Featured Some intaglio print textures (Engravings, Etchings, etc.)

I'm intrigued to know how Jacques Villon (Aka Gaston Duchamp, Marcel's brilliant, lesser-known and in my opinion seriously underrated younger brother) achieved this portrait. Which technique did he use, please? Unfortunately the materials used are of very inferior quality, hence the severe yellowing of the paper.

 

Guesswork on my part. They look like engraved lines. Having engraved a plate all over with such lines, burnishers and scrapers could have been used to bring out the lighter tones. Not unlike mezzotint, but nowhere near the density.

 

Many thanks. Intriguing. I'm not surprised that the likes of Raoul Dufy and Matisse specifically chose to have Villon working with them to create their after-aquatints. I believe Villon always remained a minor artist in his own right (notwithstanding Poulenc's having composed a song inspired by his art works), but he was a highly regarded print technician in his lifetime. Rather like Stanley William Hayter, who was also a master print maker (I believe he contributed significantly to Miro's developments in the medium) Villon is now slowly becoming appreciated as an artist in his own right.

 

I expect you know Jim Dine's masterly series of etchings: "Nancy Outside In July." He applies the techniques you describe to an exquisitely delicate etching of his wife. The results are, in turn, alluring, striking and occasionally startling. I am fortunate enough to own impressions of two states: V and VIII. I attach an image of state VIII in case you're interested. The jpeg. ofState V is apparently too large to upload

 

Excellent explanations and examples. Thank you and thanks Davey for pinning.!

 

Here is a much lower resolution image, than my earlier attempt, of State V of the Jim Dine series: "Nancy Outside in July." Maybe you'll agree with me that there is great tenderness in his depiction of Nancy, his wife and muse. Dine apparently applies power-tools to the plate for later states as well as domestic oil paint directly to the paper. It's a fascinating series which celebrates an influential modern artist's fascination with printmaking and the broadening of boundaries within the medium. Perhaps you'll agree with me that the series rewards exploration.

 

There are as many variations and permutations in printmaking as there are printmakers... probably more.

I imagine that someone who is emotionally invested in his/her subject can't help but bring that to his/her work.

I confess to being an amateur. I like intaglio prints and obviously have an interest in the techniques used to produce them. A true expert in the field can look at a print and recognize the hand of the artist. Beyond the stylistic nature of an image, I cannot.

I was looking up an engraver named John Saddler (1813-1892) and came across this passage:

He was a pupil of George Cooke (1781–1834) [q. v.], the engraver of Turner's ‘Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England,’ and it is related that on one occasion he was sent to Turner with the trial proof of a plate of which he had himself engraved a considerable portion. Scanning the plate with his eagle eye, Turner asked ‘Who did this plate, my boy?’ ‘Mr. Cooke, sir,’ answered Saddler, to which Turner replied, ‘Go and tell your master he is bringing you on very nicely, especially in lying.’ Later on he engraved the vessels in the plate of Turner's ‘Fighting Téméraire,’ the sky of which was the joint production of R. Dickens and J. T. Willmore, A.R.A....

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Saddler,_John_(DNB00)

Turner could tell. Not me.

The "Fighting Téméraire" is not a particularly rare print. The engraving credit is given to JT Willmore (James Tibbets 1800-1863), but three different engravers worked on the plate. I found that out by accident. I wouldn't have seen it in the print.

 

Firstly, how fascinating! Many thanks for the insight. Secondly, it's not surprising that "eagle eyes" in 18th and 19th century printmaking have largely died out; so has the medium; certainly as far as its contemporaneous aesthetics are concerned. The likes of Matisse, Picasso and David Hockney appear to engage with the medium of engraving (if I may be excused for lumping all the subcategories about which we have been exchanging thoughts under one heading) from a wholly different direction. Firstly, I get the feeling that before (and even into) the 20th century, prints were broadly considered to be affordable, but necessarily second class, replicas of paintings, whose value and uniqueness placed the originals wildly out of the range of most collectors. Of course there are several examples (Doré, Hogarth and Rembrandt spring immediately to mind) to contradict my suggestion, but as a gross overgeneralisation, it might do for now. By the middle of the 20th century, I need hardly say, the likes of Braque, Miró, Picasso and Chagall clearly considered "the multiple" to be a key, unequivocally artistically pregnant, component in their overall output.

Going back to eagle eyes: your eyes are clearly far more "eagle" than most, through immersion in, and love of, your pet medium. I believe I am correct in saying that, from the Renaissance well into the 18th century, great portrait artists relied on secondary collaborators to complete skyscapes, architectural details and clothing (in a nutshell, those elements in a painting considered to be of secondary importance to the main subject(s)). I expect back then key practitioners of the medium could spot at a glance the hand of a tyro touching in a bit of sky or a neoclassical pavilion. I expect a handful of trained experts still can, but with the extinction of the medium must surely, too, have passed the hands- on expertise which went with it. Your insight and experience are perfectly invaluable. Thanks again.

I have another technical question: what is a "soft ground" etching? I attach two by Giorgio de Chirico. The lines appear rather fuzzy, almost as though they were graphite. At a glance they look like original pencil drawings. Was this the intention and do you know how the effect is achieved? I thought it was rather ingenious.

Again thanks and kind wishes, Laurence.

 

Etching involves placing a plate in an acid bath. (The acid is called a "mordant".) You put a piece of metal into the correct acid, and the acid will dissolve the metal. Obviously a plate has two sides and you want to control what metal is exposed to the mordant. So you coat both sides with something that will not be affected by the acid. You can coat the backside with something like tar, but that won't work for the side you want to pattern if you plan to draw lines. Drawing with a stylus through a brittle ground will result in chipping, flaking, and loss of control. For line etchings, the side of the plate will be coated with a soft material involving a significant amount of wax. This is the soft ground. A stylus will cleanly expose the metal beneath beneath the ground without creating chips or flakes. An artist can draw his pattern free-hand through such a ground, so the lines take on the character of a drawing. Having drawn the picture, the plate is immersed in the mordant, which bites into the exposed metal leaving a recessed line. The acid well dissolve whatever metal it can reach, so in a very small way it immediately stars to undercut the ground and spread. This why an etched line appears a bit irregular and fuzzy. The longer the plate is left in the acid, the heavier the line will be and the darker it will print. An artist can control the heaviness of the lines by removing the plate from the bath, selectively coating over sections of the drawn lines, and re-immersing the plate to etch the remaining exposed areas more deeply.

The coatings on both side of the plate have to be removed before printing.

 

Thank you so much. Clear as a bell. I suspect you need to be a consummate draftsman in order to master this technique. If you make a mistake, is it possible to patch it up with some soft ground and have another go?

 

Certainly. Burnishers and scrapers can completely erase parts. The ground can be re-applied and new lines added. That's what artist's proofs are about... looking at a print, and then making alterations to the plate. If an artist issues prints and then makes changes and reworks the plate over time, you get different "states". Artists can revisit plates over and over again.

Sometimes it's a question of shading or atmosphere. Sometimes it's more extreme.

Hogarth produced this self portrait in 1749


He re-worked the same plate in 1763 to produce a satirical "portrait" of a political opponent named Charles Churchill.


There are multiple states for both those prints.

 

Fantastic thread! Thank you!

 

It's very beautiful. I can imagine how much time an artist takes!

 

A point I am not seeing in this thread -- maybe I missed it, sorry if so -- is that a drypoint needle does not remove any of the copper from the plate of an etching, it simply raises the metal into a burr. This copper burr renders a beautiful fuzzy effect, almost like the way paint bleeds into the paper in a watercolor painting. The burr is very fragile, however, and the more prints that are made from the plate, the more the burr wears away under the tons of pressure required to press an etching.

Here's an example from the British museum of Rembrandt's etching "Three Gabled Cottages" (Bartsch 217) in an early first state (top) and a later state (bottom). The plate for both is one and the same, but see the way on the topmost tree branches that the burr has worn off on the later print leaving bare lines, whereas the early print had the blurry, smeared effect from the burr.

No two etchings are exactly alike though, even two made concurrently, as there will be variables in how the plate was wiped, among others -- it's handwork. And photographs completely fail to capture the three-dimensionality of what is -- if even on the micro level -- a three-dimensional art form. Under tons of pressure, the paper is forced into the fine lines of the plate to absorb the ink and when finished shows the inked lines as slightly raised from the paper. If you look at an etching nearly sideways in front of a strong light, you will see the raised lines with the naked eye.

 

Not the clearest shot, but I think this detail from an etching does show the three dimentionality to which @rpm_1969 refers:

 

Nothing like a 1:1 macro lens for serious detail. Nice photo @moreotherstuff, cheers!

 

Picture taken with my Nikon Coolpix 2100 - not much more than a 20 year old toy.

 

Superb succinct demo MootherStu ! We were lucky enough to be in Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) for a huge Rembrandt Retrospective 6 mos pre-covid:Oils/Gouache/Ink/Wash/Pencil/ & Etchings ,brilliant !!!-but after yrs of art school,i still feel like a wee bairn when it comes to discerning a 1st/2nd/3rd state and beyond orig Rembrandt engravings pulled by the master's hand versus those struck after his passing-would that it were thus...that,and having pints with Shakespeare.