American Monotypes from the Baker/Pisano Collection | Page 10

a similar rediscovery of the process earlier in the nineteenth century. Clearly, the monotype was a process whose time had come.
The technique is an offshoot of printing that is rediscovered so
regularly that it becomes difficult to count all of its originators.
Scholars have considered the possibility that Rembrandt’s (Dutch,
1606–1669) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s (Italian, 1720–1778)
evocative inkings of their etched plates were a kind of monotype,
though the earliest extant pure monotypes are those by Giovanni
Benedetto Castiglione (Italian, 1609–1664) from the 1640s,
whose monotypes are executed on blank plates, with no linework
cut into them. At the end of the 1800s, a time when painters
experimented with looser brushwork and when the continuing
development of photography helped free artists from being mere
copyists of reality, it seems inevitable that monotype would be
rediscovered—it lends itself to a kind of Impressionism and
rewards the deft execution and craft of the draftsman.
Through the nineteenth century there was much ingenuity
expended on finding a way for printmakers to create editions
that were as painterly as monotype. Generally, inventors came up
with a special compound that could be applied to the still-wet
artist’s painting executed on a copper plate. When the plate was
dried and electroplated, it could then be inked like an etched or
engraved plate and printed again and again, providing the spontaneity of the monotype, but with the repeatability of other print

6

INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN MONOTYPE

media. Various inventors came up with similar processes, and
by the end of the 1800s three processes were available for those
wishing to make a print that had some of the visual qualities of a
monotype, but could also be produced in an edition of identical
prints: the galvanograph, the electrotint, and the herkomergravure. 5 The example of a herkomergravure—named after its
inventor, Hubert Herkomer (English, 1849–1914)—in this exhibition was created by Chase (page 24). Herkomer was a popular
painter of portraits and social genre scenes, and an inveterate
experimenter in the arts. Chase introduced Herkomer to the
monotype process in 1885.6 Herkomer developed his process
by 1897, but first wrote about it in 1892.7 It may have been in
1902 that Herkomer returned Chase’s favor by introducing him
to the herkomergravure, when Chase next returned to England.
The development of the various monotype-like processes parallels the interest in lithography as an artistic medium. Ultimately,
processes like the herkomergravure fell into disuse, and one has
to suspect that the reason for this is the relative ease by which
editions of painterly prints could be made lithographically.
Although the lithographic process is complex, it is no more
complicated than the herkomergravure, which involves several
crucia