome revival between the wars, the technique came to full colour prominence again after Picasso had revitalized it in the mid-1940s.

Christine Dixon
Pat Gilmour
Jane Kinsman