The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550 - 1820 - Hardcover

Griffiths, Antony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714126950 ISBN 13: 9780714126951

Publisher: British Museum, 2016

Synopsis

Winner of the Apollo Magazine 2016 "Book of the Year" award.

A landmark publication—beautifully illustrated with over 300 prints from the British Museum’s renowned collection—which traces the history of printmaking from its earliest days until the arrival of photography.
Copperplate printmaking, developed alongside Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, was a huge business employing thousands of people, and dominating image production for nearly four centuries across the whole of Europe. Its techniques and influence remained very stable until the nineteenth century, when this world was displaced by new technologies, of which photography was by far the most important.
Print Before Photography examines the unrivaled importance of printmaking in its golden age, illustrated through the British Museum’s outstanding collection of prints. This unique and significant book is destined to be a leading reference in print scholarship, and will be of interest to anyone with an interest in this era of art history.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Print production – materials and techniques / printing capacity of copper plates / costs and profitability / lettering, language and text / censorship, privileges, taxation and promotion / copying / reprinting / colouring / single sheets, pairs, sets / book illustration / survival and loss of prints

Part 2: European print trade – brief history of period / participants / the printmaker / the painter, designer / publisher – finance and production and distribution / patronage / non-commercial printmaking / the printseller / marketing, advertising, subscriptions / the buyer / cheap prints, street trade and peddlars

Part 3: Use and understanding of the print – variety / display and storage / collecting / knowledge and literature / understanding of prints / hierarchy of print techniques

Coda – print in the 19th century – the arrival of photography

About this title

About the Author

Between 1991 and 2010, Antony Griffiths was deputy keeper, then keeper, of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. In 1984 he co-founded Print Quarterly, a journal dedicated to the art of the print. He was appointed a fellow of the British Academy in 2000. He has published widely on the subject.

Review

“The sheer amount of information on offer here, conveyed in such a lucidly written and lavishly illustrated book, marks this as a pinnacle of print studies.” (Sheila McTighe)

“While dealing in appropriately dry fashion with all the intricacies of production, trade and patronage, Griffiths manages to make the reader look harder at the materiality of the fine art engraving, its strange otherness as if it were a branch of sculpture rather than drawing. His magnificent book brings to an end the output of the British Museum Press, here concluding, like many a fine symphony, with a triumphant flourish.” (Tom Phillips)

Antony Griffiths, who was Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum for 20 years from 1991 to 2011, has done something wholly admirable. After retiring and alongside delivering the Slade Lectures in Oxford, he sat down and has written an absolutely definitive book about the history of printmaking in Western Europe from its beginnings to the time that it began to be overtaken by other technologies, including lithography and photography. (Charles Saumarez Smith)

Edition details

• Publisher: British Museum
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0714126950
• ISBN 13: 9780714126951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 560