“Forget Me Not” Bouquet Engraving, 1825 Forget Me Not
Dublin Core
Title
“Forget Me Not” Bouquet Engraving, 1825 Forget Me Not
Subject
Literary Annual Defined
Description
Many engravings in the literary annuals were portraits, bucolic scenes, and these kinds of botanical arrangements. A process of intaglio steel plate engraving was widespread by Rudolph Ackermann after he successfully created a production line in his shop for creating an assembly line of artists to work on each element of a steel plate engraving. The intaglio steel plate process differs from wood-cut and wood-engravings by the negative and positive images created: “The engraving processes in which the image is incised into the plate, as opposed to those where the surface is cut away leaving the image in relief” (Carter 127). When printing, “the lines of the design are filled with ink, the rest of the surface being wiped clean, and damp paper is pressed hard on to the surface so that it lifts the ink out of the engraved lines. The technique of engraving the plate is similar to that of cutting a negative wood block, allowing the use of very fine lines and cross-hatched tones, but it gives a positive not a negative result” (Gaskell 156). The steel plates did not disintegrate as quickly as the wood engravings, which allowed printers to render thousands of imprints before retiring a steel plate. Copper plates, the traditional method of printing engravings, could withstand only about one hundred impressions before the artwork was compromised by the plate printers’ wiping of canvasses (and not the printing pressure). (from Harris' Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual)
Publisher
R. Ackermann & Co.
Date
1825
Contributor
Katherine D. Harris Collection
Format
duodecimo: 3.5x5.5"
Type
engraving
Collection
Citation
““Forget Me Not” Bouquet Engraving, 1825 Forget Me Not,” Book Club of California, accessed April 25, 2024, https://bccbooks.omeka.net/items/show/5.