Old master print

"The Three Crosses", etching by Rembrandt, 1653, state III of IV

An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition. The term remains current in the art trade, and there is no easy alternative in English to distinguish the works of "fine art" produced in printmaking from the vast range of decorative, utilitarian and popular prints that grew rapidly alongside the artistic print from the 15th century onwards. Fifteenth-century prints are sufficiently rare that they are classed as old master prints even if they are of crude or merely workmanlike artistic quality. A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term. The main techniques used are woodcut, engraving and etching, although there are others. With rare exceptions printed on textiles, such as silk, or on vellum, old master prints are printed on paper. This article is concerned with the artistic, historical and social aspects of the subject; the article on printmaking describes the techniques used in making old master prints, from a modern perspective.

Many great European artists, such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, and Francisco Goya, were dedicated printmakers. In their own day, their international reputations largely came from their prints, which were spread far more widely than their paintings. Influences between artists were also mainly transmitted beyond a single city by prints, for the same reason. Today, thanks to colour photo reproductions, and public galleries, their paintings are much better known, whilst their prints are only rarely exhibited, for conservation reasons.

"Melencolia I", 1514, engraving by Albrecht Dürer


Woodcut before Albrecht Dürer

This donor portrait of about 1455 shows a large coloured print attached to the wall with sealing wax. Petrus Christus, NGA, Washington. Another example is seen here.

The oldest technique is woodcut, or woodblock printing, which was invented as a method for printing on cloth in China, and perhaps separately in Egypt in the Byzantine period. This had reached Europe via the Byzantine or Islamic worlds before 1300, as a method of printing patterns on textiles. Paper arrived in Europe, also from China via Islamic Spain, slightly later, and was being manufactured in Italy by the end of the thirteenth century, and in Burgundy and Germany by the end of the fourteenth.[1] Religious images and playing cards are documented as being produced on paper, probably printed, by a German in Bologna in 1395.[2] However, the most impressive printed European images to survive from before 1400 are printed on cloth, for use as hangings on walls or furniture, including altars and lecterns. Some were used as a pattern to embroider over. Some religious images were used as bandages, to speed healing.[3]



Anonymous German 15th century woodcut, about 1480, with hand-colouring, including (unusually) spots of gold. 5.2 x 3.9 cm (similar to the original size on most screens)
A woodcut of St Christopher dated 1420

Woodcut blocks are printed with light pressure, and are capable of printing several thousand impressions, and even at this period some prints may well have been produced in that quantity. Many prints were hand-coloured, mostly in watercolour; in fact the hand-colouring of prints continued for many centuries, though dealers have removed it from many surviving examples. Italy, Germany, France and the Netherlands were the main areas of production; England does not seem to have produced any prints until about 1480. However prints are highly portable, and were transported across Europe. A Venetian document of 1441 already complains about cheap imports of playing cards damaging the local industry.[6]

Block-books were a very popular form of (short) book, where a page with both pictures and text was cut as a single woodcut. They were much cheaper than manuscript books, and were mostly produced in the Netherlands; the Art of Dying (Ars moriendi) was the most famous; thirteen different sets of blocks are known.[7] As a relief technique (see printmaking) woodcut can be printed easily together with movable type, and after this invention arrived in Europe about 1450 printers quickly came to include woodcuts in their books. Some book owners also pasted prints into prayer books in particular.[8] Playing cards were another notable use of prints, and French versions are the basis of the traditional sets still in use today.

By the last quarter of the century there was a large demand for woodcuts for book-illustrations, and in both Germany and Italy standards at the top end of the market improved considerably. Nuremberg was the largest centre of German publishing, and Michael Wolgemut, the master of the largest workshop there worked on many projects, including the gigantic Nuremberg Chronicle.[9] Albrecht Dürer was apprenticed to Wolgemut during the early stages of the project, and was the godson of Anton Koberger, its printer and publisher. Dürer's career was to take the art of the woodcut to its highest development.[10]

German engraving before Dürer

"Martyrdom of St Sebastian", engraving by the Master of the Playing Cards, c. 1445



Master E. S., "Liebespaar auf der Rasenbank"


The first major artist to engrave was Martin Schongauer (c. 1450–1491), who worked in southern Germany and was also a well-known painter. His father and brother were goldsmiths, so he may well have had experience with the burin from an early age. His 116 engravings have a clear authority and beauty and became well known in Italy as well as northern Europe, as well as much copied by other engravers. He also further developed engraving technique, in particular refining cross-hatching to depict volume and shade in a purely linear medium.[14]


The first self-portrait, by the first businessman in the history of printmaking, Israhel van Meckenam, with his wife


The earliest Italian engravings



Antonio Pollaiuolo, "Battle of the Nude Men"




The other notable early centre was Ferrara, from the 1460s, which probably produced both sets of the so-called "Mantegna Tarocchi" cards, which are not playing cards, but a sort of educational tool for young humanists with fifty cards, featuring the Planets and Spheres, Apollo and the Muses, personifications of the Seven liberal arts and the four Virtues, as well as "the Conditions of Man" from Pope to peasant.[21]

Mantegna in Mantua

"Hercules and Antaeus", engraving, 1490–1500, School of Mantegna[22]


The impact of Dürer

Main article: Albrecht Dürer


Dürer was also a painter, but few of his paintings could be seen except by those with good access to private houses in the Nuremberg area. The lesson of how he, following more spectacularly in the footsteps of Schongauer and Mantegna, was able so quickly to develop a continent-wide reputation very largely through his prints was not lost on other painters, who began to take much greater interest in printmaking.[25]

Italy 1500–1515

For a brief period a number of artists who began by copying Dürer made very fine prints in a range of individual styles. They included Giulio Campagnola, who succeeded in translating the new style Giorgione and Titian had brought to Venetian painting into engraving. Marcantonio Raimondi and Agostino Veneziano both spent some years in Venice before moving to Rome, but even their early prints show classicizing tendencies as well as Northern influence.[26] The styles of the Florentine Cristofano Robetta, and Benedetto Montagna from Vicenza are still based in Italian painting of the period, and are also later influenced by Giulio Campagnola.[27]


The rise of the reproductive print

Reproductive engraving by Jacob Matham, in this case of a sculpture, "Moses", by Michelangelo, 1593




The North after Dürer

"The Milkmaid'", engraving by Lucas van Leyden, 1510


Lucas van Leyden had a prodigious natural talent for engraving, and his earlier prints were highly successful, with an often earthy treatment and brilliant technique, so that he came to be seen as Dürer's main rival in the North. However, his later prints suffered from straining after an Italian grandeur, which left only the technique applied to far less dynamic compositions. Like Dürer, he had a "flirtation" with etching, but on copper rather than iron. His Dutch successors for some time continued to be heavily under the spell of Italy, which they took most of the century to digest.[34]


Hans Burgkmair from Augsburg, Nuremberg's neighbour and rival, was slightly older than Dürer, and had a parallel career in some respects, training with Martin Schongauer before apparently visiting Italy, where he formed his own synthesis of Northern and Italian styles, which he applied in painting and woodcut, mostly for books, but with many significant "single-leaf" (i.e. individual) prints. He is now generally credited with inventing the coloured chiaroscuro (coloured) woodcut.[36] Hans Baldung was Dürer's pupil, and was left in charge of the Nuremberg workshop during Dürer's second Italian trip. He had no difficulty in maintaining a highly personal style in woodcut, and produced some very powerful images.[37] Urs Graf was a Swiss mercenary and printmaker, who invented the white-line woodcut technique, in which his most distinctive prints were made.[38]

The Little Masters

"The Little Fool" by Sebald Beham, 1542, 4.4 x 8.1 cm




Mannerist printmaking

"Hercules", engraving by Giorgio Ghisi, after Bertani, 1558


Giorgio Ghisi was the major printmaker of the Mantuan school, which preserved rather more individuality than Rome. Much of his work was reproductive, but his original prints are often very fine. He visited Antwerp, a reflection of the power the publishers there now had over what was now a European market for prints. A number of printmakers, mostly in etching, continued to produce excellent prints, but mostly as a sideline to either painting or reproductive printmaking. They include Battista Franco, Il Schiavone, Federico Barocci and Ventura Salimbeni, who only produced nine prints, presumably because it did not pay. Annibale Carracci and his cousin Ludovico produced a few influential etchings, while Annibale's brother Agostino engraved. Both brothers influenced Guido Reni and other Italian artists of the full Baroque period in the next century.[43]


The Italian artists known as the School of Fontainebleau were hired in the 1530s by King Francis I of France to decorate his showpiece Chateau at Fontainebleau. In the course of the long project, etchings were produced, in unknown circumstances but apparently in Fontainebleau itself and mostly in the 1540s, mostly recording wall-paintings and plasterwork in the Chateau (much now destroyed). Technically they are mostly rather poor—dry and uneven—but the best powerfully evoke the strange and sophisticated atmosphere of the time. Many of the best are by Leon Davent to designs by Primaticcio. Several of the artists, including Davent, later went to Paris and continued to produce prints there.[44]


The Netherlands

The "Farnese Hercules", engraving by Goltzius



At the same time Pieter Brueghel the elder, another Cort-trained artist, who escaped to paint, was producing prints in a totally different style; beautifully drawn but simply engraved. He only etched one plate himself, a superb landscape, the Rabbit Hunters, but produced many drawings for the Antwerp specialists to work up, of peasant life, satires, and newsworthy events.[48]

Meanwhile, numerous other engravers in the Netherlands continued to produce vast numbers of reproductive and illustrative prints of widely varying degrees of quality and appeal—the two by no means always going together. Notable dynasties, often publishers as well as artists, include the Wierix family, the Saenredams, and Aegidius Sadeler and several of his relations. Philippe Galle founded another long-lived family business. Theodor de Bry specialised in illustrating books on new colonial areas.[49]

17th century

Self-portrait by Rembrandt, 1630

The 17th century saw a continuing increase in the volume of commercial and reproductive printmaking; Rubens, like Titian before him, took great pains in adapting the trained engravers in his workshop to the particular style he wanted, though several found his demands too much and left.[50] The generation after him produced a number of widely dispersed printmakers with very individual and personal styles; by now etching had become the normal medium for such artists.


A number of other Dutch artists of the century produced original prints of quality, mostly sticking to the same categories of genre they painted. The eccentric Hercules Seghers and Jacob van Ruysdael produced landscapes in very small quantities, Nicolaes Berchem and Karel Dujardin Italianate landscapes with animals and figures, and Adriaen van Ostade peasant scenes. None was very prolific, but the Italianate landscape was the most popular type of subject; Berchem had a greater income from his prints than his paintings.[52]

"The Raising of Lazarus", etching by Castiglione
"Massacre of the Innocents", by Callot, 13.7 x 10.5 cm, showing the use of multiple stoppings-out



Jacques Bellange was a court painter in Lorraine, a world that was to vanish abruptly in the Thirty Years War shortly after his death. No surviving painting of his can be identified with confidence, and most of those sometimes attributed to him are unimpressive. His prints, mostly religious, are Baroque extravaganzas that were regarded with horror by many 19th century critics, but have come strongly back into fashion—the very different Baroque style of another Lorraine artist Georges de La Tour has enjoyed a comparable revival. He was the first Lorraine printmaker (or artist) of stature, and must have influenced the younger Jacques Callot, who remained in Lorraine but was published in Paris, where he greatly influenced French printmaking.[55]

Callot's technical innovations in improving the recipes for etching ground were crucial in allowing etching to rival the detail of engraving, and in the long term spelt the end of artistic engraving. Previously the unreliable nature of the grounds used meant that artists could not risk investing too much effort in an etched plate, as the work might be ruined by leaks in the ground. Equally, multiple stoppings-out, enabling lines etched to different depths by varying lengths of exposure to the acid, had been too risky.[56] Callot led the way in exploiting the new possibilities; most of his etchings are small but full of tiny detail, and he developed a sense of recession in landscape backgrounds in etching with multiple bitings to etch the background more lightly than the foreground. He also used a special etching needle called an échoppe to produce swelling lines like those created by the burin in an engraving, and also reinforced the etched lines with a burin after biting; which soon became common practice among etchers. Callot etched a great variety of subjects in over 1400 prints, from grotesques to his tiny but extremely powerful series Les Grandes Misères de la guerre.[57] Abraham Bosse, a Parisian illustrative etcher popularized Callot's methods in a hugely successful manual for students. His own work is successful in his declared aim of making etchings look like engravings, and is highly evocative of French life at the middle of the century.

Early mezzotint by Wallerant Vaillant, Siegen's assistant or tutor

Wenzel Hollar was a Bohemian (Czech) artist who fled his country in the Thirty Years War, settling mostly in England (he was besieged at Basing House in the English Civil War, and then followed his Royalist patron into a new exile in Antwerp, where he worked with a number of the large publishers there). He produced great numbers of etchings in a straightforward realist style, many topographical, including large aerial views, portraits, and others showing costumes, occupations and pastimes.[58] Stefano della Bella was something of an Italian counterpart to Callot, producing many very detailed small etchings, but also larger and freer works, closer to the Italian drawing tradition.[59] Anthony van Dyck produced only a large series of portrait prints of contemporary notables, the Iconographia for which he only etched a few of the heads himself, but in a brilliant style, that had great influence on 19th century etching.[60] Ludwig von Siegen was a German soldier and courtier, who invented the technique of mezzotint, which in the hands of better artists than he was to become an important, mostly reproductive, technique in the 18th century.[61]


18th century

One of Piranesi's views of Rome


Canaletto was also a highly successful painter, and though his relatively few prints are vedute, they are rather different from his painted ones, and fully aware of the possibilities of the etching medium. Piranesi was primarily a printmaker, a technical innovator who extended the life of his plates beyond what was previously possible. His Views of Rome—well over a hundred huge plates—were backed by a serious understanding of Roman and modern architecture and brilliantly exploit the drama both of the ancient ruins and Baroque Rome. Many prints of Roman views had been produced before, but Piranesi's vision has become the benchmark. Gianbattista Tiepolo, near the end of his long career produced some brilliant etchings, subjectless capricci of a landscape of classical ruins and pine trees, populated by an elegant band of beautiful young men and women, philosophers in fancy dress, soldiers and satyrs. Bad-tempered owls look down on the scenes. His son Domenico produced many more etchings in a similar style, but of much more conventional subjects, often reproducing his father's paintings.[64]




William Blake was as technically unconventional as he was in subject-matter and everything else, pioneering a relief etching process that was later to become the dominant technique of commercial illustration for a time. Many of his prints are pages for his books, with text and image on the same plate, as in the 15th century block-books.[69] The Romantic Movement saw a revival in original printmaking in several countries, with Germany taking a large part once again; many of the Nazarene movement were printmakers.[70] In England, John Sell Cotman etched many landscapes and buildings in an effective, straightforward style. J. M. W. Turner produced several print series including one, the Liber Studiorum, which consisted of seventy-one etchings with mezzotint that were influential on landscape artists; according to Linda Hults, this series of prints amounts to "Turner's manual of landscape types, and ... a statement of his philosophy of landscape."[71] With the relatively few etchings of Delacroix the period of the old master print can be said to come to an end.[72] Printmaking was to revive powerfully later in the 19th and 20th centuries, in a great variety of techniques.[73]

See also


  1. Griffiths (1980), 16.
  2. Field, Richard (1965). Fifteenth Century Woodcuts and Metalcuts. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art.
  3. Hind (1935).
  4. Landau and Parshall, 1–6, quotes 2, 33–42. Mayor, 5–10.
  5. Mayor, 10.
  6. Mayor, 14–17.
  7. Mayor, 24–27.
  8. A number have survived pasted on the inside of the lids of boxes or chests, like this example.
  9. Landau and Parshall, 34–42. Mayor, 32–60. Bartrum (1995), 17–19.
  10. Bartrum, 17–63. Landau and Parshall, 167–174.
  11. Landau and Parshall, 46–51, 64.
  12. Shestack (1967a), numbers 1–2. Mayor, 115–117.
  13. Shestack (1967b). Shestack (1967a), numbers 4–19. Spangeberg, 1–3. Mayor, 118–123. Landau and Parshall, 46–50.
  14. Shestack (1967a), numbers 34–115. Landau and Parshall, 50–56. Mayor, 130–135. Spangeberg, 5–7. Bartrum, 20–21.
  15. Filedt Kok. Mayor, 124–129.
  16. Landau and Parshall, 56–63. Mayor, 138–140.
  17. Levinson. Landau and Parshall, 65.
  18. Langdale. Landau and Parshall, 65, 72–76.
  19. Langdale.
  20. Landau and Parshall, 89. Levinson.
  21. Landau and Parshall, 71–72. Spangeberg, 4–5.
  22. Levinson, no. 83.
  23. Landau and Parshall, 65–71. Mayor, 187–197. Spangeberg, 16–17.
  24. Bartrum (2002). Bartrum (1995), 22–63. Landau and Parshall, see index. Mayor, 258–281.
  25. Pon. Landau and Parshall, 347–358. Bartrum (1995), 9–11.
  26. Pon. Landau and Parshall, see index.
  27. Levinson, 289–334, 390–414. Landau and Parshall, 65–102 (see also index). Mayor, 143–156, 173, 223, 232.
  28. Levinson, 440–455. Landau and Parshall, 199, 102.
  29. Pon. Landau & Parshall, chapter IV, whose emphasis is disputed by Bury, 9–12.
  30. Pon. Landau and Parshall, 117–146.
  31. Jacobson, parts III and IV.
  32. Landau and Parshall develop the traditional view of decline, which Bury contests in his Introduction, pp. 9–12, and seeks to demonstrate the opposite view throughout his work.
  33. Bartrum (1995), 166–178.
  34. Landau and Parshall, 316–319, 332–333, 333 quoted.
  35. Mayor, 228, 304–308, 567. Bartrum (1995), 11–12, 144, 158, 183–197. Landau and Parshall, 323–328 (Hopfers); 202–209, 337–346 (Altdorfer).
  36. Bartrum (1995), 130–146. Landau and Parshall, see index, 179–202 on the chiaroscuro woodcut.
  37. Bartrum (1995), 67–80.
  38. Bartrum (1995), 212–221.
  39. Bartrum (1995), 99–129. Mayor, 315–317. Landau and Parshall, 315–316.
  40. Bartrum (1995), 221–237.
  41. Bartrum (1995), 12–13.
  42. Landau and Parshall, 146–161.
  43. Bury. Reed and Walsh, 105–114 on Annibale and subsequent artists in etching. Mayor, 410, 516.
  44. Jacobson, parts III and IV. Mayor, 354–357.
  45. Marqusee. Jacobson, part II. Mayor, 358–359.
  46. Mayor, 403–407, 410.
  47. Mayor, 419–421. Spangeberg, 107–108.
  48. Mayor, 422–426.
  49. Mayor, 373–376, 408–410.
  50. Mayor, 427–432.
  51. White; Mayor, 472–505; Spangeberg, 164–168.
  52. Mayor, 467–471. Spangeberg, 156–158 (Seghers), 170 (van Ostade), 177 (Berchem).
  53. Reed and Wallace, 262–271. Mayor, 526–527.
  54. Reed and Wallace, 279–285.
  55. Griffiths and Hartley. Jacobson, part X. Mayor, 453–460.
  56. Mayor, 455–460.
  57. Hind (1923), 158–160.
  58. Mayor, 344.
  59. Reed and Wallace, 234–243. Mayor, 520–521, 538, 545.
  60. Mayor, 433–435.
  61. Griffiths (1980), 83–88. Mayor, 511–515.
  62. Mayor, 289–290.
  63. Mayor, 550–555.
  64. Mayor, 576–584.
  65. Griffiths (1996), 134–158 on English mezzotints and their collectors.
  66. Spangeberg, 221–222. Mayor, 591–600.
  67. Mayor, 568, 591–600.
  68. Bareau. Mayor, 624–631.
  69. Mayor, 608–611. Spangeberg, 262.
  70. Griffiths and Carey.
  71. Hults, 522.
  72. Spangeberg, 260–261
  73. Mayor, 660 onwards. Spangeberg, 263 onwards.


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