n his prospectus “To The Public” dated 10 October, 1793, Blake states that the illuminated books “are Printed in Colours” and identifies “America, a Prophecy,” copies of which at that time were printed in bluish- and greenish-black inks and left uncolored, as being “in Illuminated Printing” (E 693). Apparently, what made the books “illuminated” was not colored inks (as distinct from the usual black) on each plate or even the addition of water colors to the impressions, as one of the meanings of the word “illuminate” implies. “Illuminated printing” was created simply by printing from relief-etched plates—that is, from plates produced by the “method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving” that Blake had “invented,” a mode of printmaking which combined the printmaker with “the Painter and the Poet” (E 692). Features equally distinct were its cost, producing “works at less than one fourth of the expense,” and its ease of use, for Blake believed he had invented for “the Artist, the Poet, the Musician” a means to “publish their own works” that did not require the specialized training of the engraver or typesetter (E 692). Blake claims that etching word and image in printable relief, and doing so in an affordable and accessible way, are the distinguishing features of his new invention. Combining text and illustration on one plate and coloring prints are less significant characteristics. The Gates of Paradise combines words and images but is identified in the prospectus as a “small book of Engravings” rather than a work in “Illuminated Printing” (E 693). Many other printsellers of the day offered colored prints.

Nevertheless, five of the six books listed in the prospectus as being “in illuminated printing” (E 693) were indeed printed in colored inks, usually yellow ochre, raw sienna, or green, but only in a single color in any one impression. Blake would print a few copies of each book in one printing session, often changing ink during the session for those books in print runs of more than ten copies (e.g., Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion) to diversify the copies, and had by this time printed approximately 62 copies of the six titles (Viscomi, Idea 376). Nearly all the pages making up these copies were finished in water colors. The coloring style was very simple, with just a few light washes in the images and rarely in the text areas. Blake adapted a standard practice for coloring prints, “washing” (i.e., painting in transparent water colors) sets of them with his assistant, his wife Catherine, before they were assembled as pages in books. The practice of coloring prints was a small cottage industry in England at this time (the colorist usually adding only one or two colors before passing the print to the next colorist, who adds her colors), and all the major printsellers, such as John and Josiah Boydell, Thomas Macklin, and James Sayers, offered separate prints both monochrome and colored. No one but Blake, however, offered works in “illuminated printing,” and no one but Blake was producing colored prints as illustrated text pages in books.

By the fall of 1793, the illuminated books consisted of two kinds of relief-etched prints, monochrome and colored. Blake added a third kind of print around this time, one also very popular with the printsellers. This was the color print, which differs from a colored print in that the colors came primarily, though not exclusively, from the plate along with the ink. Indeed, beginning in the mid-1780s, stipple prints, mezzotints, aquatints, etchings, and engravings printed in colors and finished by hand on the individual impressions in water colors formed an enormous part of the print industry. The color printing method used in England, invented by Robert Laurie in 1776, used brushes with their tips cut off (a procedure which stiffens the remaining parts of the bristles) or small dabbers (bundles of fabric) to apply colors to the incised lines of intaglio plates. The method was called “à la poupée” (“with the doll”) because the dabbers resembled small “poupées,” or rag dolls. À la poupée printing was essentially painting the plate, which required a high level of artistic skill on the part of the printer in applying the ink and wiping the plate’s surface. In effect, the technique produced monoprints, since the plate could not be identically inked for each pull through the press and thus no two impressions were exactly alike.

The popularity of color and colored prints—and the tonal intaglio processes of stipple, aquatint, and mezzotint—reflects the period’s interest in facsimile reproductions of paintings and drawings. Such works conceal their “printness,” their graphic syntax by which an image in one medium (oil painting, water color, etc.) is translated into another medium (etching, mezzotint, etc.). Not everyone, however, was pleased by the move toward reproductive verisimilitude. John Landseer, a line engraver, believed that the “vulgar and erroneous notion, that an Engraving is a copy of a Painting, has been assiduously cultivated by the avarice or ignorance of the dealers in prints, who always follow and pamper the taste of the mob, be it ever so depraved, provided it be profitable” (179). Engravings, he argued, are “not copies, but translations from one language of Art, into another language of Art” (178). Hiding their syntax, that which made them a unique art form with their own aesthetic qualities, made no sense to him. Landseer particularly disdained color prints, likening them to colored diamonds, “which, as is well known, would but obscure the native brilliancy and beauty of the stone” (180). He believed that

even were the printer an artist, and even were the colours employed, true to nature or the original picture from which any coloured plate has been engraven, the very nature of the process of printing in colours, would throw back these elements into chaotic confusion: the colours are unavoidably so blurred and confounded, in what, in the language of printing is called filling in the plate, and afterward wiping and clearing off the superfluous colour or ink, that such prints as they come from the press, have a very crude, confused, and discordant appearance. (182)

Given the coloring technique, it was impossible for any two such prints to be identical, and because the “cheap drudges” employed by the printsellers to “execute this delicate and difficult task” of finishing them in water colors lacked the “practised hand, the cultivated eye, and the consummate judgment of a master,” the resulting “performances must ever remain unworthy [of] the attention of those who possess the smallest pretensions to Taste.”

Landseer’s criticism is harsh and biased, the view of the outsider angry about the engraver’s lowly status as copyist—as well as about losing his market share to tonal and color printmakers. Yet, he does point to the inherent difficulty of color printing à la poupée. Industrious Cottager, a stipple and line engraving by Blake after George Morland, was color printed in three or four colors, the industry’s standard (illus. 1). The printer was almost certainly not Blake, but rather a professional plate-printer adept at such work. A detail of the tree branches demonstrates how one ink color modulates or blends into another, with little overlapping, and why great care and skill was required to keep the inks from mixing when wiping the surface of the plate (illus. 2). It also shows how delicately the print was finished in water colors. Good color prints (and they had become quite common, pace Landseer) were more expensive than colored prints because the initial painting of the plates required skilled artisans (rather than “cheap drudges”) and was more labor intensive than washing prints by hand. Blake’s stipple and line engravings after various artists, published by Macklin, cost approximately twice as much colored as plain. Morning Amusement, for example, was advertised in Macklin’s 1794 catalogue at “7s.6d. Plain, and 15s. in Colours” (70).

The alternative to printing multiple colors on one plate in a single pull through the press was to print multiple plates, all the same size, with each plate carrying one color and all the plates registered in exactly the same position on the paper. Landseer does not comment on multiple-plate color prints, probably because they were exceedingly rare. No one in England was using the technique in the 1790s, and only a few printers on the Continent were. But given that the technique was invented to produce prints that looked even more like their models than color prints produced in one pull through the press, he would have certainly disapproved. Nor would Landseer have been appeased by the separation of colors and the elimination of the need for the printer to be “an artist,” or even by impressions not having to be subjected to the hand-colorists, those “ignorant pretenders to Art . . . the cheap drudges . . . who can scarcely hold a pencil” (182). These, however, are the features that made multiple-plate printing more mechanical and thus more able to produce numerous and near-identical prints (Lilien 83). In other words, multiple plates were not only a way to ensure consistency, but also a way to eliminate the painter from the reproduction of paintings and drawings.

The first color printing using multiple plates was “chiaroscuro” woodcuts in imitation of tinted drawings common in the Renaissance. Line drawings on tinted paper with highlights in white gouache (an opaque watercolor, sometimes called “body color”) were reproduced with a key or outline block and a second block cut in the broad shape of the wash with selected areas cut out so that the white of the paper would serve as the highlights (the so-called “German” type). To reproduce wash drawings in which the tints and highlights define both outline and modeling required reducing the drawing to three or four tints and cutting separate blocks for each, with highlights cut away from the blocks. The tone blocks overlapped to create intermediate tones (the “Italian” type). Chiaroscuro woodcuts were produced primarily in Italy and Germany in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and eventually in France and the Netherlands. English engravers, however, did not learn the process until the early 18^th century, and even then it was rarely practiced (Friedman 3).

The few English engravers who produced chiaroscuro prints (e.g., Charles Knapton, Elisha Kirkall, and Arthur Pond) used mezzotint or etched plates as the key plate and wood blocks for tones and highlights, a mixed-method technique that was first used by Nicolas Le Sueur in Paris for Crozat’s Cabinet (1741), a collection of prints in imitation of old master drawings. Kirkall’s The Holy Family, a mezzotint and chiaroscuro (1724), exemplifies this type of color print (illus. 3). The best known and most accomplished chiaroscuro woodcut printer in England was John Baptist Jackson (1701-77?), who executed prints in imitation of drawings, as well as 24 paintings by Venetian masters, including Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Jacopo Bassano. The Descent from the Cross after Rembrandt (1738) is one of Jackson’s best works (illus. 4). In 1754, he published An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing in Chiaro Oscuro, which contains the first color-printed book illustrations in England in the eighteenth century (all previous were separate prints), and served as a publicity venture for his new use of chiaroscuros, printing wallpapers. The wallpaper firm failed in 1755 and Jackson disappeared from the printmaking scene.

An earlier and even more intriguing venture in multiple-plate color printing also failed. Jacques Christophe Le Blon (1667-1741), who was trained as a painter and engraver, invented a way of “printing pictures” (Le Blon 6) using three mezzotint plates, each printed in one of the primary colors (red, yellow, blue, with occasionally a fourth plate in black) and registered on the paper to reproduce all the compound colors of the original drawing or painting. His first color prints were produced c. 1704; in about 1720, he came to England where mezzotints, which are ideally suited for reproducing the tonal gradations characteristic of oil paintings, were far more popular than on the Continent. He formed “The Picture Office,” a company to produce and sell color prints, including the Van Dyck Self Portrait (c. 1720), a three-color mezzotint (illus. 5), but it quickly ran into financial problems because Le Blon sold his color prints for 10 to 15 shillings while their production cost more than a pound (Friedman 9). The technique was inherently expensive, requiring at least three copperplates for each image and a similar (or probably greater) multiplication of labor costs. Le Blon went bankrupt and returned in 1732 to Paris, where he continued to work on his mezzotint process with little financial success.

In the dedication to Coloritto (1725), Le Blon’s book on color theory, which explains the theory behind color printing but not the practice, he states that he “fell upon [his] Invention of Printing Objects in their natural Colours” while attempting to understand the theory of color, and that the invention assisted him in that understanding “till [he] arriv’d at the Skill of reducing the Harmony of Colouring in painting to Mechanical Practice, and under infallible Rules” (iv). Le Blon’s invention anticipates modern color separation, but he did not have the aid of cameras and optical filters to analyze the colors of a painting into the primary colors. This he did by eye and trial and error till he achieved the correct proportions of each color. He likened his theories about the mixture of “Material Colours” to Isaac Newton’s theories in the Optics on light, or “Impalpable Colours” (Le Blon iv).

Although Le Blon’s three-color mezzotint process was not used in England after he returned to Paris, it was well known. Robert Dossie, in the Handmaid to the Arts (1758), described the technique and noted that it would remain “neglected . . . unless revived by the patronage of some great person or society, who may conveniently bear that expence, which artists . . . cannot prudently engage in” (2:185-86). The method was, however, continued in Paris by a few of Le Blon’s pupils. The best of them, Jacques Fabian Gautier D’Agoty, produced work that “shows a marked superiority to Le Blon’s,” particularly evident in his prints for Myologie complette of 1746 (Friedman 10).

Printing multiple colors from one plate was the standard practice for producing color prints during Blake’s lifetime for good reason: it produced results closer to actual paintings than hand-colored black and white prints, and it cost less than any of the multiple-plate techniques. To summarize the two basic processes: in à la poupée printing, the plate is painted anew for each impression, which is then finished in water colors; in multiple-plate printing, each plate is inked in only one color, and the plates are registered to overlap in the impression to reproduce the secondary and tertiary colors and tones. The former requires a painter’s touch and mind; while the latter, dedicated to producing identical impressions, requires the eyes and hands of a printer skilled at registration.