Bryant's+Lithographs

Quick Facts on Illustrations

 * Lithographs
 * Aquatints

From the outside Bryant’s Progressive Lessons in Landscape’s contents is androgynous, but when it is opened it is obviously an art book. Thus, the illustrations are extremely important. The indentations boarding the illustrations, marking of plate numbers in the right hand corner and knowledge that Ackermann ran a lithographic printing press leads to the conclusion that most, if not all, the prints are lithographs.

John Ross and Clare Romano’s book, The Complete Printmaker, describes the step-by-step process of lithography. Lithographs[1] are traditionally created on limestone from Munich (Ross 195). The steps to make a lithograph are as follows: the lithographer must first grain and flatten the surface of the stone. Grinding the stone plate with a grinding disk does this. Then a grease or wax is slathered over the surface with an ink and grease based crayon. The lithographer lightly etches into the surface of the stone. This changes the chemicals in the surface from a carbonate into a nitrate of lime. The carbonate is sensitive to the grease slathered on the stone and the latter is not sensitive. The next step the lithographer takes is to change the chalk or ink used from a soluble alkali into an insoluble acid (Ross 196). The plate is exposed to water, washing away the soluble ink, and then it is dried and inked before transferred to paper. The grease treatment of the stone prevents the ink from sticking to the surface area around the drawing (Ross 200). To transfer the lithograph onto paper, the printer, tapes down the paper, the paper should be a thick and sturdy so it does not rip under the plate[2]. Then the plate is placed on top of the paper (Ross 209). The indentations around the prints in Bryant’s Progressive Lessons in Landscape are from the heavy stone placed on top of it. The process is work intensive but as read in an article by Karen Cook, it was less expensive than other printing methods (Cook 158).

The lithograph was much easier and cost effective way of producing illustrations in comparison to the relief woodcut and intaglio copper printing methods that previously dominated the market. Cook writes, "By 1820 lithography was widely used, and it became a vehicle for technological innovations, including color printing" (Cook 158). One benefit of lithographs was the printer's ability to produce images that looked like they were from different, more expensive printing techniques, like ink-wash drawings. The advance of aquatint helped promote the production of color illustrations (Cook 158). Aquatint printing is another part of the lithography process.

Ross describes aquatinting as another part of the lithography process. It is mainly used when the printer wants to create different tones in the print. Tones are corroded into the stone after the surface is covered with tiny droplets of rosin or lacquer. When the plate is emerged in acid the acid eats away the area around the droplets. This creates the desired tonal effect in aquatint prints. The tonal effect is more dramatic the longer the plate is emerged in the acid (Ross 79). Aquatinting is displayed in Bryant’s Lessons in Landscape, especially in the color illustrations in the back of the book.

The illustrations in Bryant’s Lessons in Landscape are clear depictions of landscapes aimed at instructing the art student. Lithographs may have been Bryant’s preferred medium. He was not a well-known artist, so knowing for sure is impossible. He did, however write another arts manual on the use of India ink as mentioned earlier. It is understandable that Bryant would make lithographs of the image because they were an effective way to produce the same image in a large quantity. The multiple copies of each image in Bryant’s Progressive Lessons in Landscape expand the legacy of the book. Other copies of the book went out into the world and helped instruct various artists. Likewise, lithographs were a pivotal technology for illustrated books (Burwick 16). Bryant’s Progressive Lessons in Landscape is a marker in the history of printing with its display of the, then, new technology.

[1] "Lithography was invented by Alois Senefelderin Bavaria in 1798.17 Briefly, Senefelder discovered that a greasy image drawn on a limestone slab would bond chemically with the stone to repel water. The result was a chemical lydifferentiated printing surface which was, in principle, flat or planographic" (Cook 158)

[2] Straw stated the paper in //Bryant’s Progressive Lessons in Landscape// looks and feels like a cotton blend paper, which was popular in the 19th century (Straw 2012).  Introduction