The Print Before Photography: An introduction to European Printmaking 1550 - 1820

Description

Copper-plate printmaking, developed alongside Gutenberg's invention of moveable type, was a huge business employing thousands of people, and dominating image production for nearly four centuries across the whole of Europe. Its techniques and influence remained very stable until the nineteenth century, when this world was displaced by new technologies, of which photography was by far the most important. Print Before Photography examines the unrivalled importance of printmaking in its golden age, illustrated through the British Museum's outstanding collection of prints. This unique and significant book is destined to be a leading reference in print scholarship, and will be of interest to anyone with an interest in this era of art history.

Between 1991 and 2010, Antony Griffiths was deputy keeper, then keeper, of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. In 1984 he co-founded Print Quarterly, a journal dedicated to the art of the print. He was appointed a fellow of the British Academy in 2000. He has published widely on the subject.

"The sheer amount of information on offer here, conveyed in such a lucidly written and lavishly illustrated book, marks this as a pinnacle of print studies."--Sheila McTighe (11/1/2016 12:00:00 AM) "While dealing in appropriately dry fashion with all the intricacies of production, trade and patronage, Griffiths manages to make the reader look harder at the materiality of the fine art engraving, its strange otherness as if it were a branch of sculpture rather than drawing. His magnificent book brings to an end the output of the British Museum Press, here concluding, like many a fine symphony, with a triumphant flourish."--Tom Phillips (9/1/2016 12:00:00 AM) Antony Griffiths, who was Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum for 20 years from 1991 to 2011, has done something wholly admirable. After retiring and alongside delivering the Slade Lectures in Oxford, he sat down and has written an absolutely definitive book about the history of printmaking in Western Europe from its beginnings to the time that it began to be overtaken by other technologies, including lithography and photography.--Charles Saumarez Smith