European printmaking in the 18th century
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European printmaking in the 18th century grew greatly in quantity, and generally had high levels of technical skill. But original artistic printmaking declined, with reproductive prints becoming the majority. Many printmakers mixed intaglio printing techniques on the same plates with great skill. The generally reduced level of artistic creativity in printmaking changed at the end of the century with the great print series of Goya, whose career stretched into the 1820s but is all covered here. Goya is usually taken as the end of the old master print era, to which the 18th century added relatively little.
In this century the Baroque survived until almost the middle of the century—depending on the area—followed by Rococo and Neoclassicism, a movement that lasted until the beginning of the 19th century. The Rococo developed approximately between 1730 and 1770,[1] and involved the survival of the main artistic manifestations of the Baroque, with a more emphasized sense of decoration and ornamental taste, which were taken to a paroxysm of richness, sophistication and elegance. The progressive social rise of the bourgeoisie and scientific advances, as well as the cultural environment of the Enlightenment, led to the abandonment of religious themes in favor of new themes and more worldly attitudes, in which luxury and ostentation stood out as new factors of social prestige.[2]
Neoclassicism, on the other hand, can be framed between approximately 1760 and 1830.[3] During this period, and especially after the French Revolution, the rise of the bourgeoisie favored the resurgence of classical forms, more pure and austere, as opposed to the ornamental excesses of the Baroque and Rococo, identified with the aristocracy. This atmosphere of appreciation of the classical Greco-Roman legacy was influenced by the archaeological discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, together with the dissemination of an ideology of perfection of classical forms by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who postulated that in ancient Greece there was perfect beauty, which generated a myth about the perfection of classical beauty that still conditions the perception of art today.[4]
During this period, prints reached high levels of technical perfection, requiring more and more apprenticeship and professionalization, which meant that most of the works were by printmakers by trade and not by the artists themselves, who combined this technique with painting. Likewise, engravers limited themselves to transcribing artists' compositions and rarely made their own compositions, except in a few cases such as Jean-Michel Moreau and Philibert-Louis Debucourt. Nevertheless, some artists did produce their own engravings, especially etchings, such as Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin.[5]
At the end of the century, lithography appeared, a new type of printmaking with wax on limestone plates, invented by Alois Senefelder in 1796. It was used by painters such as Goya, Gainsborough and Géricault.[6] Because of its ease of printing and low cost, lithography was widely used in the journalistic medium until the appearance of photomechanical techniques.[7] On the other hand, the printing of large series of prints became popular, usually collected in books, usually on subjects such as landscapes and views (Marco Ricci, Canaletto), satires of manners (William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson) or whims and fantasies (Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista Piranesi).[8]