Hand-colored prints - Current and Coming - exhibit Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Northern Renaissance prints immediately bring to mind Albrecht Durer, whose bard-edged engraved lines and seemingly infinite cross-hatchings give his prints extraordinary depth and tonal qualities. Color seems entirely unnecessary. Not so in Durer's own time. Susan Dackerman, the curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, and her colleague Thomas Primeau, the associate paper conservator, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, have discovered that many prints made during this time were brightly colored by hand. Until now these prints were thought to have been colored long after they were issued--a supposition that Dackerman and Primeau have proved erroneous. Their groundbreaking findings form the basis of a traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue entitled Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts. The show is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 6 through January 5,2003. It then travels to the Saint Louis Art Museum where it may be seen from February 14 to May 18. The show includes more than one hundred works from public and private collections in Europe and the United States. The purposes of the exhibition as Outlined in Dackerman's catalogue essay are: "To overturn several assumptions: that the addition of color to prints was merely a means to remedy technical deficiencies, that the addition of color obliterated the superior printed matrix, and that the addition of color was separate from the printed design."

The art of coloring prints flourished from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth century The exhibition features the work of Durer through twenty-seven pairings of colored and black-and-white prints. The colored examples were executed close to the time the black-and-white examples were issued, which can now be determined by scientific analysis of the pigments used. (An appendix in the catalogue includes the results of the analysis of some of the prints in the exhibition.) The show also includes a re-creation of a sixteenth-century print colorist's studio--complete with brushes, pigments, and stencils. This part of the exhibition enables the visitor to understand how pigments were created from minerals, roots, and plants, and how once made, they were applied to prints.

In Germany in the sixteenth century the Briefmaler, or print colorist, either used stencils to cover predetermined portions of a print or executed the coloring freehand. Prints colored freehand were more desirable, but also more expensive, for the work was necessarily painstaking. Not all colorists worked with artists as eminent as Durer. Many earned a living adding color to broadsides, playing cards, instructional broad-sheets given to children, and other printed ephemera serving both secular and religious functions.

In several European cities, the colorist was a specialist who sometimes signed his work. Dackerman's catalogue essay includes a fascinating account of the Mack family who were prolific colorists in Nuremberg starting in the late sixteenth century. This case study based on extensive court records, provides remarkable insight into how the profession evolved over time.

The exhibition catalogue, which contains essays by Dackerman and Primeau, and catalogue entries by six other scholars, is published by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania State University Press. It may be ordered by telephoning 800-288-2129.