Villa Madama, after design by Hubert Robert

Color printing in the “wash manner” involved the preparation of four separate plates, inking of each with one of the three primary colors or black, and carefully aligned printing on a single sheet. The result is a remarkably faithful imitation of the appearance of a watercolor. Here Janinet, the greatest master of the technique, reproduces Hubert Robert’s view a famous ruined Renaissance villa outside Rome. Such reproductions enthralled the educated public in late eighteenth-century France, which admired but could not always afford original drawings.