For sale is a wonderful fishing scene, a framed and double matted, color lithograph, " Pike Fishing: Landing The Catch".

From 1931 this lithograph looks like the day it was pressed!  Pristine, deep rich colors, sharp and crisp, with fine detail!

Frame size is 9 1/2" x 11 1/2".

This one's a real keeper, don't let it get away!  A great gift for any angler or sportsman.  A classic image for any man cave!

Thank you for looking!

COLOR PRINTING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

INTAGLIO PROCESSES

Until the technological revolution in printing of the nineteenth century, color was added to illustrations by hand. The outline of the design was printed in black using an engraved copper or other metal plate and watercolor was used to add color. Depending on the skill of the artist, the result could range from a crude wash of color to a delicately shaded work of art. Hand coloring was particularly popular for natural history and botanical illustration because the limitless range of paint colors allowed for the accurate representation of plants and animals. Even after color printing was technologically feasible, the highest quality books continued to be hand done until the middle of the nineteenth century. The disadvantages of this system are readily apparent--to produce high quality illustrations took time and skill. Very few copies of books could be made, resulting in a very high per book cost and very limited sales. Attempts were made to simplify the painting process using stencils and cheap labor (primarily women and children), but quality suffered.

Copper plate engraving is primarily a linear process, as only the lines which are cut into the metal will hold the ink and be printed. Shading could be added by crosshatching lines of varying width, but the lines remain visible. The aquatint method was an attempt to produce gradations of tone in the printing process. Artists were attempting to imitate the effect of a watercolor was, particularly useful in producing landscapes. Aquatint is produced by dusting the copper plate with a resin and heating the plate. As the grains of resin melt, they produce an irregular pattern of a dark network surrounding small white patches of resin. When acid is applied to the plate, it will etch only the spaces around the resin, resulting in an overall textured pattern. Watercolor was then applied over the printing to achieve the colored image. Aquatint came into use in the mid-eighteenth century and was used extensively from the 1770s until the 1830s. The books most noted for aquatint engraving during the beginning of the nineteenth century were caricature or genre works and books of landscapes.

Several attempts were made to print color directly from copper plates. The most common, called a la poupee, involved applying the colored inks to the plate's surface and working the inks into the appropriate areas of the design with stubs of cotton fabric, called dollies or, in French, poupee. This allowed for color to be printed with a single impression. However, this was extremely time-consuming and required too much skill to be broadly used. Other methods attempted to print color directly by using tint plates, one for each color, which were printed over the outline or key plate. Again these were successful in the hands of a fine craftsman but were too complex to gain general acceptance.