Line Engraving
 Line
engraving was the first of the intaglio
techniques to be devised and was developed
in Germany and Italy about half a century
later than woodcut.
Engraving
allows a much finer line, and a concentration
of lines can give a rich subtle nuance
of tone which the woodcut cannot achieve.
The inherent light and shade in the technique
precluded added hand colouring from the
outset.
The
artist engraves directly into the sheet
of metal with a steel burin with a wooden
handle that fits into the palm of the hand,
not dissimilar to those illustrated
in the section on Wood
Engraving. The steel
is sharpened at its cutting end to a
lozenge-shaped cross-section which cuts
a V-shaped groove tailing off to a point
(a stylistic factor especially exploited
by the mannerist Haarlem School – see
the detail above and the entire engraving
by Saenredam, illustrated to the right).
The rough shaving of metal raised by the
burin at the edges of the cut line is removed
with a scraper, to give a sharp, clean, crisp
line when printed, whose slight stiffness
reflects the initial resistance of the
metal.
There
was already a long tradition of ornamental
engraving and metal chasing by the 15th
century. It is not known who first in Germany
conceived of taking impressions from engraved
designs and adapted the technique as a
process to print pictorial images from
copper onto paper, or when the earliest
intaglio printing press was made. However,
most of the earliest renowned masters of
engraving like the Master of the Year 1446,
author of the earliest dated intaglio print,
the Master of the Playing Cards and the
Master E.S. were themselves also goldsmiths.
The
invention of engraving in Italy has traditionally
been credited to the Florentine goldsmith
Maso Finiguerra, a famous niellist. Niello
was a method of decorating a small gold
or silver plaque by filling incised lines
with an alloy (nigellum) so that they read
as a black design against the brightly
polished metal. Apocryphally damp laundry
left on top of a fresh niello plate suggested
the concept of printing onto paper from
the incised plate. Impressions were printed
from niello plates and occasionally come
onto the market.
Italian
artists of the stature of Pollaiuolo and
Mantegna experimented with engraving, using
broad open parallel lines in the manner
of their ink drawings.
By
the close of the 15th century line engraving
had come of age. As in woodcut, Dürer
was the predominant figure of the period,
though Lucas van Leyden, in the Netherlands
and Marc Antonio Raimondi in Italy complete
Arthur M. Hind’s “great triumverate”.
Whereas
Dürer, Lucas van Leyden and their
followers engraved their own original designs.
Raimondi was primarily an interpretive
engraver of other artists’ drawings;
he worked in particularly close collaboration
with Raphael. As the century progressed
the reproductive tendency of engraving
increased throughout Europe, given impetus
by the founding of publishing houses such
as those of Cock, Galle, Van de Passe,
and Sadeler in the Netherlands and Salamanca
and Lafrery in Italy.
The
17th century was particularly noteworthy
for the interest in line-engraved portraiture.
France produced some exceptional masters
in Claude Mellan, Jean Morin, Robert Nanteuil.With
the principal exception of William Blake,
by the 18th and 19th centuries line engraving
had almost ceased as an original medium
(a role taken over by etching) and was
largely used to reproduce paintings. The
eloquence of line as an original graphic
expression was submerged in its conjunction
with the tone processes of mezzotint and
stipple, the better to reproduce paintings.
The introduction of steel plates in 1820,
and steel-facing for copper plates in the
mid 19th century, meant that demand for
popular images such as Frith’s “Derby
Day” could be met by thousands of
identical impressions.
Though
the subsequent invention of photographic
methods of reproduction made the commercial
engraving trade redundant later in the
century, it was not before it had subsumed
the concept of artists’ own
original printmaking in public understanding.
In
the mid-1920’s, inspired by the old
master engravings of Schongauer and Dürer,
Robert Austin revived original engraving
with its emphasis on pure line. Austin’s
example generated a small following amongst
his English contemporaries, such
as Stanley Anderson, and students
at the Royal College of Art.
Stanley
Anderson (1884–1966): "The Reading
Room". *
Engraving, 1930. (169
x 218 mm)
In
Paris Jean Emile Laboureur had taken up
line engraving by 1916 for his cubist figure
and town scenes and in the 1930’s Stanley
William Hayter with the establishment of
his Atelier 17 in Paris took original line
engraving into abstraction and the Modernist
movement.
In
general parlance line engravings are usually
referred to simply as engravings.
(*
Stanley Anderson's "The Reading
Room",
above. This example is a fully annotated
unique impression from the cancelled plate,
the corners having been cut off and the
engraved inscription added to the plate
to show the limited edition was complete
in 1931, before the plate was sold at his
special request to an American collector.)
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