Early Aquatint
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - Sunday, April 17, 2011
This exhibition presents the museum’s finest works from the first and most experimental period of aquatint: before 1800. Aquatint is the most effective printmaking technique for producing areas and apparent gradation of tone. The process begins with the deposit of a fine grain of acid-resistant resin, either in liquid or more often in powder form, onto a copper plate. The plate is then immersed in the same dilute acid used in the etching process to induce a regular and extremely fine pitting of the surface. When the plate is inked and wiped, the pitting retains ink and therefore prints in an even tone. As with etching, the plate can be rebitten in stages: areas of a desired tone are protected with varnish while others are left exposed and the plate immersed again to generate a darker tone in the unprotected areas. Aquatint is unsuitable, however, for producing linear articulation or fine detail. For that reason it is usually combined with its sister technique, etching, for effective representation.
Aquatint is the most important and enduring of a group of printmaking techniques that appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was developed in France in the mid-1760s as a way of controlling the older, cruder technique of brushing acid directly on the plate (lavis). Like most of the other newly introduced techniques, aquatint was first used to imitate drawings done in brush-and-wash or watercolor. With greater experience and ambition came attempts at reproducing the more complex and continuous tones of paintings, both Old Master and contemporary. At the same time, printmakers began to explore the technique’s distinctive formal and expressive possibilities. The English applied it to satire and caricature, helping to elevate the genre’s aesthetic appeal, while in Spain Francisco Goya made it a vehicle for conveying dramatic social and human content. By around 1800, aquatint had joined the basic techniques of printmaking.
Aquatint is the most important and enduring of a group of printmaking techniques that appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was developed in France in the mid-1760s as a way of controlling the older, cruder technique of brushing acid directly on the plate (lavis). Like most of the other newly introduced techniques, aquatint was first used to imitate drawings done in brush-and-wash or watercolor. With greater experience and ambition came attempts at reproducing the more complex and continuous tones of paintings, both Old Master and contemporary. At the same time, printmakers began to explore the technique’s distinctive formal and expressive possibilities. The English applied it to satire and caricature, helping to elevate the genre’s aesthetic appeal, while in Spain Francisco Goya made it a vehicle for conveying dramatic social and human content. By around 1800, aquatint had joined the basic techniques of printmaking.