00:00:08.840 - 00:00:18.680

STEPHANIE DELAMAIRE: Hello, my name is Stephanie Delamaire. I'm the Associate Curator of Fine Arts at the Winterthur Museum Garden and Library in Delaware, and I'm also an affiliated assistant professor

00:00:18.680 - 00:00:29.480

in the Winterthur Programme in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. I'm a specialist of 19th century visual culture and the publishing industry.

00:00:29.480 - 00:00:48.280

I'm going to talk today about one of the major colour printing processes that emerged out of the transformations of the 19th century publishing industry, chromolithography. So what is chromolithography, and why is it important?

00:00:48.280 - 00:01:00.050

There are various definitions of chromolithography, but in a sense, chromolithography is a method for making a multicolor print by way of lithographic printing.

00:01:00.050 - 00:01:16.050

It was perfected during the second half of the 19th century, and it became the dominant form of production for printed images for more than half a century, approximately from the 1860s to the rise of photomechanical processes in the first decade

00:01:16.050 - 00:01:27.250

of the 20th century. Chromolithography is one of the most important visual media of the modern era because of its role in the rise of mass visual culture.

00:01:27.250 - 00:01:39.650

Together with wood engraving, lithography and photography, chromolithography generated an immense number of images produced through a combination of artistic talent, technological innovation,

00:01:39.650 - 00:01:50.250

and mechanical operations. And in contrast to wood engraving and photography, chromolithography produced images that were printed in full colour.

00:01:50.250 - 00:02:03.940

So how were chromolithographs made? Chromolithography is an expansion of lithography into the realm of colour printing. So we need to go to what is a lithograph.

00:02:03.940 - 00:02:17.020

The term lithography is derived from Greek writing on stone. It is a planographic process, that is a printing process where the design is levelled with a printing matrix.

00:02:17.020 - 00:02:30.480

It was developed by Alois Senefelder in Germany at the end of the 18th century, and it is based on the principle that water and oil do not mix. Although specially prepared metal plates, usually zinc,

00:02:30.480 - 00:02:44.100

were also considered early on, the best surface for lithographic printing and later for chromolithograph was widely acknowledged to be limestone, especially limestones that were coming from the quarries of Bavaria

00:02:44.100 - 00:02:57.060

of the kind you see here. The practise of lithographic printing became widespread in Europe and America after the 1820s-- in America after the 1820s.

00:02:57.060 - 00:03:06.310

Prang's aid for object teaching that you have here is an image published by Louis Prang, one of the leading publishers of chromolithography in the United States.

00:03:06.310 - 00:03:16.670

It represents, in a simplified way, the main steps involved in the creation of a lithographic image. The groundbreaking innovation of lithography

00:03:16.670 - 00:03:31.030

was the use of limestone slab instead of copper plate or woodblock as a printing matrix. So rather than cutting into the block or the metallic plate, the new method only required writing or drawing

00:03:31.030 - 00:03:43.950

on a stone uniform flat surface with a greasy medium. The surface thus bearing directly the trace of the artist's hand. So the first step indicated at the left of the image

00:03:43.950 - 00:03:57.330

is the grinding of the stone surface, a process that would take place in the printing house. And in the early years of lithography, it would be done by putting two stones face to face and using

00:03:57.330 - 00:04:12.000

fine sands to wear away their surfaces using a water as lubricant, but machines were developed later to replace this physical labour. The machines were in regular use by the time chromolithography

00:04:12.000 - 00:04:23.580

became an important mode of printing in the industry. Depending on the lithographer's purpose, the stone could be either polished when the intended medium was a liquid Tusche, for example,

00:04:23.580 - 00:04:35.880

an ink specifically prepared for lithography, or it could be left with a grain when the stone was intended for lithographic crayon drawing. The artist lithographer here that you

00:04:35.880 - 00:04:49.200

see sitting by the window would draw the design on the surface of the stone, working with a wooden bridge so as to avoid touching the stone with his bare hands. Otherwise, the oil naturally secreted by human skin

00:04:49.200 - 00:05:01.750

would imprint indelible marks on the stone, and that would later attract ink in printing. So that was to be avoided. There were two possible ways of creating a mark on the stone.

00:05:01.750 - 00:05:15.370

One was the use of lithographic ink, or so-called Tusche, and the other, as I said, the lithographic crayon. The effects were quite different. This album, Flower Tokens, is illustrated with hand-coloured

00:05:15.370 - 00:05:25.850

crayon lithograph drawn on stone by one of the few women artists who had a successful professional career as a lithographer in the 19th century. Fanny Palmer was a British artist

00:05:25.850 - 00:05:35.170

who first trained in London. She immigrated to the United States in 1844, where she established a lithographic workshop. She is famous for her association

00:05:35.170 - 00:05:45.270

with Currier and Ives, one of the major American lithographic publishers of the period. She created the work you see here soon after her arrival in New York.

00:05:48.010 - 00:05:57.830

Church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn Heights is another of her early work. It is a three stone lithograph that combines crayon and ink work.

00:05:57.830 - 00:06:08.870

The church and the foreground are printed from two crayon lithographic stones. One is printed in black and the other in brown ink. The sky, however, is printed in blue

00:06:08.870 - 00:06:23.250

from a polish stone which the artist painted with liquid Tusche. So we are going back to a picture with the third detail. To prepare the stone for printing,

00:06:23.250 - 00:06:31.950

a solution of gum Arabic and acid was applied to the stone in order to affix the image on the stone. Then moistened with water, the stone

00:06:31.950 - 00:06:44.670

would receive an application of oil-based ink from a roller. Because of the properties of oil and water, the oil-based lithographic ink would only adhere to the oil based medium of the artist's design.

00:06:44.670 - 00:06:58.800

The printer finally laid the sheet of paper on the stone and passed it through the press. Here we see a hand press, transferring the ink drawing to the paper as a mirror image of the original.

00:06:58.800 - 00:07:14.480

What we see in the background of the image is a steam-powered lithographic press. Early on, the hand press could produce a maximum of about 100 or 120 impressions in an hour, which is at most 1,200 prints

00:07:14.480 - 00:07:26.760

a day. And when printing in colour with several stones, the hourly output could reduce to about 15 to 20 prints an hour, making it impossible for chromolithography to compete

00:07:26.760 - 00:07:38.280

with letterpress printing in terms of speed. The development of the steam-powered presses, however, which started around mid-century, made it possible for lithography to successfully

00:07:38.280 - 00:07:52.600

compete with letterpress printing and for chromolithography to take on its important role in the printing industry. At the same time, powered presses impose some limitations

00:07:52.600 - 00:08:03.930

on the medium because of the way it limited how artists were able to draw on stone. So the rise of the steam-powered lithographic press really transformed the appearance

00:08:03.930 - 00:08:20.930

of chromolithographic images. So if we go back to the origins of chromolithography, the term itself was coined by the Franco-German lithographic printer Godefroy Engelmann and his son in 1837.

00:08:20.930 - 00:08:33.650

The idea of printing lithographs in colour goes back to the really early years of the medium. In fact, we can say that the first lithographers were able to build on centuries of experimentation in colour

00:08:33.650 - 00:08:49.330

printing as well on Isaac Newton's theory of light and colour division, and on Michel Eugene Chevreul's Laws of Contrast of Colours, published in France in 1839. Between the early years of the printing press and the invention

00:08:49.330 - 00:09:01.020

of lithography in the late 18th century, there were basically three approaches that were successfully developed for the printing of images in colour. In the first one, a unique matrix would be selectively

00:09:01.020 - 00:09:14.220

inked with various coloured ink before passing through the press. In the second method that was used in particular with letterpress printing, a printing matrix could be made of several

00:09:14.220 - 00:09:29.100

parts, each separately inked with individual colours, and then connected together before going through the press. And in the last approach, which was developed in the middle of the 18th century by Jacob Christoph Le Blon and which

00:09:29.100 - 00:09:45.620

became the most important aspect of chromolithography, it consisted in the creation of separate sets of printing surfaces, each charge with a specific ink, and then printed in particular sequence.

00:09:45.620 - 00:10:01.290

So what colour printing required in all cases, however, it's the manufacturing of transparent coloured ink and solving the problem of registration if printing with several matrices, in particular.

00:10:01.290 - 00:10:11.910

You had to solve also the problem of the paper stretch, of course, in printing, and therefore, the control of uniformity in production, which is especially important in an economy of scale,

00:10:11.910 - 00:10:24.590

like chromolithography. And that was really achieved with the mechanisation in the 19th century of the presses and the paper manufacturing.

00:10:24.590 - 00:10:37.570

So in the 1840s, several lithographers developed what has been called a flat colour work, which is lithographs printed with coloured inks, where there is no variation in each printed colour.

00:10:37.570 - 00:10:53.040

And this was one of the earliest kinds of chromolithography, and it was particularly popular for Title pages and broadsides. Flat colour lithography was also successful in the field of decorative arts, architecture, and heraldry.

00:10:53.040 - 00:11:08.320

The grammar of ornament which you have here is the influential work of an architect, Owen Jones, was entirely printed with flat colour work by the firm of in London in 1856.

00:11:08.320 - 00:11:21.840

Colour played a crucial role in Jones's work itself, and so this work has been one of the most influential in the realm of the decorative arts. It's a book that has never run out

00:11:21.840 - 00:11:38.160

of print, that has been constantly reprinted, even if the text itself is not reprinted, the plates are. In the 1860s and 1870s, steam-powered lithographic presses started making their way into lithographic workshop

00:11:38.160 - 00:11:51.610

in significant numbers, on both sides of the Atlantic. Their introduction encouraged a substantial shift in lithographic drawing techniques, because such presses were only suited for polished stones,

00:11:51.610 - 00:12:07.730

and these required ink drawing rather than crayons. Instead of drawing with a lithographic crayon, stippling, the painting of numerous small dots or specks on a painted surface became one of the most common manner of rendering

00:12:07.730 - 00:12:18.070

subtle gradations of tone. It could be done with a fine brush and lithographic ink, or Tusche. And when applied to several stones,

00:12:18.070 - 00:12:31.650

each charged with different coloured inks, the variations in density and hue created in the eyes of the viewer, an illusion of blended colours, a bit similar to the way that pixels in digital images blend

00:12:31.650 - 00:12:41.750

in our eyes to create a similar illusion. We can see it very well on the detail of this cigar box label, which is part of the Grossman Collection at the Winterthur library,

00:12:41.750 - 00:12:57.420

and it's titled Liberty Light. Blended colours through sequential printing was the real work of chromolithography, and it required the training, eyes, and intelligence of the most experienced artist lithographers

00:12:57.420 - 00:13:09.600

in the firm. They were also called visualizers. The normal practise in a workshop was for several artists to work on their stones, under the direction of the visualizer,

00:13:09.600 - 00:13:25.520

who decided on the nature and the number of colours needed for the printing, the inks also that would be used for their printing, as well as the sequence of printing. Visualizers had to have a good understanding of colour theory,

00:13:25.520 - 00:13:38.460

as well as a great artistic talent and practise within a workshop in order to be able to be familiar with the properties of each printing ink, its density, its opacity, et cetera, and how it would behave in printing together with

00:13:38.460 - 00:13:51.630

the others to produce the final print. Dissecting how the blending of an oil painting could become discrete use printed on top of one another was truly a work of visual translation.

00:13:51.630 - 00:14:05.450

The creation of chromolithographic reproduction of a painting like Martin Johnson Heade's still life, Flowers of Hope, required the visualizer to anticipate how great the tones of one colour after another,

00:14:05.450 - 00:14:15.790

with fusion optically for the viewer, and reconstruct the pictorial effect of a painting in the print. Technical manuals published during the period would give

00:14:15.790 - 00:14:28.910

tips about the visualizers work, adding sections devoted to colour theory that gave general guidelines about the number of colours needed to produce a standard chromolithograph, the properties of ink,

00:14:28.910 - 00:14:43.790

the impact of the sequence of printing on the final image. But the real evidence of how chromolithography worked really comes from the progressive and sequential proof books that have survived, several of which

00:14:43.790 - 00:14:56.640

are here in the Grossman Collection and the Downs Collection at the Winterthur Library. What they tell us is that there were no real strict rules for colour choice, and sequencing followed all across

00:14:56.640 - 00:15:10.200

the board. They also show that a chromolithograph started with key line drawings, which defined areas of change in shape, hue and tone in an original design

00:15:10.200 - 00:15:23.360

and created a set of registration marks. The drawing was transferred onto the stones, intended to be used in production of the final print as a guide for each stone selected drawing.

00:15:23.360 - 00:15:34.000

The key line drawing also included sets of crossing images-- crossing lines, sorry, in the margins, used to ensure registration of the final image in printing.

00:15:34.000 - 00:15:45.360

The key line drawing indicates locations but does not include information about hue or tone. These are conveyed in the sequential proofs that we see, for example, in the proof

00:15:45.360 - 00:15:56.220

book of one of Louis Prang masterpiece of chromolithography publishing. Oriental Ceramic Art, a 10-volume set of chromolithographs representing the collection

00:15:56.220 - 00:16:09.020

of Asian ceramics owned by the Baltimore collector William T. Walters-- this is one of the proof books. It includes the key line drawing progressive proofs

00:16:09.020 - 00:16:22.940

and sequential proofs of one plate only, showing the progression of the prints as each colour is added and recording the effects expected at each stage in the production process.

00:16:22.940 - 00:16:41.000

The sequential colour proofs contains annotations giving information about the components of the ink for each hue, and sometimes the visualizers notes. Progressive and sequential proof books were tools of the trade,

00:16:41.000 - 00:16:51.110

not publications made for to be retained beyond the life of the print. So they provided lithographers with a record of the effects that were expected

00:16:51.110 - 00:17:03.790

at each stage in the production process. And they were usually kept with a set of proofs showing each individual colour separately. Volumes such as these contain invaluable information for us

00:17:03.790 - 00:17:12.710

today. They help us understand the sequence in which the specific image was printed, compare it to the written record, and they also tell us about the kind

00:17:12.710 - 00:17:29.790

of inks and pigments that were mixed in the workshop. Winterthur Library collection holds several sets of progressive proofs from commercial labels made in the United States between around 1890 and 1950.

00:17:29.790 - 00:17:40.270

And they include, in general, the key line drawings. They are not always kept in the order of printing, but nevertheless, they give us a sense of how sophisticated the industry had become.

00:17:40.270 - 00:17:55.960

The printing of a commercial label such as the State Seal, for example, sample required no less than nine inks, yellow, red, two browns, one blue, buff, pink, and grey and gold for its production.

00:17:55.960 - 00:18:08.080

So of all the techniques for making and printing an image, none, I would say was so versatile as chromolithography, and none was also so widespread in its applications.

00:18:08.080 - 00:18:21.020

Freed from the technical restraints of letterpress printing, artist designers were able to design text and image as one piece of artwork. Lettering style, fanciful ornament, vibrant colours,

00:18:21.020 - 00:18:37.840

animated figures, textured areas, flat colours, or painterly areas, they can all be done on the same image. Everything was possible, and Victorian artists definitely embraced the medium's versatility, and its eclecticism

00:18:37.840 - 00:18:52.410

for better or worse, such images became ubiquitous in reproductions of books, illustrations, posters, advertisements, trade cards. Chromolithographs were used in the manufacture of paper toys

00:18:52.410 - 00:19:04.890

and all sorts of ephemera that were collected in albums and scrapbooks. They were also particularly prominent in children's books, exerting thus a profound impact on a young reader's

00:19:04.890 - 00:19:18.510

visual imagination. With chromolithography, vibrant images reach for the first time millions of viewers of all ages as illustrations in books and magazines, as reproductions of celebrated works of art

00:19:18.510 - 00:19:33.050

for the parlour, colourful posters and advertisements decorated the walls of cities, travelling shows, and they became mundane household items. And so we could say, really, that suddenly colour was

00:19:33.050 - 00:19:45.200

in every corner of everyday life. The medium that really transformed not only the way view people viewed the world, but also the world itself.