English
Stipple Engraving
As
a student in Paris the English engraver
Thomas Wynne Ryland (1733–1783) noted
the new techniques of crayon and pastel
engraving, and much later adapted them
to the process which came to be called
stipple engraving. (Ryland was incidentally
also known for engraving forged bills of
exchange, the cause of his relatively early
death by hanging.)
The
principle lines of the design were first
established by the use of dotted lines
made with a curved graver into an etching
ground (see “Etching”).
The surface of the plate was then worked
on directly, all over, with the same curved
graver in a series of dots and flicks,
and sometimes with the roulette too, to
give broad areas of continuous tone similar
to pastel engraving but vermicular in texture,
rather than the granular lines of crayon
engraving.
Though
stipple engraving is quintessentially English,
it is most identified with the Italian
engraver Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815)
who settled in England in 1761 and recognised
the potential of stipple for reproducing
what Arthur Hind described as the “slight
subjects of graceful fancy” (see
below right) typical of his friends the
fellow Italian G.B. Cipriani and the Swiss
Angelica Kauffmann, who both also settled
in London. Bartolozzi took the fashionable
English market by storm, reflected in his
being the only engraver (until 1928!) to
be honoured with full Fellowship of the
newly founded Royal Academy.

Franceso
Bartolozzi (1727–1815): "Young Woman
by a Window".
Stipple engraving with
etching, 1804 , after George Chinnery. (220
x 200 mm)
At
the height of his success he had fifty
pupils in his workshop. Bartolozzi’s
most prominent pupils of the next generation
were Luigi Schiavonetti, Peltro William
Tomkins, Charles Knight, Giovanni Vendramini,
William Bond and Anthony Cardon. They worked
to the designs of artists such as William
Hamilton, William Redmore Bigg, William
Westall, Thomas Stothard and Francis Wheatley.
Wheatley painted his famous series of “The
Cries of London” specifically to
be published as stipple engravings.
Stipple
engraving did not long outlast Bartolozzi’s
departure to Lisbon in 1802. Its use was
virtually confined to England (despite
many of its best practitioners being Continentals
resident in England) and to the last decades
of the 18th century and the beginning of
the 19th century. A short-lived revival
at the end of the 19th century was merely
for the purposes of re-engraving the most
popular 18th century plates as a commercial
venture to exploit would-be investors at
a period when fine 18th century impressions
had come back into vogue with collectors
and were commanding high prices.
Though
grandiose schemes like ‘The Shakespeare
Gallery’ of John Boydell, Lord Mayor
of London, were intended to be bound, most
stipple engravings were used as furnishing
items, framed-up to hang as decoration.
Old master prints traditionally were mounted
into albums to be studied; framing prints
as wall decoration was only introduced
in a large way in the 18th century. |