he
color prints that Blake produced, between 1794 and 1796 but a few
as late as c. 1808 (e.g., Jerusalem proofs and a handful
of plates in America copy M have more than one color printed
from the plate), range from very simple to very elaborate, from
one or two colors applied to relief areas only, as in plate a4 of
There is No Natural Religion copy C
(illus. 6), to colors applied to both relief plateaus and etched
shallows, as in plate 18 of The First Book of Urizen copy
C (illus. 7) ,
where Blake also used different colored inks for text and illustration.
Blake also color printed relief etchings without text, such as the
full page illustrations in The Book of Urizen (illus. 31-32),
and intaglio works, such as Albion rose. His color prints
reflect a printmaker far less orthodox than Landseer or any other
of his period, and far more the artist (rather than the precision
mechanic) in the print studio and in his thinking about graphic
art. He was as angry as Landseer and others about engraving being
dismissed as mere copywork, but instead of attempting to sensitize
his audience into seeing dots and lozenges as a virtuoso performance
/ translation in metal, Blake deployed another strategy. He erased
the grounds for hierarchies in the arts by reducing both painting
and engraving to “drawing” and asserting that “he who Draws best
must be the best Artist” (E 582), and by producing prints whose
aesthetic originality was stunning and even, as with the white-line
etching of Deaths Door and many of the color prints, confrontational.
He showed how prints could be as original and unique as drawings
and paintings, as creative as the works normally imitated in prints.
This new “method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving” (E
692) did more than combine—or etch into printable relief—text and
image. When Blake printed in colors, his relief-etched copperplates
offered two different printing surfaces, relief and intaglio, that
he fully exploited as an artist, creating color images unlike any
ever seen before, such as the pages in The Song of Los copies
A-F, The Book of Urizen copies A, C-F, and J, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell copies E and F, and Visions of
the Daughters of Albion copies F and R. It is in color printing
that his “method of Printing” fully met and joined with the art
of the “Painter” (E 692).
Blake’s colors were opaque, water-miscible paints
in which pigments were most likely mixed with water into a paste
and then ground with a vehicle of warm, diluted “size” (glue) or
a gum with the physical properties of glue (Essick, Printmaker
126-28, 259-60; Viscomi, Idea 121). Mixing this vehicle with
a little ox gall and hydromel (honey and water), ingredients used
to keep gum arabic-based water colors moist, will retard the drying
action of the paint. [11]
By degreasing the copper with a solvent, Blake could keep the paint
from beading up, and thus also help the colors to transfer from
metal to paper. Blake’s departure from conventional color printing
was in printing two surfaces of the plate as well as using—on the
same plate at the same time—both oil-based inks and water-miscible
paints. Actually, Blake combined oil with water not only when printing
inked plates with size-color, but also when printing on dampened
paper (the standard practice for all plate-printers) and when washing
or painting prints in water colors, which was “a prime function
of water color wash for five hundred years” (Cohn 11). Size-color
can be placed on the plate along with oil-based ink, thereby making
it possible for Blake to print both inked text and colored designs
simultaneously. Blake could wash the resulting impressions in water
colors because size-color is insoluble once dry, and thus not disturbed
by being re-wetted. The mottled or reticulated texture so typical
of his color prints was caused partly by the paper pulling away
from a buttery size-color on the plate, and partly by the water
colors interacting with an oily surface and attaching to the exposed
paper where the ink had reticulated. The surface tension between
the oil-based ink and water-based paint was also deliberately manipulated
to create various types of tactile surfaces.
[12]
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