Title

Printing in oil [colour printing]

Author

Author not identified

Details

The Courier (Hobart), 2 August 1851, p.4, col.3.

Publication date

2 August 1851

Type

News

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

PRINTING IN OIL

A new adaptation of lithography to the process of printing in oil has lately been invented by Mr. Kronheim, of Paternoster Row. Hitherto, as the public is well aware, no strictly mechanical means have existed for successfully producing copies of paintings combining the colours and brilliant effects, as well as the outlines and shadings, of the originals. Steel engraving, the most perfect and best method in use for multiplying and rendering accessible to the public the chef d’ouvres of art, besides its obvious defects from the want of colouring, is also objectionable on account of the great experience and delay attending it. The ingenious and beautiful invention of Mr. Kronheim, while it enables him to supply copies of the great masters wonderfully accurate in every respect, reduces the cost of such copies to one-half the price of steel engravings, and is a far more expeditious process. His invention is rather a difficult one to describe intelligibly, but the following brief account of it will no doubt prove interesting. He uses six different kinds of blue, two of red, six of yellow, three of brown, five of grey, and a variety of flesh tints. Outlines are made not only of the forms, but of the shading of colours in the painting he wishes to copy. Proofs are taken from these outlines and transferred to a number of stones, corresponding with the diversity of colours, as just specified, which the painting contains. In this way lithographed outlines of the several parts of the painting, according to the distribution of its colour, are obtained. Each description of red, blue, yellow, or whatever the tint may be, has its stone, and the outline engraved on each stone is more or less filled in (according to the amount of shading required) with a species of chymical ink. Aquafortis is then applied to produce a raised surface, after which the oil colours are made to pass over the stone by rollers, where they are at once arrested by the ink. So that, according as the chymical ink has been more or less closely wrought in, the utmost nicety of shading can be secured. The colours from the stones are then printed off upon paper, and the exact tints requires are produced by printing one colour over the other, much upon the same principle as that which guides the artist in mixing his paints. In this way, when all the impressions of the different stones have been put together, they form themselves into an exact copy of the original picture a copy true not only in the details of the outline, form, and shading, as is the case in steel engravings, but true also in respect of that great art of colouring skills which forms so large a part of the painter’s art. We saw at Mr. Kronheim’s a number of copies (produced by this process) of the “Decent from the Cross,” by Reubens, in the cathedral at Antwerp. They represented with astonishing fidelity the brilliant and varied flesh tints in which that great master luxuriated, and, except they were executed on paper, and not canvass, they had the appearance of genuine copies in oil. So far is this carried, that each copy may without injury be washed with soap and water. Mr Kronheim’s invention has reduced to a certainty the practice of a new process by which the appreciation of art may be more widely extended, and the works of great artists popularised.

[The Courier (Hobart), 2 August 1851, p.4, col.3.]

Last Updated

13 Aug 2012