University of Virginia Library

William Blake's Techniques of Engraving and Printing
by
G. E. Bentley, Jr. [*]

William Blake was apprenticed as an engraver on 4 August 1772 and served a seven year term under James Basire, one of the most successful engravers of the time. Basire's speciality was reproducing drawings of architecture and sculpture in works such as Stuart & Revett's Antiquities of Athens Measured and Delineated (1762-1816), [Richard Gough's] Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain (1786, 1796), and Jacob Bryant's Analysis

of Ancient Mythology (1774, 1776), and Blake worked on these and other learned volumes of the time during his apprenticeship. He was meticulously taught all the conventional skills of his craft while he lived with Basire, and he always defended his master vigorously: "Woolett did not know how to put so much labour into a head or a foot as Basire did".[1] By 1809 he could say truly in his Prospectus for his Chaucer engraving, "Mr. B. is an old well-known and acknowledged Engraver", and he was rightly confident of his ability: "I defy any Man to Cut Cleaner Strokes than I do or rougher where I please" (Notebook, p. 25). "If a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so . . . ."[2]

Blake had mastered the various standard reproductive techniques of his time, in line-engraving (e.g., Job [1826]), stipple (Flaxman's Hesiod [1817]), etching (the first state of the plate after Hogarth for Gay's Beggar's Opera [1790]), and wood engraving (Virgil [1821]), and, had his character been different, he might well have been President of the Chalcographical Society, as was his sometime fellow apprentice and partner James Parker. He also experimented vigorously with the new techniques such as lithography, which was introduced into England about 1803—his "Enoch" lithograph was probably made about 1807—and he adapted and invented a number of techniques for his own purposes. Blake would have been remembered as a chalcographical innovator, even had he not been a great engraver, designer, colourist—and poet. The purpose of what follows is primarily to lay forth the contemporary verbal evidence about Blake's engraving and copperplate-printing techniques.

Not long after he was out of his apprenticeship indentures in 1779, Blake began experimenting with reproductive techniques. The subject was much in the air at the time: in France and England Franz Ignaz Joseph Hoffman and Alexander Tilloch were making experiments, and Blake's friend George Cumberland wrote excitedly to his brother about his discoveries and published them as his "New Mode of Engraving", New Review, IV (Nov 1784), summarized in the European Magazine (1784). Cumberland's discovery was that the relatively simple technique of etching designs could be adapted by amateurs to etching texts; the chief drawback, a relatively minor one Cumberland thought, was that the text would ordinarily be printed backwards and could be read easily only with a mirror. In Cumberland's technique, it was the dark lines which were etched and printed. Blake's technique of Illuminated Printing was a very considerable extension of Cumberland's and was probably made about the same time, for his Island in the Moon (?1784) evidently once had a passage describing a method of "Illuminating the [Engraved] Manuscript".

Blake's method of Illuminated Printing differed in at least three important respects from Cumberland's: 1) The writing on the copper was put on

in mirror-writing, so that it would print right-way round on the paper; 2) Designs were added to the text, so that the finished work was not just a different and inexpensive method of printing words but an almost entirely new technique uniting text and design which he called Illuminated Printing; 3) The etching was in relief (the reverse of the ordinary, intaglio, method), so that the ink is transferred from the raised surfaces rather from the recessed hollows. Thus an "O", for example, is made not by drawing or gouging a circle (as in intaglio etching) but by removing the outside and the hole, leaving a kind of volcano, the top of which prints the letter. All three techniques were in a sense commonplaces. Titles were regularly added in mirror-writing to engraved designs, and the ancient craft of woodcutting is essentially relief-engraving on wood.[3] Blake's genius lay largely in combining and perfecting the techniques for his own special purposes. In particular, he seems to have become extraordinarily skillful at mirror-writing, so that the etched words would come out right-way round when printed. His friend George Cumberland wrote in 1810 that "Blake . . . alone excels in that art" of reading, writing [and engraving] backwards,[4] and his disciple John Linnell commented after his death that "The most extraordinary facility seems to have been attained by Blake in writing backwards & that with a brush dipped in a glutinous liquid".[5]

Presumably all engravers were trained in mirror-writing, but few did so well or often. Note that the art of writing backwards on copper was a separate sub-division of the engraver's craft and that there were Writing Engravers such as William Staden Blake (fl. 1770-1817) who specialized in it. Frequently, probably normally, the design-engraver would turn his finished plate over to the publisher, who would then commission a Writing Engraver to add the lettering, including the title and the crucial imprint with the day of publication, e.g., "Published as the Act directs by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1 Jan. 1817". Blake, for instance, brought in his plates after Flaxman's Hesiod designs to Longman beginning in 1814, but it was not until 21 June 1816 that they paid £4.18 to "Jeffreys [for adding] Writing to 14 plate &c.mmat; 7/.—" (Blake Records, 579).

However, Blake not only lettered all his own separate plates and works in Illuminated Printing, but he sometimes lettered his commercial plates for other men's books. For example, he wrote to Hayley on 16 March 1804 about his plate for the third volume of Hayley's Life . . . of William Cowper: "The inscriptions to the Plates I must beg of you to send to me that I may Engrave them immediately". This may, however, have been an exceptional case, because of Blake's friendship with Hayley. It seems likely that the inscriptions

on most of Blake's commercial plates for books were made by other men.[6]

The invention of Blake's method of Illuminated Printing was thus described by Blake's acquaintance of 1784, J. T. Smith:

With this technique of Illuminated Printing, Blake produced almost all his published works, from Songs of Innocence (1789) and The Book of Thel (1789) to Jerusalem (1804-?20) and The Ghost of Abel (1822). So far as I know, the technique had never been used before Blake's time and has not been practised since. The most unusual feature of Blake's method was that he did not cover his plate with wax and cut away "the plain parts or lights"; instead he drew on the copper directly with a fast-drying liquid impervious to acid. The nature of this remarkable liquid is not known with confidence, though recent experiments by Professor Robert Essick indicate that it may have been either the usual stopping out varnish, "pitch . . . diluted with Terps", or some other comparatively common substance. Smith wrote that

Blake described his own techniques of engraving and printing a number of times, mostly for his friend the dilletante artist and inventor George Cumberland.

He helped Cumberland with etching the designs for Cumberland's Thoughts on Outline (1796), and in a letter of 6 December 1795 he told him:

Cumberland was profoundly grateful for the assistance, and in the Thoughts on Outline he wrote:

Blake made a memorandum in his Notebook (p. 4), perhaps at this time, about etching or engraving on relatively soft and cheap pewter (rather than copper), the technique being a standard one of transferring a pencil drawing, reversed, to the wax-covered plate; about white-line engraving on pewter; and about white-line etching on copper:

Blake evidently told George Cumberland about this method of woodcutting on metal, for on the back of a letter of James Irvine of 16 December 1794 Cumberland made a memorandum about "Blakes method, biting whites".[11]

Cumberland continued to be interested in Blake's methods of engraving. He evidently acquired one of the very few copies of Blake's lithograph of "Enoch" (?1807), and on the back of it he wrote down

Lias is a limestone rock found in the South of England, which C. Hullmandel, The Art of Drawing on Stone (1824), 2, says "is too soft and porous" for printing, compared with the German lithographic stone. "Tripoli" or "Rotten Stone" is a fine earth used as a powder for polishing metals. The ink used here seems very unusual. Cumberland may well have followed these directions in the lithographs for his own Scenes, Chiefly Italian (1824).

Blake seems actually to have recorded in print some of his inventions, though these may have now been lost. In his notebooks for 1804-8, Cumberland repeatedly made notes to himself:

These rules may well have been about engraving. Cumberland was anxious that the invention should be recorded in print, and in his notebook for the summer of 1807 he wrote that "Blake . . . intends to publish his new method through means[?] of stopping lights" (Blake Records, 187). On 18 December 1808 he wrote to Blake: To this Blake replied on the 19th:

Blake's inventions in engraving and printing are not known to have been published in 1809 or later, and Cumberland consequently noted eagerly other inventions which were like Blake's. On 22 January 1819 he wrote to his son:

The method is apparently that of relief-etching on copper, about which Cumberland fairly obviously knew, and consequently it would be of very great interest to locate this note by Sivewright in a "Philosophical Journal". The author may be "John Sivewright, Teacher of Music" (c. 1770-1846) who wrote a Collection of Church Tunes & Anthems (Edinburgh, c. 1805); he is probably the John Sievwright, Engraver, who appears in the Edinburgh city directories for 1805-15.[15] However, no article has been identified which corresponds to the one Cumberland described. His information may have come, perhaps through a friend, from

• 1) Anon., "Art. V—Account of a new Style of Engraving on Copper in Alto Relievo, invented by W[illiam Home] Lizars. Drawn up from information communicated by the Inventor", Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, II (April 1820), 19-23, in which Lizars says he "was much indebted" "during these experiments" to "Mr Sivright of Meggetland" (a suburb of Edinburgh), but he does not mention "Copper Blocks";
• 2) The reprint of the bulk of Lizar's account in The Gentlemen's Magazine, XCI (1821), 625-6, citing "Edinburgh Philosophical Journal";
• 3) Anon., "A New Style of Engraving, invented by Mr. Lizars", London Journal of Arts and Science, I (1820), 78-79, which does not refer to "Copper Blocks", Sivewright, or The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal; and
• 4) Charles Pye, "Mr. Pye on Engraving on Metal and Stone. On a new Process of Engraving on Metal and Stone", London Journal of Arts and Sciences, I (1820), 55-58, which describes Pye's own experiments made "five years" earlier than the "account of the Process of Engraving on Copper Blocks into alto relievo by Mr. Lizars" "in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal", but which does not mention Mr Sivewright.

None of these accounts mentions both "Copper Blocks" and Mr Sivewright, as Cumberland does.

There is a further, chronological, difficulty, for all four of the articles were published in 1820 and 1821.[16] Without yet another date, after January

1819, for the obscured date-stamp in Cumberland's letter, or another, earlier account of Sivewright's Copper Blocks in some Philosophical Journal, we are left with a mystery as to where Cumberland found his information. Though we know a great deal on Blake's own authority about his methods of engraving, we still do not know with confidence about his method of reliefetching producing "Copper Blocks" as in stereotype for his works in Illuminated Printing.

Blake's Printing Techniques

Blake's techniques of printing are rather better known, partly because they are more conventional, partly because they are more easily visible in his surviving works.

Blake bought a wooden press for printing engravings, perhaps with money he inherited when his father died in July 1784, and he probably used it in the print-selling business which he and his fellow-apprentice James Parker established beside Blake's birthplace at 27 Broad Street, Golden Square, London, in 1784-85. Certainly Blake had the press by 1800 when he moved to the little seaside village of Felpham in Sussex. He brought it back to London with him in September 1803,[17] and there were unsuccessful negotiations to sell it to J. Lahee in August 1827, just after Blake's death. We last hear of it when it was moved to John Linnell's house in Cirencester Place in 1827, when Catherine Blake moved there to be Linnell's housekeeper (Blake Records, 29, 350-351, 461 n. 1).

Blake was a master printer as well as engraver, and he took great care with his printing usually. Sometimes he masked the plate, so that only part of it would print, as in America pl. 4 and in many of the plates for the Small Book of Designs. Normally he wiped the border of the plate, and the presence or absence of this dark border is one of the ways of distinguishing between prints pulled by Blake and those made after his death by his disciple Frederick Tatham. He regularly printed in colours, brown, blue, green, red, orange, and yellow, as well as in black, and he invented a method, still little understood, of colour-printing in several colours at once. He apparently used this method of colour-printing chiefly or exclusively in 1795-96. Most of his works in Illuminated Printing he later coloured in water-colours, and this of course gave him the opportunity to improve the prints; sometimes he retraced the letters to clarify them, and sometimes he added features in the design, a bird, say, or a tree. Occasionally he added a border or extended the bottom of the design with a stream, particularly with the Songs.

At first, in 1790-1800, Blake apparently printed a stock of his own works which he kept on hand for customers. In his Prospectus "To the Public" of 10 October 1793 he announced:

During these years he "had a whole House to range in", as he told Cumberland on 12 April 1827, but later he was cramped for space in a few rooms, and he had little room for his press, for hanging up prints to dry, or for storing them. Consequently he seems later to have printed chiefly to order, and he printed comparatively few copies. On 9 June 1818, he told the collector Dawson Turner that his works were

The watermarks in his works in Illuminated Printing suggest that they were chiefly produced about 1790-1800, 1805, 1815, 1818-20, 1825-27.

However, many copies of his works were apparently not printed by Blake himself. His wife Catherine

Blake's methods of printing seem to have been meticulous but not unconventional. He told Cumberland his methods, probably about the time he was helping with the etchings for Cumberland's Thoughts on Outline (1796) and writing to him with directions for "laying on the Wax" on the copperplate (6 December 1795). Cumberland recorded in his Commonplace Book

There are a number of clear indications that Blake and his wife not only pulled proofs of his works on their own press and printed the small numbers of his works in Illuminated Printings,[21] but that they did a certain amount

of commercial printing as well. Hayley's broadside ballad of Little Tom the Sailor (October 1800) was apparently printed entirely by Catherine Blake. On 26 November 1800 Blake wrote to Hayley: "my wife . . . has not printed any more since you went to London. But we can muster a few in colours[22] and some in black which I hope will be no less favourd tho they are rough like rough sailors. We mean to begin printing again tomorrow." Only a few copies of Little Tom have survived, and perhaps no more than a few score were printed. Since the work was printed for charitable purposes, it is possible that for their printing work (and Blake's designing and etching work), the Blakes acquired credit only in heaven, not in the bank.

A more extensive labour was for Hayley's Designs to A Series of Ballads issued in parts in June, July, August, and September 1802 with three plates each designed and engraved by Blake, plus two others in the prefatory matter issued with the first part. William Hayley explained in a letter to Lady Hesketh of 10 June 1802 the progress of the first part:

The work was printed for Blake's benefit and sold chiefly through a network of middle-class and aristocratic ballad-mongers like Lady Hesketh; perhaps not surprisingly, it was a commercial failure. Probably no more than a hundred copies of the first part were sold, and there were evidently progressively smaller sales for the succeeding parts until the work dwindled away entirely, with only four out of the projected fifteen parts in print. Not only the proceeds but the expenses of the work were Blake's, and, taking into account his fair wages as designer, engraver, and printer, it is likely that he lost money on the 1802 Ballads.[23]

The most profitable printing undertaking of the Blakes, so far as we know, was that of the plates of Hayley's Life . . . of William Cowper, Volumes I and II (1803). Blake told his brother James on 30 January 1803: "My Wife has undertaken to Print the whole number of the Plates for Cowpers work which she has done to admiration & being under my own eye the prints are as fine as the French prints & please every one." And he confirmed this

statement many years later to his young friend John Linnell: "The copper plates which Blake engraved to illustrate Hayley's life of Cowper were as he told me printed entirely by himself and his wife in his own press—a very good one which cost him forty pounds" (Blake Records, 461 n. 1). There were four plates for the first two volumes, and the printing-run was probably large,[24] perhaps 1,750 copies. This comes to 7,000 prints, an enormous number, and it is no wonder that Hayley wrote to the publisher R. H. Evans on 3 April 1803 that the "plates for the Life of Cowper . . . have engrossed much of his [Blake's] time even to this Hour, as He and his good industrious Wife together take all the Impressions from the various Engravings in their own domestic Press . . ." (Blake Records, 114). The standard are for commerical printing seems to have been about 6s. per hundred pulls:[25] at this rate, the Blakes might have expected something like £21 for printing 1,750 copies each of the four Cowper plates. On 30 January 1803, when the printing of the plates for the first two volumes may have just begun, Blake told his brother James, "The Publishers are already indebted to My Wife Twenty Guineas for work delivered[;] this is a small specimen of how we go on." This statement may imply that there were yet more copies of the Cowper plates to be printed.

Blake's own relations with his patron Hayley were, however, deteriorating at this time, he and his wife were intermittently ill, and the London publisher, Joseph Johnson, must have found considerable difficulty in coordinating his London operations with a Chichester text-printer and his Felpham plate-printers. At any rate, the Blakes do not seem to have been employed to print the plates for Volume III of Cowper (1804), though Blake continued to pull his own proofs. He apologised to Hayley on 21 March 1804 for the delay in sending proof of the Cowper, because "I had not enough paper in proper order for printing; beg pardon . . .". The published version was clearly printed by a commercial copperplate printer, for on 1 April 1804 Hayley wrote: "Blake told me He had found an excellent Copperplate Printer not far from him . . . [to whom] He had confided his Work [of printing the Cowper plates.]"[26]

We have information as to who printed Blake's commercial engravings only when they were for books sponsored by his friends such as William Hayley, John Flaxman, and John Linnell. Probably he normally printed his own working-proofs of his commercial engravings, as he almost certainly did those for Flaxman's Hesiod. The earliest proofs, such as those in The British Museum Print Room, were, as he told Maria Denman on 18 March

1827, "Printed on both sides of the Paper . . . many of the backs of the paper have on them impressions from other Plates for Booksellers which he was employd about at the same time" such as Rees's Cyclopaedia. The finished proofs which he took to the publisher in 1814-17 are in Bodley. Perhaps the proofs to be shown to the publisher who commissioned the work were ordinarily printed by a commercial printer; certainly the firm of Cox & Barnett printed the final proofs for Hesoid at 6d. each in June 1816 and January-February 1817 (Blake Records, 579-580) as they did the finished plates. We know that Blake pulled his own proofs for his wonderful woodcuts for Thornton's school-text Virgil (1821), for his young disciple Samuel Palmer wrote on one set of Virgil proofs: "Mr Blake gave This page to me in Fountain Court [where Blake lived 1821-27]: impressions taken there, at his own press, by his own hands, and signed by him [W Blake fecit] under my eyes . . .".[27] The early working-proofs for Job were probably pulled by Blake at his own press, but later proofs were ordered by John Linnell (who had commissioned the set) first at Dixon's on 3-4 March 1825 and immediately thereafter at J. Lahee's on 5 March and in September, October 1825 and February 1826, and Lahee apparently printed the 315 sets of the first edition in March 1826 for £49.19.11; Linnell tipped the pressman Freeman £1 (Blake Records, 300, 321, 582, 590, 602-603).

In his last years, Blake probably printed little besides proofs of the plates he was then working on such as Job and Dante. On 19 February 1826 he told his new friend Crabb Robinson, evidently in a rather captious spirit:

In earlier years, he had clearly printed a stock of his own works in Illuminated Printing, but in his two cramped rooms in Fountain Court he could not afford to be so forehanded. Four months before his death, he wrote on 12 April 1827 to his old friend George Cumberland:

At Blake's death in August 1827, his wife Catherine inherited all his small property, including his printing press and his hundreds of copperplates. These she moved to John Linnell's house in Cirencester Place, where

she was to be housekeeper, but, as Cumberland reported to his son in January 1828, "her late husbands works she intends to print[t] with her own hands and trust to their sal[e] for a livelihood—" (Blake Records, 365.) It would not be surprising if she had printed some of Blake's works after his death, but no surviving copy can be so identified. At her death in October 1831, all her property passed to Blake's disciple Frederick Tatham, with whom Catherine had lived for a time. We know that Tatham printed copies, for they are on paper watermarked 1831 and 1832. The quality of the printing is distinctly inferior to the Blakes'; he seems to have used only shades of brown and black, and he regularly omitted to wipe the ink from the borders of the plates as the Blakes had done. And not only did he somewhat debase the works in printing them, but he managed to lose all the hundreds of plates of Blake which had come to him (he said they were stolen from him) (Blake Records, 417 n. 3).

William Blake was thus an enterprising and energetic innovator in engraving and in copper-plate printing. Here as elsewhere, however, his interest was in eternal beauty rather than in temporal profit: "My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes expressing god-like sentiments".[28] He has gained from posterity what his contemporaries denied him. He deserves to be remembered for his technical inventiveness and expertise as well as for his grander creations in design, engraving, and poetry.

Notes