Four intermediate (C, Y, M, B) colors of the engraving of Cardinal Fleury by Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1738), National Library of France, Public Domain
Jacob Christoph Le Blon was born on May 2, 1667, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, a descendant of Huguenots fleeing France in 1576, who had settled there. His maternal grandmother was a daughter of the artist and engraver Matthaeus Merian the Elder (1593–1650). Showing an early interest in engraving and painting he had, sometime between 1696 and 1702, an extended stay in Rome where he is reported to have studied art under the painter and engraver Carlo Maratta (1625–1713) [1]. Around 1702, Le Blon moved to Amsterdam, where he worked as a miniature painter and engraver. In 1708–1709, he is known to have made colorant mixing experiments in Amsterdam and in 1710 he made his first color prints with yellow, red, and blue printing plates. In 1717, he moved to London where he received a royal patent for the three-color printing and a related textile weaving process [2]. Circa 1722, he published a small book on painting, Coloritto, in French and English [3]. There he stated that “Painting can represent all visible objects with three colors, yellow, red, and blue.” During his stay in England he produced several dozen images printed from three or four plates in multiple copies that initially sold well in England and on the continent. In the long run, his enterprise did not succeed; however, Le Blon left England in 1735, moving to Paris where he continued producing prints by his method. In 1740, he began work on a collection of anatomical prints for which he had a solid list of subscribers. He died on May 16, 1741 in Paris. A detailed technical description of Le Blon’s method was published in 1756 by Antoine Gautier de Montdorge who supported him during his final years in Paris [4].
23.1 Three- and Four-Plate Printing Process
The idea of three chromatic primaries, yellow, red, and blue, was quite well established in Le Blon’s time among painters, graphically represented by Aguilonius in 1613 and described by Boyle [5, p. 220]. What was new in Le Blon’s work is that he applied this concept to color printing of images in an entirely new fashion making greater and much subtler detailing and coloration possible. It required experience in deconstructing an image in terms of the three prime colorants so that printing multiple copies, based on only three or four plates, produced good quality coloration. It required the ability to mentally resolve the image into its presumed primary chromatic components and understanding and predicting the effects of superimposed printing inks in certain areas, for which extensive trial and error work was required. Le Blon manually engraved copperplates, using the mezzotint process, with the relative components of the three primary colors printed successively in registration in the sequence blue, yellow, and red onto the paper substrate. As he gained experience he at times used a fourth plate printing in black to achieve greater tonality and contrast, thus, employing an early version of the CMYK process. Le Blon used the pigments Prussian Blue, Stil de grain (Yellow lake), a mixture of Red lake and Carmine for red, and a common printer’s black ink [4]. The pigments were dispersed in copal tree resin dissolved in copal oil to make the inks. Examples of his work are shown as the title image for this entry and below (see Fig. 23.1). The technical problems associated with the process prevented it from becoming a standard method and lithographic printing of color images from up to a dozen wood engravings or stones per image continued until H. E. Ives’ invention of the chromatic halftone printing process ca. 1890.
Fig. 23.1
J. C. Le Blon, Head of a woman, ca. 1720 (three-color printing process)
