Polygraphicum7Aquatinta.jpg
AQUATINT AQUATINTA TUSCHMANIER
Book Madness
THOMAS ROWLANDSON
London Rudolph Ackermann 1819
excerpted from
Peter Helm
AQUATINTA Book-Madness Thomas Rowlandson.
Bei Rudolph Ackermann.London 1819
collection Peter A. Helm sammlung
cf.
A. HYATT MAYOR.
Curator Emeritus.Department of Prints.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Prints & People
a social history of printed pictures
Princeton University Press
1971
Princeton.New Jersey & Guildford Surrey
When the French Revolution and Napoleon's wars gave London its chnace to become the world's money market, English wealth and the wartime ban on travel turned publishers
to books of views sumptuous enough to substitute for tours and cruises.
Blockade and embargo drove restless Englishmen to invent light, rugged carriages for roads that John McAdam was experimentally paving with small broken stones.
Catering to these innovations, a young German carriage designer ,
Rudolph Ackermann
drew, etched , and published a pamphlet of
12 ''fashionable carriages'' in 1791.
[374].
His success encouraged him to issue carriage designs until 1825 and also to untertake over 60 folios of texts written around views of the world.
[375],
which in time
familiarized the Regency Englishman more than anyone else with the look of far places and directed his imagination to venture forth for an empire.
Ackermann's glamorous aquatint plates were colored in his building in the Strand by refugees from the French Revolution.They sat at long tables, passing the sheets
from hand to hand as each one brushed on a color.This meant coloring 107.000 prints for Ackermann's first big publication, the three-volume Microcosm of London
in 1808-10
[604].
These prints did not have to be colored all at once, for the rolling press printed the copperplates gradually as the book sold, since the unit cost did not
vary with number.Thus, worn Microcosm plates occur on paper watermarked with dates as late as the 1820s,
even though bound with the original text, whose unit cost
was greatly reduced by printing the 1000 copies in one press run.
Ackermann's salesroom
[376],
the first in London to be lightened with gas, looked like many printshops in England today.
Here, in 1822, he imported the
German vogue for gift annuals -
those gracefully printed miscellanies of sugary verses and vapid pictures in stamped bindings like bonbon boxes that ladies collected until about 1840.
On the new steel plates delicately etched illustrations could print perfectly to the very end of immense editions.
Ackermann also invented the art magazine with the
Repository of Arts (1809-28),
which brought some 3000 subscribers about 1000 views of English interiors
[376]
and country houses, and 450 fashion plates,
documented with swatches of actual fabrics.
°a°
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