Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/465

Rh ENGRAVING 445 requires a good deal of stopping-out, and some burnishing, scraping, fce., at last It has been employed very success fully by M. Brunei Debaines in his plates from Turner, especially in Agrippina landing with the Ashes of Ger- manicus. Aquatint may be effectively used in combina tion with line etching, and still more harmoniously with soft ground etching in which the line imitates that of the lead pencil lency The natural tendency of the three kinds of engraving we rav have studied is from line to shade and from shade to &quot; d texture. The perfection of line is seldom maintained when ire. the attention of artists has been directed to the other elements, for line is a separate study. Shade is its enemy, but line may still survive under a veil of half shade. When chiaroscuro becomes complete the delicacy cf line, which is an abstraction, is nearly lost; and when texture becomes an object also, the line is lost altogether. This appears to be the natural law of development in the graphic arts, and it is an approach to nature, which is all shade and texture without line ; yet the pure-line is a loss in art, from its ready expression of the feeling of the artist, and a loss for which more natural truth is not always a compensation. Mezzotint. Of all the kinds of engraving, mezzotint comes nearest to nature, though it is far from being the best as a means of artistic expression. It is said to have been invented by Prince Rupert, or by Lewis Siegen, a lieutenant in his service, in or about the year 1611, and to have been suggested by the rust on a weapon which a soldier was cleaning. The plate is prepared (before any design is made upon it) by means of an instrument like a chisel, with the edge ground into the segment of a circle like the rocker of a cradle, and so engraved as to present when sharp about 100 or 120 small teeth. This cradle is rocked from side to side with the hand, and every tooth makes a small dent in the copper, and raises a corresponding bur. The whole surface of the plate is gona over with this instrument about eighty times, in different directions, before it is in a fit con dition to be worked upon. &quot;When sufficiently prepared it presents -a fine soft-looking and perfectly even grain, and if in this state a proof is taken from it by the usual process of copper-plate printing, the result is nothing but the richest possible black. The engraver works from dark to light by removing the grain with a scraper, and exactly in proportion as he removes it the tint becomes paler and paler. Pure whites are got by scraping the grain away entirely, and burnishing the place. As the process is from dark to light, the engraver has to be very cautious not to remove too much of his grain at once. He proceeds gradually from dark to half-dark, from half-dark to middle- tint, from middle-tint to half-light, and from .half-light to light. He has nothing to do with line, but thinks entirely of masses relieved from each other by chiaroscuro. When the work is good the result is soft and harmonious, well adapted to the interpretation of some painters, but not of all. As the art has been most practised in England, some of its most successful work has been employed in the tran slation of English artists. More than a hundred engravers in mezzotint employed themselves on the portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the best of their works are now valued as the classics of the art, which is connected with the name of Reynolds just as line engraving is connected with that of Raphael. Turner and Constable s landscapes were also admirably engraved in mezzotint by Lupton and others, Turner himself being a good mezzotint engraver, though he practised the art little. Mezzotint, engraving is still practised in England with great skill by Cousens and others, and would no doubt be more resorted to than it is l p en- i of I!ZZO- Pt en- i.ving. t :par:i- iof t. plate. is. ic en- avcrs Rey- Ids. dpton. if the plates yielded larger editions, but unfortunately they soon show signs of wear. Dry point is really nothing but mezzotint in line. As Dry the point of the stylus makes its scratch on the copper, it point, raises a bur, which retains the ink in the printing just as the bur from the cradle does in mezzotint. The bur of dry point also wears away fast, and yields but few impressions. Copper, steel, and zinc are the metals chiefly used for engraving. Steel is less employed than formerly, because copper is now covered with a coat of steel by the electro type process, which enables it to resist printing indefinitely, as the steel can be renewed at will. Zinc is similarly coated with copper, and sometimes used for small editions. AUTHORITIFS. A real knowledge of engraving can only l&amp;gt;e at tained by a careful study and comparison of the prints themselves, OT cf accurate facsimiles, so that hooks are of little use except as guides to prints when the reader happens to he unaware of their existence, or else for their explanation of technical processes. The department of art-literature which classifies prints is called Icono graphy, and the classifications adopted by iconographers are of the most various kinds. For example, if a complete book were written on Shakespearian iconography it would contain full information about all prints illustrating the life and works of Shakespeare, and in the same way there may be the iconography of a locality or of a single event. The history of engraving is a part of iconography, and there are already various histories of the art in different lan guages. In England Mr W. Y. Ottley wrote an Enrly History of Engraving, published in two volumes 4to, 1816, and began what was intended to be a series of notices on engravers and their works. Mr H. Ottley has also written upon the same subject. The facili ties for the reproduction of engravings by the photographic pro cesses have of late years given an impetus to iconography. One of the most reliable modern writers on the subject is M. Georges Duplessis, the keeper of priiits in the national library of France. He has written the History of Engraving in France, and has pub lished many notices of engravers to accompany the reproductions by M. Amand Durand. He is also the author of a useful little manual entitled LCK Merveilles de la Gravurc. Count de Laborde collected materials for a history of wood-engraving, and began to publish them, but the work advanced no farther than a first num ber. Jnnsen s work on the origin of wood and plntc engraving, and on the knowledge of prints of the 15th and 16th centuries, was published at Paris in two volumes 8vo in 1808. Didot s Essai typographique ft bibliographique sur Fhistoire de la gravure sur bois was published in Paris (8vo)in 1863. A Treatise on Wood Engrav ing, by John Jackson, appeared in 1839, and a second edition of the work in 1861. A good deal of valuable scattered information about engraving is to be found in the back numbers of the principal art periodicals, such as the Gazette des Beaux- Arts, IS Art, and the Portfolio. In the year 1877 Professor Colvin published a scries of articles in the Portfolio on &quot;Albert Durer, His Teachers, His Rivals, and His Followers,&quot; which contain in a concentrated form the main results of what is known about the early engravers, with facsimiles from their works. Professor Ruskin lias also published a volume on engraving, entitled Ariadne Florentina, in which the reader will find much that is suggestive ; but he ought to be on his guard ngainst certain assertions of the nuthor, especially these two, (1) that all good engraving rejects chiaroscuro, and (2) that etch ing is an indolent and blundering process at the best. The illustra tions to this volume are of unequal merit : the facsimiles from Holbein are good ; the reductions of early Italian engravings are not good. The reader will find information about engraving, and many fac similes of old woodcuts, in the different volumes by Paul Lacroix on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, published by Firmin Didot ; the information may be relied upon, but the facsimiles, though effective, are not always perfect. Roret s Collection de Manuelsfor- mant une Encyclopedic des Sciences et d&amp;lt; s Arts contains a pocket volume on engraving which is full of useful practicnl information, and another similar volume on plate-printing, also very useful to engravers on metal, who ought always to understand printing ; thest volumes may be had separately. Etching h;is been the subject oi several different treatises. The oldest is that of Abraham Kosse, published at Paris in 1645, 8vo, and in 1701, 12rno. The revival of etching in our own day has been accompanied by the publication of various treatises. The first was a short account of the old process by Mr Alfred Ashley ; then came the French brochure of M. Maxime Lalanne ; then Etching and Etchers (450 pages, in the stereo typed edition)by the writer of this article, and a smaller treatise, The Etcher s Handbook, by the same. These were followed- by another short French handbook, that of M. Martial. For information about the states of plates, their juices, their authenticity and history, the stmlent ought to consult the best catalogue-makers, such as Tiartsch, Claussin, Charles Blanc. &c. The literature of engraving
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