Print-making

In the production of prints there has also been, mainly in the West and since the sixteenth century, a division of labour between designers and executants. The purpose of print-making is to produce a number of copies of a single design on sheets of paper, silk or any other material that will absorb ink. The earliest technique was that of the woodcut by which the design was drawn on a smooth block of wood, the parts that were to be white on the print were cut away, those that were to be black were left standing up in relief and covered with ink so that when the block was pressed on to paper or a textile it left an impression of the design in reverse. (This is known as a relief print.) It was first used in China in the seventh century AD for printing images of the Buddha and in Europe in the fourteenth century for Christian images. By alternative processes developed in Europe from the mid-fifteenth century, intaglio prints were made from metal plates in which the parts that are to be black and carry ink are incised by tools (engravings) or eaten away by acid (etchings). From the sixteenth century the drawing of designs and the cutting of woodblocks or the engraving of metal plates were usually separate activities. Copper-plate engravings with their fine firm lines soon superseded woodcuts for scientific illustration, anatomical, zoological, botanical and so on. For imaginative work, artists sometimes engraved copper plates but generally preferred etchings which they executed themselves, drawing with a needle on wax-coated copper plate sub-sequently immersed in acid which ate into the parts exposed by the needle (see p. 608). From the early nineteenth century artists also made prints by the process of lithography - drawing with an oily crayon on stone (15,18).

Woodcuts, engravings, etchings and lithographs both designed and executed by the same hand are termed 'original prints', as distinct from 'reproductive prints' executed by specialist print-makers, who copied the works of painters or draftsmen using a variety of techniques, often with the greatest skill. In the nineteenth century it was discovered that prints of very high technical quality could be made from engravings on steel-coated plates, which yielded a far greater number of copies than easily damaged copper. But artists took little interest in this process which was used mainly for illustrations - in books and periodicals - until it was superseded by photography. In the meantime Japanese artists had developed a woodcut process for making color prints which were imported into Europe and America from the 1850s and enthusiastically received by many artists who welcomed an escape from the European tradition of oil painting. In the West these prints were sometimes copied, and their effects emulated, in oil paint, as well as influencing etching and lithography (see p. 662). Early in the twentieth century several European artists reverted to print-making with woodblocks, emphasizing obviously hand-cut irregularities for expressive effect .