Innovation and Tradition in Early 19th-Century European Colour Printing

Abstract Around 1818, following advances in printing methods (wood-engraving and lithography), several printers experimented with colour printing as an alternative to hand-colouring. The traditional method of inking a single intaglio plate in different colours (referred to as selective inking) continued with Charles-Louis Malapeau in Paris in the 1820s, but gave way to methods requiring the allocation of different colours to several blocks or stones. Key early works discussed are: Alois Senefelder’s Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (1818), for its account of coloured inks and tinted lithography; William Savage’s Practical Hints on Decorative Printing, for its colour-printed wood-engravings produced between 1818 and 1823; and the second edition of Johann August Barth’s Pacis Annis MDCCCXIV et MDCCCXV (1818), the first major application of chromolithography. The focus from the late 1820s was Berlin, where Wilhelm Zahn, C. H. von Gelbke, and others used flat-colour chromolithography for books on the decorative arts issued by Georg Reimer, several with plates drawn on stone by Heinrich Asmus.