Catalogues - Engravings

The Atelier Collection is an historic collection of hand-pulled and hand-coloured engravings and a small selection of hand-coloured prints. Rosenstiel's has built up the collection since the company was founded in 1880 and the original copper plates from which the prints are pulled span two centuries of print history. Each print is painstakingly pulled by skilled craftsmen, using techniques which have changed little over the last four hundred years. Most images are then hand-coloured by a skilled watercolourist, whilst some are carefully inked in the plate.

Printing intaglio plates

The machines used for intaglio printing are rolling presses, built on the simple principle of the washing mangle: two rollers with a flat bed that travels horizontally between them, operated by a geared fly-wheel or by radiating spokes attached to the spindle of the top roller. There has been no essential change in the design of the rolling press since the appearance of intaglio printing in the fifteenth century.

Until the 1830s such presses were made of wood, but we have plenty of evidence - not least the magnificent etchings of Rembrandt - of their effectiveness. However, the iron presses that superseded them could spread pressure even more effectively over the largest of plates (some of which during the peak years of the nineteenth-century engraving trade were enormous).

The paper, which must be of excellent quality, is damped and left overnight in a stack under a board and heavy weights. The following day, the ink (a dense pigment, ground in linseed oil) is worked into the crevices of the plate. The surface of the plate is then wiped free of ink using pads of stiff muslin. This can be an arduous process, particularly in cold weather when the plate may need to be gently heated; and it must be done with care, leaving ink in all the plate's grooves and depressions. The polishing of the plate is completed with the palm of a hand which has been rubbed on a block of whiting; this effectively removes the final film of ink. Finally, the margins of the plate are carefully cleaned and the plate is laid, face upwards, on the previously marked-out bed of the press. The printing paper, now supple and evenly damped after its overnight permeation, is positioned on the inked plate. It is backed with a sheet of acid-free tissue paper which has the dual function of keeping the paper clean and of preventing too much moisture being transferred from it to the woollen blankets which, as the whole sandwich passes under the upper roller, provide the resilience that presses the paper into the inked recesses and transfers the image to it. This procedure has to be repeated for each impression, so it will be seen that the hand-printing of engraved plates is a slow and painstaking business. Only about ten impressions of a large plate such as Blink Bonney, (illustrated) can reasonably be made in a day, especially since when printing is finished the damp prints must be carefully sandwiched between layers of blotting paper and heavily weighted. The blotters must be changed daily until the prints are dry and flat, a process which can take four or five days. Prints cannot easily be coloured until two or three weeks after printing since the ink, although evidently dry to the touch, will tend to repel watercolour until fully dry.

Most of the prints in the Atelier Collection are coloured by hand. The aquatints, especially, are splendidly transformed by this treatment. However, most of the mezzotints were designed not to be first printed and subsequently to be tinted with watercolour, but to be inked in colour. This method, known as printing a la poupee, was popular towards the end of the eighteenth century and has been used intermittently ever since, though because of its slowness and hence its expensiveness, more and more rarely. However, this traditional process is still used by Rosenstiel's in the printing of these particular plates. The method entails inking the plate with a unifying ground colour and then applying all the other colours one by one with muslin wrapped round a finger-end or, for more detailed passages, with a 'dolly' or twist of fabric (or, nowadays, with a cotton bud). After each colour is applied it is carefully wiped, as for a monochromatic print, but a subtle film of colour is left. When all is ready, the plate is passed through the press and the result is a coloured impression at one printing. No more than five impressions can be made daily from a plate such as the Juliet (illustrated). The quality, however, cannot be surpassed.