Engraving on copper was a slow, laborious process demanding high skills, patience, long experience and sharp focused eyesight. As age enveloped an engraver, so eyesight would dim:
Bending double all through a bright, sunny day, in an attic or closeworkroom, over a large plate, with a powerful magnifying glass in constant use; carefully cutting out bits of metal from the plate . . . working for twelve or fourteen hours daily, taking exercise rarely, in early morning or late at night; ‘proving’ a plate, only to find days of labour have been mistaken, and have to be effaced and done over again . . . such is too commonly the life of an engraver.
Thus went the daily routine of the Birmingham engraver William Radclyffe, whose son Charles described the dismal day-to-day existence that his father’s profession offered. But the thrill from the shimmer of an engraved copper plate, the joy when an image was pulled off its inked surface, the wonder of multiplication – all this was a seduction in itself. Such delights lost none of their appeal for succeeding generations, to the extent that the Birmingham-born printmaker of the twentieth century, Raymond Cowern, wrote of his ‘absolute compulsion to etch’.
Engraving became big business where profits could be made, and it is no surprise that the more entrepreneurial engravers – those with business sense and acumen like John Boydell, John Britton and Charles Heath – moved on from daily practice themselves to manage and employ others to produce the work for them. Another engraver, Abraham Raimbach, looked back at the eighteenth century and wrote of the skills and self-presentation of William Woollett, the engraver whom all admired:
In person Woollett was rather below the middle stature, and extremely simple and unpretending in manner and demeanour. He had been apprenticed to a general engraver in Cheapside. His great works were executed at his house, the corner of Charlotte and North Streets . . . till a comparatively recent period, the window of his workroom, which he had adapted to his purpose, and had a northern aspect, remained unaltered. He was accustomed, on the completion of a plate, to assemble his family on the landing-place of his study, (the first floor) and all give three cheers.
Wood engraving, in which the image is engraved into the hard end-grain of a block of boxwood, offered slightly better conditions than engraving on copper, if only because wood shavings were less dangerous to have on the workbench than sharp little bits of cut metal. The early twentieth-century artist William Heath Robinson, the son and grandson of wood engravers, remembered the old days when his father employed a team of artists producing engraved blocks as illustrations to books, journals and newspapers:
They were all bent low over their work. Glass globes filled with water increased the light that came from the green shaded lamps. Each engraver wore a protruding eyeglass like a watchmaker’s glass fixed to one eye. This he brought as close as possible to the woodblocks, for it was the finest work they were executing . . . After each cut was made in the wood, the graver was brought up to the lips or moustache to clear the tool. One poor man in this little group was suffering from consumption.
Note the similarities in Radclyffe’s and Robinson’s accounts: the bending low; the long hours; the optical accessories; the eye strain; the need for steady light; the close work; the health risk. Engravers on both wood and metal were thus close-knit self-supporting groups: ‘brother scrapers’, as Thomas Lupton described their shared profession to John Pye.
The reproduction of works of art was overwhelmingly performed on a polished or wax-coated copper plate across which an engraving needle, or burin, could pass with a sharp and flexible grace. The skills demanded for this work embraced the ability to manage the straightforward topographical view, or complex figure subject, and to have the potential to interpret the colour and style of a painter of renown. James Ward appreciated this crucial role only too well. Writing to his son the engraver George Ward ARA, he observed:
A fine Engraver must be something more than a meer [sic] Tool in the hand of the Painter. What would a Wilson and Stubbs &c have been without a Wollet [sic]?
Letters to the topographical artist and engraver John Buckler indicate the kind of prices that workmanlike and accurate engravings of local interest might fetch. A Lincoln dealer in prints sent Buckler an account for the five coloured and thirty-seven plain engravings of Lincoln and Norwich cathedrals that he had resold in 1800: Buckler charged 1 guinea each for plain (i.e. uncoloured) prints, and a further half guinea for the ones he had coloured by hand. Business was good, and the dealer wanted more to be supplied. Prices remained stable for years: Buckler charged another client, Lord Clarendon, the same prices for plain and coloured prints fifteen years later.
The various techniques of engraving are well known: there is the direct engraving of marks on the metal, needle scratching copper; etching, in which wax coating and an acid bath are additional requirements; mezzotint, in which the polished plate has first to be pitted all over with a toothed rocker, like a half-moon horse-brush armed with teeth, so that when inked the plate prints a deep, smooth black; and drypoint, which does not concern us here. The greatest engravers, such as Woollett and Pye, could create in their engravings extraordinary evocations of paintings by making marks that range from small dots and flecks to curvy lines, ruled lines and solid gouges. These together create varieties of tone that evoke the impression of colour. Engravings were themselves works of art; engravers paid homage to great originals certainly, but as brothers-in-arms with painters, not as their below-stairs servants. Engravers took paintings into realms of visual pleasure that the painter might never have conceived. As the advances in science met the demands of art, so by the 1820s it became possible to face copper plates with steel, through electrolysis, and thus extend their working lives.
Wood engraving, though capable of the finest detail in the hands of artists such as Thomas Bewick, Edward Calvert and Thomas Robinson, was sucked rapidly into journalism as a quick fix, and deprived of its good name. Bewick’s wood engravings of animals and birds are magnificent works of art, to the extent that he and his pupils began to rival copper engravers in detail and quality. They certainly rattled the French. The engraver Pierre-François Godard remarked of wood engraving in the 1820s:
[The English] are taking this art so far that one can scarcely distinguish the burin that they use from that of copper engraving . . . It is clear that if the English example is not quickly [followed], they will take over the printing from all countries of current publications in which illustrations play an essential role.
Engravers, being contractors rather than self-directed creative artists, had to be prepared to take instruction, and to accept brisk opinion. A client wrote to John Buckler about an architectural print he had commissioned from one of Buckler’s drawings:
I cannot find anything like a fault in the building &cc But I think yr Engraver has made your Clouds too heavy: they have not that light appearance which the Drawing has, & they look too much like distant Land . . . you required my real opinion & you have it.
William Cobbett gave Thomas Robinson no room for the personal interpretation of a subject in his treatment of a wood-engraved illustration for Rural Rides:
In the landscape, leave out the houses, town &c entirely. Leave the figures as I saw them: leave the hop-ground, which you will extend over part occupied by the farm-house; and enclose all with high trees in the foreground, as you have them now, and keep the gate and hedge which will remain; and also a gate at the further side of the ground may improve the picture. You will be so good as to lose no time.
A third reproductive technique, lithography, was popular and cheap and could carry the finest detail and the most elusive atmospherics. Invented in Germany, lithography was developed and improved independently in centres all over Europe, and particularly in England, where the émigré German printer-businessman Charles Hullmandel set up a printing works in Marlborough Street, London. Hullmandel printed illustrations for books and pamphlets, journals and flyers, finding among those crossing his threshold people as varied as Michael Faraday and the revolutionary French painter Théodore Géricault. The illustrations in Frank Howard’s Colour as a Means of Art were created and printed by Hullmandel. Faraday himself made lithographic drawings and was fully attuned to the art both scientifically and artistically. He gave Hullmandel high praise and credit for the advances he had made in the technique:
I have no hesitation in stating . . . that having been made acquainted with, and having witnessed your method, and other methods of preparing Lithographic Drawings, I know yours to be strikingly peculiar and different from the others, and from consideration of the chemical principles of the art, should expect your process to possess the superiority which the testimony of Artists, competent to judge, assure me that it has.
John Britton’s role as go-between for artist and patron was far-reaching and influential, and his volumes which embrace engraving, lithography and texts remain a rich mine of information about the history and antiquities of the British Isles from a nineteenth-century perspective. He was a pioneer in dealing and in publishing, on a par in his field with John Murray (see chapter 9); he not only produced high-volume print runs of multiple titles of topographical works, but was also instrumental in widening and encouraging the market for illustrated books of landscape views and history. In this he helped to create the market that also offered William Daniell’s A Voyage Round Great Britain (1814–25) and the many landscape series published from Turner’s work such as The Southern Coast (1814–26) and Picturesque Views in England and Wales (1827–38). In Britton’s heyday, in which he produced the twenty-one-volume series The Beauties of England and Wales (1801–15), Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain in five volumes (1807–27), and The Cathedral Antiquities of England in fourteen volumes (1814–35), the market for such publications continued for perhaps thirty years in healthy fluctuations. Beauties cost £50,000 to produce, a formidable amount of money that was probably never recouped. Britton’s entrepreneurship created employment in its wake – for artists willing and able to travel, engravers, paper-makers, publishers and booksellers – and also contributed to ancillary trades such as bookbinders, transporters and the manufacturers of ink. Britton’s determined efforts in the first half of the nineteenth century were the direct antecedents of the Murray Guides of the middle and latter part of the century and, further into the future, of the Shell Guides of the 1930s and Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series from the 1950s.
Britton and his business partner Edward Brayley travelled around the country with their platoons of artists from bases in Bath and London. When John Flaxman’s monument to the Baring family was set up in St Mary the Virgin, Micheldever, in 1810, it was Britton whom the family engaged to engrave it: ‘three fine engravings, his new work of modern art’, Ann Flaxman told a friend. Volumes in general series were accompanied by individually commissioned publications such as Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey (1823) for Beckford, a History of Deepdene (1821–6, never published) for Thomas Hope, South Wiltshire (1812–19) for Sir Richard Colt Hoare, and The Union of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (1827) for Sir John Soane. With his draughtsmen on parade, Britton met clients, walked their landscapes, and admired their mansions and their ruins. In Britton’s offices in St Pancras, then a village on the edge of London, the draughtsmen returned to join the small army of topographers and engravers to produce the images for the books.
Wood engravers worked to even greater pressure of time than did engravers on metal, to keep up with the relentless deadlines for the illustrated journals. Steam-driven machinery was by the 1820s revolutionizing the speed and quantity of printing. Engraved wood blocks, which matched the depth of type, could be set in the same frame with metal type, and inked and printed together so that image and text would appear with ease on the same sheet of paper. Engraved metal plates were different; their printing was slower and more complex, the ink being taken into the engraved lines by the ‘intaglio’ process, rather than being wiped across the uncut surface as in the ‘relief’ process of wood engraving. To keep up with the pressure of the modern world, metal engraving just had to become quicker and produce more impressions per plate. The printing of bank-notes for the Bank of England was the catalyst for a very necessary change in practice, in an area where engravers and engineers found a surprising new synergy. The question from the Bank of England was: could bank-notes be produced rapidly and in quantity, and be made resistant to forgery? What underpinned the relationship between engineering and engraving was not the market for landscape views or portraits, lucrative though this could be, but the demand for bank-notes in large quantities, every one identical but individually numbered, and with elegant but complex lettering and decoration. As early as 1819, 30,000 bank-notes were struck at the bank every day, a volume that demanded high-speed printing machines and hardened printing plates that could be engraved with delicate lines that would not wear out.
Forgery was an ever-present problem for all banks. The Times reported official figures of bank-note forgery, a capital offence, revealing that in 1812 nearly 18,000 forged notes of all denominations had been discovered in circulation, rising in 1817 to above 30,000. Farington observed that:
It is well known that the principle forgers reside in Birmingham; that they are well known to the Bank Directors but sufficient evidence against them has not been attained . . . They are reputed to sell the notes for 5 shillings.
The Society of Arts took the initiative in grappling with the problem of forgery, commissioning a report from its Committee of Polite Arts on ways to proceed. Suggestions included ‘superior engravings by eminent artists’, and engravings by Indian artists ‘of such mathematical exactness as to wholly exceed the artist’s skill in lineal varieties’. The idea of engaging artists from India came as a direct consequence of experiments being carried out by the cutler James Stodart and others, including Michael Faraday, on wootz, an Indian steel that had been imported into Britain since the eighteenth century through the East India Company. The hardness of wootz was legendary; this was the material from which were made the sharp, durable and highly decorated swords from India and Arabia.
Other suggestions put to the Society of Arts committee included the proposal that the type that printed the lettering on bank-notes should be cut in diamond, ‘imitation of which would present insurmountable difficulties, the expense being prodigious . . . and the length of time necessary for finishing a font of type for the purpose several months’. Diamond typefaces would have been a prodigious expense for the bank, let alone for a forger, and this recommendation did not go forward. The number of notes printed at the bank each day made it essential that copper plates should be replaced by steel. Here, once again, art and science went hand in hand, and indeed to find a solution to the problem the committee requested that ‘a union between the engravers and printers’ should be pursued. The enthusiastic young Michael Faraday described in 1820 the method of softening steel plates for engraving, and the subsequent hardening of them for printing. This process was then being developed by the American émigré inventor and engineer Jacob Perkins, who cornered the market for supplying paper money to dozens of country banks. Abraham Raimbach saw ruin in the common usage of this industrial technique. Of electrotype plates – those made chemically, by electrolysis – he wrote:
To the introduction of steel-engraving by multiplying almost indefinitely the number of impressions each plate would produce, may in a great degree be attributed the decline and debasement of the art, exercised on a small scale. The embellishments of books are no longer what they have been, and the recent discovery and application of the electrotype bids fair to affect similar results as regards works of a large size.
The process could reproduce any number of copies,
consequently greatly lessening the value of the aggregate, and destroying at the same time, root and branch, the long-established system of proofs and early impressions, which contributed so much to the advantage and respectability of the profession, by holding out inducements to connoisseurs and lovers of rarity, to form collective choice exemplars.
Some things in image reproduction rolled on as before, however, until the introduction of photography in the early 1840s forced a change. The fundamental requirement remained for the engraver to pore for months, even years, over the original painting, retaining it often to the frustration and fury of artist and owner. Landseer and his engravers endured odium and even threats of violence, while John Pye’s engraving of Turner’s Ehrenbreitstein was delayed for ten years, from 1835 to 1845. ‘Year after year rolls on,’ the artist wrote to the engraver, ‘and no proof of Ehrnbtein appears.’ There was no owner to complicate the issue in this case, as Turner had painted Ehrenbreitstein specifically so it could be engraved by Pye, ‘free of all cost to Mr Turner’. Nevertheless ten years was more than he had expected: Turner’s share of this deal was his continued ownership of the painting and 100 impressions of the print; while Pye would make his money out of the prints sold, and a half-share with Turner in the ownership of the plate. This was a deal cooked up between them, with no publisher involved, though in the event the process did not take the route intended. First of all, Pye expected Turner to produce a small picture that he, Pye, could take with him to engrave while travelling Europe with his daughter; but in the event the painting Turner delivered was 3 feet by 4 feet, much too large to transport with ease. Secondly, the long delay in the project, caused principally by Pye not being able to travel with the painting because it was so big, meant that the work could not be completed in the agreed five years. Ehrenbreitstein was sold to Elhanan Bicknell in 1844, before the print was published, but nevertheless Bicknell was not allowed to collect his purchase. He wrote to Pye in 1845:
My getting the painting appears as distant now as it was in March 1844. I thought I had only to send to Queen Anne Street to have it – but the grim master of the Castle Giant Grimbo [i.e. Turner] shakes his head and says he and you must first agree that all is done to the plate that is necessary, and the picture will be wanted to refer to.
These local difficulties were the inevitable consequence, and an indicator, of the rise in value of paintings by artists of substance, the growing influence and reach of the entrepreneurial art dealer, and the widening market for fine art from the grand house to the terrace. Further, they demonstrate that the accrued market value of an edition of prints, sold on to upper- and middle-class households, significantly rivalled the value of the original work of art. Pye put it succinctly: ‘By the graver’s art, it has been as truly as elegantly said, “copper has been turned into gold”, for it is a vein of wealth both to the artist and to the state.’ He went on to point out that foreign trade in British prints brought £200,000 a year into the country – that would be an export value of £10 million in the early twenty-first century:
By this art alone it may be said . . . the British school is known and admired in every country of Europe and America; in which its productions form an important article of commerce. By engravings the high moral and intellectual character of England has been displayed and acknowledged by honours, by volumes, and by imitations . . . The superiority of the English school of landscape painting especially is known only by engraving, and the illustrious masters in this department of our Academy will, perhaps, be immortalised by the graver rather than the pencil, since their original works may perish. Wilkie, Flaxman and Turner’s works have been the indexes to the character of our intellectuality in art, and the foundation of our artistic reputation, both in design and engraving, in the countries of the Continent generally.
Turner’s work with engravers is a classic case, dividing itself broadly into three distinct phases, of trade following art. The phases are indicative of the fact that Turner’s career is a transition between the generation of artists whose work was conditioned by requirements of the patron, and the era of artists who were able to maintain some measure of contractual control over their paintings, by working with dealers and publishers, or entirely for themselves. During the eighteenth century, engravings after the landscape painter Richard Wilson, for example, might include a florid inscription reflecting the artist’s indebtedness to the owner of the painting or the landscape depicted. This was commonplace. In Turner’s early career, many of his watercolours were commissioned specifically to be engraved. The engraving was the end; the painting merely the means to that end. Thus, for 20 guineas, Turner delivered in 1799 two watercolour drawings of scenes in Oxford for the Oxford University Press. These became university property and were engraved by James Basire to decorate the 1799 and 1801 Oxford Almanack, a single-sheet fly-poster about 3 feet high, which listed the university’s senior officers and carried the year’s calendar.
In the following decade Turner produced for the Press eight more watercolours, one in 1801 and seven in 1804, a clear sign that by 1804 the Delegates of the Press had noticed his assiduity, his approach and the quality of his work. For the very modest outlay of 10 guineas each in 1804, the Press now had seven years’ supply of drawings for the Almanack, quite enough at a time when they were being troubled by persistent inaccuracies in the calendar and blaming Basire for them. Turner was doing them a favour: since they took him on in 1799 he had risen first to become an Associate member of the Royal Academy, then an Academician, then the owner and manager of his own gallery, and was rising immeasurably in public and professional stature. By the time his last Oxford Almanack drawing was engraved and published, he had sold large and complex paintings for high prices to patrons who included, rising up the social scale, Walter Fawkes Esq., Sir John Leicester, the Earl of Egremont and the Duke of Bridgewater. Turner had, from his youth, developed a sincere respect for Oxford, mixed with loyalty and esteem for the academic community. He also had the professional canniness to know that his work would be seen by all, from Chancellor to servants, and that each Almanack would be circulated and displayed prominently for at least a year in the best university rooms, pasted on walls, and sold at 2s.6d a time. This was a very good business deal, in which Turner could trade off low income against high public exposure.
The second phase of Turner’s work with engravers, where the relationship turns from ‘for’ to ‘with’, began with his initiative to create his own portfolio of engraved pictures, his Liber Studiorum (‘Book of Studies’), itself a means to maintain control over the copyright of his paintings. By the end of the twelve-year process, 1807 to 1819, he had produced, with his engravers, ninety plates. Many of these were begun with etched outline by Turner himself, and a handful were made by him in their entirety. The finish to most of the plates, whether in aquatint, mezzotint or etching, was nevertheless made by engravers under Turner’s close supervision, the artist inspecting every inch of the way and pencilling terse instructions in some of the margins. Despite, or perhaps because of, his desire for control, Turner’s Liber Studiorum was a commercial failure. One of the problems initially was poor advertising. In 1808 Turner bitterly castigated his engraver (and namesake) Charles Turner in the margins of one print:
Respecting advertising you know full well that every thing ought to have been done long ago!! I have not seen a word in the papers, take it away from the Times: if you can get advertised any where do so . . . In short everything has conspired against the work.
The Liber Studiorum suffered from mixed motives on the part of the artist. Was he doing it purely to protect his ownership of the images, or was he hoping to expand the pool of knowledge of his work, from the aristocratic gallery to the modest family parlour? Both, probably. John Pye remarked that for Turner the purpose of the Liber was ‘to demonstrate’ that he ‘could delineate everything that is visible under the sun’. This may have been in the back of Turner’s mind, but he will have known that his exhibited paintings were already making that perfectly clear.
Turner was his own highly erratic business manager. He kept costs of producing the Liber down by tending to pay the engravers rather less than they asked: for example, he paid F. C. Lewis 5 guineas for engraving the first subject in the series, Bridge and Goats, though Lewis wanted 8. He made sure that Charles Turner did not buy any more paper for the prints than was necessary, and set print prices low enough to anticipate a modest flow of orders: 15 shillings for a folio of five prints, and £1.5s for the betterquality proof impressions. At 3 shillings a print, then, for the standard issue, the purchaser was paying what might today be around £7 or £8 for an unframed image. That seems about par for a frameable art gallery reproduction these days.
Nevertheless, they did not sell, a failure that Turner immediately and roughly put down to poor advertising on the part of others. Maria Callcott (then Maria Graham) wanted to buy a set of the Liber Studiorum, but ran into difficulties in trying to track one down. She told John Murray, ‘I believe that it is only to be gotten at his own house so that I must write to him for it.’ When John Ruskin went to Turner’s studio after his death, he found
neatly packed and well labelled as many Bundles of Liber Studiorum as would fill your entire Bookcase, & England and Wales proofs in packed and Labelled Bundles like reams of paper . . . piled nearly to ceiling.
Volume marketing was clearly not among Turner’s strengths – a problem that, with the engravings of his Picturesque Views in England and Wales, which were also not selling, was lifelong. In the 1840s Turner chastized the print-seller Halsted for breaking up sets of the Liber. On being told, quite reasonably, that some plates sold better than others, he responded mysteriously: ‘A pack of geese! A pack of geese! Don’t they know what Liber Studiorum means?’ We might also ask what Turner meant by such a gnomic statement, worthy of the Sphinx, or the epigrammatic footballer Eric Cantona. My guess is that he saw the collection as one might see a gaggle of geese: that is, all equal, all similar in kind, but having their best effect when banded together.
The third and final phase of Turner’s professional life with engravers shows his work being reproduced at extremes of scale, both very small as vignettes for book illustrations, and relatively large to be framed for domestic display in such series as The Southern Coast and Picturesque Views in England and Wales, each plate being about 6 by 9 inches. Over the final two decades of his life, and after his death, new engravings after Turner tended to be yet larger, growing to as much as 22 by 32 inches for the largest, John Burnet’s 1853 steel engraving after The Shipwreck. In the 1830s his vignettes – small images usually oval in shape and without a fixed border – were engraved and published as illustrations to octavo, or small-format, books of poetry or prose. These, embracing the work of Scott, Byron, Campbell, Moore and Rogers, entered the mass market and carried his already famous name into every household where books flowed freely. Turner was, to readers, an exemplary interpreter of contemporary literature, an artist published by John Murray and Robert Cadell; thus he straddled two normally separate worlds, being also, to visitors to art exhibitions and collectors, an artist of gravitas, status and conscience, and the creator of extraordinarily chromatic paintings. In addition he contributed illustrations of subjects on the Loire and Seine to three annual volumes, 1833 to 1835, for armchair travellers. ‘Turner’s Annual Tour’, articulated with texts by the journalist and novelist Leitch Ritchie, was eagerly awaited by those planning or dreaming of foreign travel. He showed what distant places looked like; readers knew they could trust Turner. By the 1840s his work and name were closely and particularly connected to the book trade, and were key factors in the commercial success of the publications he illustrated. Publication of the largerscale engravings drew in art dealers such as Thomas Griffith, Francis Moon, and Hodgson and Graves, who sought large profits by speculating in singleimage engraving contracts. Turner was deeply involved in all negotiations concerning his paintings, more or less successfully. He cautioned William Miller, who wanted to engrave his Mercury and Herse, ‘I told more than one Publisher about it without any result.’
Turner’s career overlapped significantly with the new era of dealer-led mass reproduction. In his agreement with Hodgson and Graves in 1836 for Miller to engrave Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute, Turner was to be paid 100 guineas for the copyright of the image, with fifty ‘first proofs’ – that is, the best – from the finished plate, specified in the contract as copper and to be ‘the same size as The Temple of Jupiter by Mr Miller’. The agreement on the fifty best proofs was a special (and expensive) courtesy to Turner, reflecting both on his eminence and on his expectation to be involved in the money-making side of the process. The fifty, creamed off a copper plate, were a particularly valuable asset to be relinquished by the dealers, who would have considered this concession when agreeing the artist’s fee. Further, the painting was to be insured against fire and ‘all risks of carriage by Land or Sea’ for 350 guineas. As Miller lived in Edinburgh and the painting had to be transported from London, this was a significant requirement.
Already, with insurance being part of the deal, engraving processes were becoming professional and systematic, involving a new complex of interests. Turner’s copyright fee for Venice would not become due for twelve months, and the painting was to be returned to him two years after the agreement with Hodgson and Graves was signed. Turner was a fully involved businessman where the engraving of his work was concerned. He always expected full insurance of his paintings when they were away at the engravers – ‘insurance &c. &c. shall be fully attended unto; rely upon my enforcing them’ – while his insistence on close control of the way the engraver handled his image, tone and detail, went beyond mere concern to become involved, obsessive, proprietorial guidance. In short, Turner recognized the full value of the highest-quality engraving, expected the best, and knew engraving to be an art of distinction on a par with his own. He would have understood and echoed the engraver John Landseer’s remark, ‘engraving is no more an art of copying painting than the English language is an art of copying Greek or Latin.’
Over the course of his career, and until a few years after his death, nearly a thousand different print subjects were engraved after works by Turner, from the first, a view of Rochester, when he was nineteen years old. In all he seems to have engaged about sixty different engravers, indicating a high degree of loyalty from some of them, despite the quarrels that were a regular feature of his professional relationships with engravers. By comparison, Edwin Landseer had the modest output of 434 subjects engraved. Other differences are equally revealing, however, if we consider that in career terms the two were more or less on a par: their working lives were of a similar length, both being of about fifty-three years; they both had high public fame from widely reproduced images; and they had similar levels of productive energy and personal financial security. Compared with Turner’s sixty-odd engravers, Landseer and his dealers employed 126; and while we have no accurate figures to make comparison of the number of proofs taken off each print, it is the case that Landseer benefited from the durable steel plates which for Turner were introduced when he was well into middle age. What is clear is that Landseer used twice the number of engravers to make half the number of print subjects. This reflects the growth and improved organization of the art engraving trades since the 1820s, a direct consequence of improvements in printing technology brought on by industrialization, mechanization, and the need to print secure bank-notes in extreme quantities and at speed.
There is extensive surviving correspondence that evokes the turbulence in the relationships between artist, dealer and engraver. One exchange prompted by Ernest Gambart’s approach in 1848 to Jacob Bell concerning the copyright of Landseer’s paintings is direct and unpleasant. It opens with the young engraver Charles Lewis, the son of Turner’s engraver F. C. Lewis, writing to Bell to complain in the strongest possible terms about Gambart’s persistence:
I should be very much obliged if you would ask Mr Gambart not to call any more with his promises; he has now been, in all, twenty times, making arrangements & settling things, that, when they are seen into, are not so substantial as bubbles, all this you are well aware is not pleasant or expected. You will merely be so good as to explain that we English are not used to these unsolid modes of doing business.
A month later, Lewis appeared to have got over his antipathy towards Gambart, perhaps on Bell’s advice, and wrote to him:
Mr Bell has written to me requesting that I should call upon you about the Picture of the ‘Random Shot’. I should like to understand the terms you have jointly to offer . . . I will promise to be very amiable, as I am sure your willingness has always been most complementary to me, but there are so many obstacles in the way.
Gambart immediately sent Lewis’s letter to Bell, complaining that Lewis’s prices for engraving were extravagant and suggesting a more reasonable figure. A fortnight later Lewis wrote to Bell about a meeting he had had with another dealer, Henry Graves, who offered improved terms. He was, however, inclined to stick with Gambart:
I saw Mr Graves last night he would like to see the Picture [A Random Shot] & would call upon you this morning if you will allow him to see it with me; he seems inclined to pay the very small copyright you have named, although if he would not allow us a fair price for engraving, I would rather be subject to Gambart’s plans or take the copyright myself. I think you would kindly understand my meaning . . . I dare say you are almost heartily tired of these matters.
Landseer stepped in, after a year had gone by, with more invective against Gambart, and spoke his mind to Bell:
It is quite time to give that Frenchman up. He only thinks of himself. Not the least feeling for art or the reputation of the author or authors, a heartless flattering humbug. If possible I should like to take other things in progress out of his hands . . . Any written agreement signed? No? That letter of his is mostly insolent . . . Get his money or rather our honest share out of the concern and send him to the Devil.
Despite demonstrations of bad temper from Landseer, Gambart found ways of publishing prints after the artist. Indeed, he contracted Edwin’s brother, the engraver Thomas Landseer, to create three prints of hunting dogs. When these were published in 1850, The Times observed that ‘for spirit, accuracy of delineation, and character, [they] are amongst the very best things produced by that eminent artist’.
Martin Blackmore, despite his philanthropic support of the Artists’ Benevolent Fund, was a particularly difficult client. Lewis had had Blackmore’s Landseer painting Collie Dogs in his studio for some time (see pages 100–101), but he needed it again and appealed to Bell for its return: ‘I wd really not lose a moment on its completion, & keep it a month.’ Writing subsequently to Landseer, Lewis wrote:
I am very sorry to trouble you, while you are away from home, but Mr Blackmore has now had his Picture for 8 or 9 months, & says he will not again allow it to go away without your written order . . . If I do not get the picture so as to finish it at once, I fear I shall get into serious trouble, which I am sure it is not in your nature to recognize.
And then to Bell again:
I still hope you will get the Picture for a short time. If you can not oblige me I can foresee a tedious Lawsuit which it is the power of yourself & Sir E. Landseer to prevent . . . You are in error that I told Mr Blackmore a fortnight would suffice to finish with the Picture, he said he would lend it to me for 21 days & then take it away for good, without consulting me . . . As you wish for security that Mr B. should have his Picture returned in three months, I will of course promise he shall h[ave] [tear] whenever he may wish for it; if you do not consent to this I shall consider, as I before said, you are the instrument of the Lawsuit, as you are the prevention to the completion of the plate I have so nearly done for Mr Graves. Last night I had a writ served upon me. I cannot really understand the meaning of it, from gentlemen like you & Sir Edwin.
And again, now reporting a threat of violence:
I am still very sorry to learn Mr Blackmore is so strongly biassed against my interest in the present case . . . Without wishing to renew any old grievances respecting any angry words between Mr Blackmore & myself, I have a perfect recollection of his saying he would shoot any one who detained his picture.
Graves clearly took no notice of Lewis’s needs and summoned him to court in 1855 for failing to produce the engraved print on time. Graves won damages; Lewis went home in sorrow. The law courts were a recurrent recourse for publishers, engravers and artists to establish their mutual rights. The entire weight of this particular saga of intemperance and impatience, fought out between men of substance and influence, fell upon the poor bloody engraver.
In the creative process, all kinds of erratics creep in. The engraver of illustrations by Abraham Cooper RA to Walter Scott’s Rob Roy wrote in concerned tones bearing Scott’s opinion to Abraham Cooper. This had come, handed along like a relay baton, from Scott, to the print dealer Moon, to the engraver, to Cooper:
Messrs Moon & Co transmitted to me a few days since your drawing of Baillie Jarvie which I transmitted to Sir Walter without any delay. I fear you have not put the Baillie in sufficient peril – he is not sufficiently dangling – there is one tree only, but I had as well tell you what Sir Walter says.
‘Mr Cooper is too tame and has mistaken the position which is the face of a Highland precipice a tree projecting from the face of the rock which has caught the Baillie in his fall and holds him suspended between earth and sky, his wig gone and his coat rending, all fours off the ground and hanging, as he says himself, like the sign of the golden fleece. In Mr Cooper’s sketch the Baillie has only slipt a foot in a swampy woodland and fallen into a thorn bush. He can do nothing however but what is marked by genius.’
I have no doubt you can Doctor all this very easily. Tis important as far as possible to come near the author’s views.
In this particular case, a twitch upon the thread in Abbotsford was quickly and sharply felt by relays in the artist’s home in Greenwich.
Contracts regularly specified quantity and quality of the prints ordered. In an agreement with the engraver William Giller, Hodgson and Graves insisted that his engraving of the portrait of Lady Peel, made after Charles Heath’s print which was itself made after Sir Thomas Lawrence’s oil portrait, should be engraved on steel
in mezzotinto, 6½ × 8¾ inches, finish and deliver by 25 September 1836 for 40 gns. Plate to work 1000 good impressions without further expense which William Giller agrees it should do.
Note the process here: an earlier print of the painting, and not the painting itself, becomes the source of the new engraving.
Turner’s 100 guineas for copyright of his Venice is put into the shade by comparison with the £1,200 that another star of the engraved painting world, David Wilkie, was paid in 1829 for the copyright of Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo. This was in addition to the £1,260 that the Duke of Wellington paid for it on commission. The engraver, John Burnet, was to receive £1,575 for his work engraving this large plate, size 28¼ × 17 inches, plus one-third of the profits from the sale of the prints. The top engravers’ fees were gradually encroaching on the copyright payments to artists, so when a publisher brought together an artist of Wilkie’s stature with an engraver like Burnet it is not clear which of the two is the real star. The scene became further complicated when Moon, Boys and Graves engaged James Stewart to engrave Wilkie’s Scotch Wedding in the collection of King George IV. The detailed, expensively and neatly drawn up contract between the parties – clearly top lawyers were used – in which Wilkie would earn £367.10s [i.e. 350 guineas] for the copyrights and Stewart £1,207.10s [1,150 guineas] for the engraving, contained the clause that the picture was to be left with James Stewart for the period of engraving, unless the king wanted it to be returned, in which case all payments would be suspended.
Business was so good that, as Pye pointed out, there were about twenty print-sellers in London whose transactions averaged £16,000 a year (i.e. c.£750,000 turnover in the early twenty-first century). In 1844 Graves’s sales reputedly totalled £22,000. In 1837 Landseer completed the sale of the copyright of The Drover’s Departure: A scene in the Grampians to the engraver James Henry Watt for 200 guineas. This marked the beginning of the fame of this work, which turned inevitably into tedium as fashions changed, and the engraving, proudly bought by one generation, was dismissed to backstairs and junk shops by another. The Drover’s Departure was one of the first mass-marketed images of a crowded and complex contemporary scene with plenty of niggling anecdotal detail. It would be followed twenty years later by such highly populated show-stoppers as W. B. Frith’s Derby Day (1856–8), The Railway Station (1862) and Private View at the Royal Academy (1883), and Meeting of Wellington and Blücher and Death of Nelson (1858–64) by Daniel Maclise.
In the case of The Drover’s Departure, ownership, and profits, were spread across the trade. Watt had bought the copyright, but ownership of the engraved plate was different again. Initially, Watt, and Hodgson and Graves, each owned half the rights in the plate, but even before the engraving was finished, Hodgson and Graves had sold half of their 50 per cent to the art dealer Thomas Agnew, then of Manchester, for 350 guineas. Thus investment in the process, and the prospect of lucrative profits, racked upwards, divided and subdivided by shares, long after the artist had sold out his part of the deal. Abraham Raimbach, a good friend of David Wilkie, expressed the engravers’ view. He saw the painters to be the root cause of the problem of ‘the change that had come over the good old legitimate art of line-engraving . . . the enormous sums now for the first time exacted by the painters under the claim of copyright’:
The printsellers, in yielding to these claims, sought to indemnify themselves by adopting a more expeditious and lower-priced mode of engraving (mezzotinto), and which, being also executed on steel, enabled them by printing much longer numbers than copper-plates will produce to obtain their usual regular profits . . . A noble lord, a great collector of the modern as well as of the old masters, was desirous of befriending a young engraver of talent by allowing him to make an engraving from a picture in his gallery; when the painter, hearing of the circumstance, interfered and prevented the fulfilment of his lordship’s benevolent intention, the patron being unwilling to enter into a contest on the subject.
In the matter of Landseer’s The Drover’s Return, a companion painting to The Drover’s Departure, Watt complained bitterly to Hodgson and Graves when the latter party
departed the strict letter of the parsimonious agreement which your house insisted on in consequence of my unlucky oversight and Mr Hodgson’s repeated refusals to advertise the plate [of The Drover’s Return] properly . . . [They] have hitherto completely destroyed my confidence in his intentions of vigorously promoting the success of the publication. But his present voluntary departure from the strict letter of the agreement [by payment of £25] restores my confidence in your house, and shall be met with renewed exertions to finish the plate quickly.
Nine months later Watt accepted £700 from Hodgson and Graves for his remaining quarter-share in The Drover’s Departure and his half-share in his engraving of C. R. Leslie’s May Day in the Time of Queen Elizabeth. These evanescent, long-dead deals are impossible to reconstruct fully, but what we can grasp of them does nevertheless give a clue to the activity, energy and passion which ran behind the creation of what may now be mere anachronistic curiosities. They also reveal the fluctuations in the structures of art-dealing firms as they take on, then shed, new partners, associates and directors.
The process of engraving was dogged by quarrels, which were more about money than aesthetics or interpretation. John Murray and Charles Heath agreed in 1818 to pay £10 or guineas each for drawings for an edition of Byron’s poems, and £20 or guineas each for the engravings. Murray was then furious when he received a bill of £300, a 40 per cent increase, for six completed plates. Constable and S. W. Reynolds lambasted each other over the engraving of Constable’s painting The Lock. ‘Get whom you please to make Engravings from your Works,’ Reynolds told him:
I don’t care who, or how bad they may be when done. All I know, is that I will finish the Lock myself, and that I have prevailed upon a Friend of mine a la Paris to have Engraved Your two Wretched Works, that [John] Arrowsmith Bought of You [The Hay Wain and View on the Stour], and which made such a Fuss in Paris, so behave Yourself or I’ll make Devils of things from them . . . I hope to see something in the Louvre of Yours next Opening in the Autumn. You was to have painted me a companion to the Lock, Avez vous.
This was not a good relationship.
The 1830s were the golden age of reproductive engraving; the high prices and the commercial quarrels reflect something of the churn of the market. This had regained its buoyancy after the crash of 1825/6, and the new methods of reproductive technology were bedding down with a vibrant professional network of engravers. Under the leadership and inspiration of John Pye – ‘truly . . . a gigantic man . . . a stupendous life’, as one of his descendants recalled – engravers developed their own effective system of apprenticeships and career aspiration in which the experience of age could be passed on through the enthusiasm of youth. A clause in the contract drawn up in 1836 between Hodgson and Graves and the young engraver Frederick Bromley, to engrave Abraham Cooper’s Wellington at Waterloo, contained an endorsement by Frederick’s father, the distinguished engraver John Charles Bromley:
I promise and undertake not to interrupt my son, Frederick Bromley, in the performance of his agreement with you . . . I will do all I can to enable him to fulfil his engagement.
As they were employing a young untried engraver, for the modest fee of 100 guineas, Hodgson and Graves inserted a cautious caveat: they would pay for the steel plate, but that ‘if the engraving is not satisfactory to them [the plate is] to be then cut up and destroyed’.
The destruction of an engraved plate would soon become an event of commercial celebration rather than an indication of failure. Edward Whymper noted with interest in his diary the dramatic event prior to the retirement of Thomas Boys from the business of print dealing in 1855:
The celebrated plate of the Waterloo banquet [engraved by William Greatbach after the painting by William Salter] has been destroyed along with 11 other celebrated ones . . . [Mr Boys] wishes to render some service to printmakers in general, by raising the price of impressions that they have, and also to hasten the sale of his stock.
The sight of an executioner smashing the steel plates to pieces both fascinated and shocked the witnesses to the event, and ‘so unexpectedly called forth so much public interest’, as Boys put it in a letter to The Times. The plates of Salter’s Waterloo Banquet, The Christening of the Princess Royal by C. R. Leslie, and subjects by Landseer including Shoeing: The smith’s forge and The Return from Hawking were destroyed at this event, and then, so that there should be no doubt in the matter, the metal fragments were nailed up as if they were magpies shot by a farmer, and displayed at the Albion Tavern, Aldersgate Street, while the remaining prints from the plates were auctioned off to the trade around them. This was ‘the most extraordinary epoch in the annals of the fine arts’, according to Boys’s extravagant claim. Boys’s justification of his act was that the steel plates were capable of producing a further 3,000 copies each, and that if these were printed and entered the market, they would destroy the value of the otherwise limited editions:
If the high price demand ceases the cost cannot be obtained back; if the cost cannot be reimbursed the undertaking cannot be entered into; and thus high art, however high it may be, so far as engraving is concerned, will be smothered in its birth, and such noble and beautiful specimens of the graver . . . will cease to be produced.
The ruthlessness of the trade, as exercised by Thomas Boys, came to justify Abraham Raimbach’s fear that steel-faced engraving would debase the market. The destruction of the plates may also be a tacit but demonstrative admission that the prints were not selling in sufficient quantities to justify their release to a wider market, and so drastic steps were required. Thus the Art-Union’s misgivings of 1846 (see p. 98) might be seen as a premonition.
An artist who, unlike Turner and Landseer, looked after his own business, keeping well clear of dealers and publishers, was John Martin. He had no fear of images losing their value through multiplication: therein lies the essential difference between the artist and the dealer, and indeed between Martin and Landseer. Martin’s career as a painter and printmaker rose like a bubble during the 1820s, filled out, burst and then practically collapsed during a decade or more of financial disaster in which he wandered the world of civil engineering, haemorrhaging money to further his plans to create a healthy and wholesome London. In the late 1840s he got back on track and found renewed fame through new paintings of apocalyptic dimension and subject matter. These he, and after his death his sons, exhibited to great acclaim in the major cities of the British Isles. Martin came from a simple Northumbrian family, from which no fewer than four male siblings – John, Jonathan, Richard and William – all having been apprenticed to trades, achieved the extraordinary distinction of becoming in due course subjects whose lives came to merit inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Within their period, that is a turn of events usually reserved only for aristocracy or royalty.
Martin came to London in 1806 to seek success and fortune as an artist, having been trained in Newcastle to paint and polish coach bodies and to give them the kind of shiny surfaces, bright decorative flourishes, lettering and heraldic devices which drew attentive glances as they clattered around the county. In this training he mirrored the early career of that other entrepreneur, Rudolf Ackermann (see pages 157–162). He found in the capital decorative work of a similar kind, in which a light hand and close attention to detail were constant requirements, painting china and glass with landscape views and other charming devices. While he made additional money by teaching and selling landscape drawings, Martin did not himself have an orthodox art education – there was no enrolling in the Royal Academy Schools for him, or being apprenticed to an exhibiting artist. Instead, driven by his own extraordinary energy and even a bloody-mindedness that led to the occasion of his leading an apprentices’ strike and facing his employer in court, he was able within six years to break out and surprise the art world with his apotheosis of coach-painting, the smoothly detailed, heated and showy canvas Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, all dressed up like a postillion in its red and orange. The reception of this painting seems to have given Martin a taste of what it was that the unreal and the uncanny, the lurid and the shocking, could convey beyond the pages of the Gothic novel of the previous century. Far from leading him to the waters of oblivion, Sadak showed Martin the way to seek the sunshine of fame.
The growing popularity of what became Martin’s characteristic theme – civic disarray, collapsing authority and the insignificance of the individual against the overwhelming power of nature – led him to create new opportunities for his work. His light hand, his close attention to detail, his polish, and his experience and understanding of the factory system empowered him to produce a series of engravings after his exhibited work which developed his paintings’ popularity and lengthened their shelf-life. His experience of successful litigation in the business field caused him also to have no fear of opposition, and a strong sense of self.
John Martin was highly organized as an engraver of his own work, sending out prospectuses, chivvying potential buyers: for example, in the case of fellow artist James Northcote, he requested an ‘early answer’ in 1817 to the invitation to subscribe to the print of Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still. While he had published engravings in the 1810s without much commercial success, Martin found a fertile source of income with the engraving he made of his Belshazzar’s Feast (1821). This etching and mezzotint, published in 1826, came onto the market as a national exhibition tour of the painting itself was coming to an end. Belshazzar’s Feast had become the star attraction at its first exhibition at the British Institution, where it won a £200 prize from the directors and had to be fenced off from the crowds that came to see it. The painting was bought for 800 guineas, Martin’s advertised price, by William Collins, the man whom Martin had courageously challenged in court over the terms of his apprenticeship. Collins subsequently toured it around the country, to Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, Bristol, Bath and Cheltenham. Such public exposure and acclaim were unheard of. In terms of the numbers of people who had seen it during the first half of the 1820s, when fortyfive editions of the accompanying pamphlet were printed, John Martin’s Belshazzar’s Feast was the most widely seen modern painting with serious moral and historical intent, reaching more people than any other before the advent of film and television. Compared to Martin, in terms of market share and public profile, Wilkie, Turner, Frith, Maclise and Holman Hunt were beginners.
Martin had a strong following wind for the marketing of his Belshazzar print, of which he made three versions and tolerated, to a greater or lesser extent, many more. He produced his first engraving of the subject in 1826, despite another legal attack from the disagreeable Collins, who claimed that he had acquired copyright when he bought the painting. Martin’s defence boiled down, somewhat pedantically, to his claim that the engraving was based on a new version of the painting that he had made, not the one bought by Collins. The proliferating number of versions from the artist had tended to obscure the situation, to Martin’s eventual, and probably unexpected, benefit.
From this point, John Martin’s career as a commercial art printmaker and publisher took off. On the floor below his studio in Allsop Terrace, Marylebone Road, he maintained a print workshop and a team of assistants. The workshop was described in detail by his son, Leopold, ‘as nearly perfect as art could make it’:
He had fly-wheel and screw-presses of the latest construction; inkgrinders, glass and iron; closets for paper French, India and English; drawers for canvas, blankets, inks, whiting, leather-shaving etc; outdoor cupboards for charcoal and ashes; in fact every appliance necessary for what my father was converting into a fine art.
While he carried out much of the preliminary work on the copper plates himself, Martin had his own efficient ‘marketing department’ in the person of his 26-year-old daughter Isabella, who kept his books carefully and made sure his customers got what they ordered and paid up. Martin’s customers comprised all the leading print dealers, including Ackermann, Colnaghi, Moon, Boys and Graves, Bulcock of the Strand, Lambe of Gracechurch Street, and, in Manchester, Agnew and Zanetti. Other dealers, in Bath, Norwich and Liverpool, also bought prints in some quantity, as did those whom his surviving ledger, kept by Isabella, lists as ‘Chance subscribers’. These run into more than 200 entries between 1826 and 1836, the peak years being 1826 to 1829, when Martin’s print factory sold nearly 450 prints to individuals. Over these three years the trade bought many hundreds of prints, the largest single purchaser by far being Ackermann & Co., who spent £1,410 on 208 prints between 1827 and the end of 1829. In the late 1820s John Martin was making money hand over fist from sales both to the trade and to individuals. As a measure of the strength of the market, Ackermann bought fifteen prints of The Deluge, in various proof states, between September and November 1828, and then in the following January he bought fifty-two more, for the price of fortyeight. Martin would give a discount on bulk orders – thirteen prints for the price of twelve, for instance, or seven for the price of six. While this ledger of Martin’s accounts is a rare survival, so there is little to compare it with, it clearly shows that Martin was a consummate businessman, well able to allow production to meet demand, and Isabella Martin a consummate business manager.
Among Martin’s ‘chance’ or private subscribers were the architect A. W. N. Pugin, who bought a Joshua and a Deluge in November 1829 for £5.2s; the artists’ paint manufacturers Messrs Rowney, who bought a Belshazzar in 1829 for 6 guineas; the engineers, inventors and bank-note printers, Perkins & Bacon, who bought three Deluges, three Joshuas, three Ninevehs and three Babylons for a total £30.16s, including discounts; and St John Long, briefly Martin’s only pupil in the mid-1820s, who went on to become a controversial physician specializing in consumption. In 1830 Long bought from his former employer one Deluge for 6 guineas, one Joshua for 7 guineas, and one Belshazzar for 8 guineas.
Martin’s was the old manner of art reproduction, a system tried and tested over 400 years by woodcuts, wood engraving and engraved copper and steel. Developing to take its place, however, was photography, an infant art in the 1840s, but one whose potential was being relentlessly pursued by artists and scientists alike. Its baptism of fire came in 1851 at the Great Exhibition, an event that gave photography the opportunity to begin its inexorable rise to become the principal twentieth-century means of image reproduction. The photography of art developed slowly in the wake of the 1851 exhibition, as it could not yet match engraving or lithography for reproductive volume. The official photographers for the Great Exhibition, Henry Fox Talbot and Nicholas Henneman, were commissioned to take enough photographs to illustrate 140 sets of the four-volume Report of the Juries of the 1851 Exhibition. Had the project been completed, they would have produced 21,700 separate prints of overwhelmingly three-dimensional objects and exhibition views.
Pioneers in the photography of works of art were Leonida Caldesi and his partner Mattia Montecchi. They had been commissioned by Agnew’s and Colnaghi’s to record 100 of the exhibits in the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures exhibition and to create the sumptuous two-volume Photographs of the ‘Gems of the Art Treasures Exhibitions’, Manchester 1857, priced at the exhibition at £42: old masters in one volume, modern masters in the other. This was the first extensive test of photography’s ability to capture the tone and detail of paintings and drawings in both quantity and quality. There were mixed results, the photographers having to contend with reflections, shine, wear, bloom, and wide variations in scale and available light. The evident technical difficulties faced by Caldesi and Montecchi when they photographed the paintings in Manchester were being confronted in the 1850s by photographers all over Britain. The 1858 Photographic Society exhibition at the South Kensington Museum was rich with photographs of paintings and drawings, a category that was clearly active and growing. The Athenaeum praised their technique as ‘minute, careful and successful – truer, softer and surer than engravings, and expressing more of the colour and sentiment of the picture’.
Francis Hawkesworth Fawkes, the son and heir of Walter Fawkes, embarked in 1864 on his own entrepreneurial photographic scheme. In partnership with Dominic Colnaghi, Leonida Caldesi and Thomas Griffith, he aimed to create and publish an album of photographs of Fawkes’s Turner watercolours. ‘There is a novelty about to burst onto the critical world, of which & your opinions upon it, I shall be anxious . . . to learn’, Fawkes told Griffith. In its own modest way, their project was quite as pioneering as the Manchester initiative. Fawkes continued:
When the bubble bursts . . . I am . . . certain that you will not be the one (if there be such a one in existence) who will blame me for extending to the world in Photograph so perfect a Representation of the Beautiful works of Turner’s best period & that adorn the Walls of the Saloon here.
When I made Colnaghi the offer I had little expectation that Photography practised in so hazy & gloomy an atmosphere as our own could adapt itself to the Warmest as well [as] cold suggestions of the originals. Both theses, whether aiming to remind us of the Sketcher perspiring from every pore, or obstructed in his Work by an Alpine Winter & frostbitten Fingers, seem to me equally successful . . . I have had the whole collection (shortly as I hear to be published) on my Table . . . I rise nearly daily from the attractive review of them, with ever increasing admiration of the powers of Photography.
Griffith’s and Colnaghi’s connection with Fawkes’s initiative reflects something of the mid-nineteenth-century art market’s never-ending search for the new. While photography was already a well-established technology, new depths in its possible commercial applications were being explored energetically as a realistic economic alternative to the time-consuming and expensive art of the engraver. Photography was art’s steam-engine, the revolutionary new means to carry its message, further, quicker.