1 At the present day line engravers sometimes work on steel plates, as they are capable of supplying without damage a much greater number of proofs than can be printed from copper plates. It more frequently happens that a copper plate is coated with steel before being submitted to the action of the press, in order to preserve it, and to increase the number of copies without taking off the edge of the workmanship. That is to say, that by means of "electrotyping" a thin coat of metal is superimposed, which, since it considerably increases the power of endurance, increases the productiveness of the plate and the number of proofs that can be taken.

2 Papillon, "TraitÉ de la Gravure en Bois," 1766, vol. i., ch. 1.

3 Pliny, "Hist. Nat.," xxxv., c. 2.

4 "Materiali per servire alla Storia dell' Incisione," &c., p. 83 and following.

5 That is the "Treatises on Latin Syntax" by Ælius Donatus, a grammarian of the fourth century. In the Middle Ages these treatises were much used in schools.

6 Published by John Koelhoff under the name of "Cronica van der hilliger Stat van Coellen," p. 31 and after.

7 "Essai historique et critique sur l'Invention de l'Imprimerie." Lille, 1859.

8 This, at any rate, is what we feel tempted to do as regards the "Biblia Pauperum," a book containing xylographic illustrations, whose date has been variously estimated, and which we are disposed to believe even older than the first edition of the "Speculum." Heinecken, as usual, claims for Germany the production of this precious collection, which Ottley, with more appearance of reason, regards as the work of an artist of the Low Countries, who worked about 1420. In this way Germany would only have the right to claim the plates added in the German editions published forty years later, and which are far less perfect in point of style and arrangement than those of the original edition.

9 The Dutch word coster means churchwarden, or beadle.

10 "IdeÉ gÉnÉrale d'une Collection d'Estampes, 1771," p. 305.

11 "Discours Historique sur la Gravure." Paris, 1808.

12 See in "L'Artiste," 1839, an article entitled "La plus ancienne Gravure du Cabinet des Estampes de la BibliothÈque royale est-elle ancienne?"

13 "Notice sur deux Estampes de 1406, et sur les Commencements de la Gravure en CriblÉ." "Gazette des Beaux-arts," t. I^{er}, 2^e pÉriode, 1869.

14 "Le Peintre-Graveur," Leipzig, 1860, vol. i., p. 84.

15 "Une Passion de 1446. Suite de Gravures au Burin, les premiÈres avec Date." Montpellier, 1857.

16 "Archiv fÜr die Zeichnenden KÜnste," 1858.

17 The "Pax" is a metal plate which, at high mass and during the singing of the "Agnus Dei," the officiating priest gives to be kissed by the clergy and the devout, addressing to each of them these words: "Pax tecum." The "Pax" made by Finiguerra for the Baptistery of St. John has been removed from thence to the Uffizi, where it still is.

18 It is useless to adduce the fine "Profile of a Woman," discovered a few years ago at Bologna, and now the property of the Berlin Museum, as an argument against the poverty we are trying to prove. This very important document is not only of uncertain date, but, as we have remarked elsewhere, the nature of its execution and style forbid one to look upon it as the work of any Florentine artist.

19 Martin Schongauer was born at Colmar, in which town his father had settled as a goldsmith; there he passed the greatest part of his life, and there he died in 1488. Vasari sometimes speaks of him as "Antwerp Martin," or "Martin the Fleming." This is easily explained: a German or Flemish artist would be all one in the eyes of a Tuscan of the fifteenth century, as strangers were all barbarians to the ancient Romans.

20 This is by no means universally admitted to be a genuine work by Martin Schongauer.

21 He had no fewer than eighteen children; Albert was the third.

22 Herr Moriz Thausing has treated this question exhaustively in his important work on Albert DÜrer.

23 The oldest known dated engraving by Marc Antonio, the "Pyramus and Thisbe," bears the date of 1505. If Marc Antonio, as we have reason to think, was born about 1480, he must have been already over twenty when he published this extremely commonplace print.

24 Michael Huber ("Manuel des Curieux et des Amateurs de l'Art," t. iii.) says, word for word: "All that is wanted in these prints is a richer handling and that general aspect which we admire in the subjects engraved from Rubens." One might as well say that Petrarch's style would be improved by being Ariosto's.

25 Agostino Caracci, who deserves to be numbered amongst the cleverest engravers of the end of the sixteenth century, did not blush to devote his talents to a similar publication, serious in style, but of most obscene intention. The Bolognese artist, like his celebrated countryman, seems to have wished to display at once his science and his shamelessness. The one only serves to make the other more inexcusable, and it is even still more difficult to tolerate this austere immodesty than the licentiousness, without Æsthetic pretension, which characterises the little French prints sold under the rose in the eighteenth century.

26 Passavant: "Le Peintre-Graveur," iii. 5.

27 "Les MaÎtres d'Autrefois," p. 165.

28 In the National Library at Paris a collection of over a hundred trial proofs, retouched by Rubens himself, exists to bear witness to the careful attention with which he overlooked the work of his engravers.

29 At the time of Callot's birth Lorraine was not yet French territory; but as it was during his life that Nancy was taken by the king's army, we have a right to include him among French artists.

30 He was in all twelve years in Italy: three in Rome, and nine in Florence.

31 William Faithorne, the first line engraver worth mentioning in the history of English art, did not even begin to be known till after Charles I. After the king's fall, Faithorne, who was a Royalist, went to France, where, under Nanteuil, he perfected himself in his art, and did not finally settle in England till near the end of 1650.

32 Hollar is not merely one of the most distinguished of German engravers. There are few artists in any country who have handled the needle with so much skill and intelligence; there is probably none who has so greatly excelled in rendering the details of apparel and of the daintiest objects. His achievement numbers more than 2,000 prints, which, in spite of their small size, and the generally trifling nature of the subjects, deserve to be classed amongst the most remarkable etched work of the seventeenth century.

33 His first plates are sometimes signed "De Leeuw," sometimes "Tomaes de Leu," which has led many writers—M. Robert-Dumesnil among them—to suppose that he migrated to Paris from a town in Flanders.

34 It represents a "Holy Family," with this inscription on a stone, to the right: "R. Nanteuil PhilosophiÆ Auditor Sculpebat Rhemis An^o dni 1645."

35 These flights were not Nanteuil's last. There is extant a sort of petition in verse, which he one day presented to Louis XIV. to excuse himself for not having finished in time a portrait ordered by the king. These rhymes, quoted by the AbbÉ Lambert in his "Histoire LittÉraire du RÈgne de Louis XIV.," and some others composed by Nanteuil in praise of Mlle. de ScudÉry, are not such to make us regret that he did not more frequently lay aside the graver for the pen.

36 The greater part of Nanteuil's drawings are in three crayons, made out in places with light tints in pastel. The colour is sober and delicate, and offers a good deal of resemblance to the charming French crayons of the sixteenth century. Nanteuil doubtless produced many portraits which he never engraved, but he engraved very few that he had not previously produced. It must also be remarked, that in his achievement, which is composed of more than two hundred and thirty pieces, there are not more than eighteen subject pictures or illustrations. It is worthy, too, of special note that there are only eight portraits in which the hands are seen, and in six of these only one hand is shown.

37 "Édit de Saint Jean-de-Luz," 1660.

38 Claude, it is true, was still alive in 1667; but after his second installation in Rome (1627), he never saw France again.

39 Vitet: "Eustache Lesueur."

40 It is said that Lebrun one day proclaimed that Audran had "improved his pictures." It is possible he may have said, "that he had not spoilt them." Such an expression in the mouth of such a man is quite modest enough; but it is difficult to imagine Lebrun so far humbling himself in public.

41 We said that Edelinck was born at Antwerp; but as he was very young when he took up his abode in France, and as he never returned to his native country, we may be allowed to include him in the French school with as much right as his countryman, Philippe de Champaigne.

42 Amongst Audran's most distinguished scholars, we need only mention the following names: Gaspard Duchange; Dorigny, summoned to London by Queen Anne; Louis Desplaces; and Nicolas Henri Tardieu, founder of a family of clever engravers, the last of whom died in 1844, worthy of the name he bore.

43 Engraver of the "Assumption" of Philippe de Champaigne. He must not be confused with another Bartholomew Kilian, his ancestor, and the head of a family in which there are no less than twenty engravers.

44 Some of these little unpretentious amateur prints are not without charm; some even show a certain amount of talent in the execution, and the portraits drawn and engraved by Carmontelle, the author of the "Proverbes," deserve, amongst others, to be mentioned on that account.

45 In his landscapes, Woollett makes use of etching, line, and the dry-point, all three. Philippe Le Bas was the first to make use of dry-point to render the misty tones of distances and the clearness of skies. This mode of engraving, improved by VivarÈs, was carried to its highest perfection by Woollett. Certain English artists of the same period tried to apply the process of mezzotint to landscape engraving; but the landscapes engraved in this way by Watson and Brookshaw, after the German Kobell, will not bear comparison with Woollett's.

46 In a work dedicated to Pitt, "On the Origin of Trade and its History to the Present Times" (London, 1790), we read that the prints exported from England at that time were, as compared with those imported from France, in the proportion of "five hundred to one by the most exact computation," and that the trade in English engravings, far from being restricted to one or two countries, extended all over Europe.

47 The credit of the invention is really due to Jean Charles FranÇois, born at Nancy in 1717. But the application that FranÇois made of his discovery was—if we consider the improvements introduced soon afterwards by Demarteau—still so incomplete that it seems only fair to attribute to the latter a principal share in the original success.

48 "Lettre de Cochin, SecrÉtaire perpÉtuel de l'AcadÉmie, au Sieur FranÇois," 26th November, 1757.

49 Before giving himself up almost exclusively to the practice of aquatint, Debucourt produced a large number of engravings in colour: "Le Jardin" and "La Galerie de Bois au Palais Royal," the "Promenade aux Tuileries," "L'Escalade," and so forth. We know the ardour, verging on mania, with which these prints, albeit of little value from an artistic point of view, are now collected.

50 This important publication contains, in four sections, the most remarkable pictures and sculptures of the Louvre, as it existed after Napoleon had enriched it with masterpieces from every school. Begun in 1802, it was continued till 1811.

51 This fine cathedral, burnt with so many other churches in the great fire, was 690 feet in length, 130 feet broad, and 520 feet high at the top of the spire.

52 The tear-shaped pieces of glass (LachrimÆ VitreÆ), which resist hard blows applied at the thick end, yet fly to pieces the moment a fragment is broken off the fine end, were first brought to England by Prince Rupert, and are called popularly "Prince Rupert's drops."

53 This print represents a tall, powerful-looking man, standing with naked sword in one hand, and holding up in the other the head of St. John the Baptist.

54 Other names given to mezzotint out of England are: Schwarzkunst, black art; La maniÈre anglaise, L'incisione a foggia nera, engraving in black fashion or manner.

55 This engraver must not be confused with John Keyse Sherwin, whose line engravings produced a century later are well known.

56 This Club was instituted in 1703, the year after the accession of Queen Anne, to promote the Protestant succession, the members meeting at the "Cat and Fiddle" in Shire Lane, Fleet Street, kept by Christopher Kat, from whom it took the name. The particular size known amongst artists as Kit-cat, just below the waist and not quite three-quarter length, also acquired its name from this series of portraits, which were painted their particular length to suit the walls of Tonson's villa at Barn Elms.

57 John Riley, Jonathan Richardson, Michael Dahl, John Closterman, John Vanderbank, and Thomas Hudson.

58 The date of McArdell's birth is often erroneously given as 1710 instead of 1728ndash;9 according to the above authority.

59 James Walker must not be confused either with Anthony and his brother William, or with the stipple and mezzotint engraver William Walker of the present century. James Walker's prints are not numerous, a great number of his plates and prints having been lost from the foundering of the vessel which was bringing them back to England from Russia, where Walker had lived for seventeen years, having been appointed in 1784 engraver to the Empress Catherine.

60 A painter more generally known as Langen Jan, born at Munster in 1610, the correct name being John or Johann van Bockhorst; the name, however, appears as above in the engraving.

61 On the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768, Bartolozzi, to the exclusion of Strange and Woollett, was admitted one of the first forty members with full membership; all engravers afterwards up to the year 1855 could only be elected as associate members.

62 This engraver was in no way related to the better-known stipple and historical engraver of the same name who flourished in the present century.

63 Woollett was buried in Old St. Pancras Churchyard; on a plain
tombstone which marks the spot were found one day written in pencil
the two lines—

Shortly afterwards a subscription was raised, to which Benjamin West and John Boydell contributed, for the purpose of erecting the above-mentioned tablet which now stands in the West Cloister.

64 Opie painted a life-size head of S.W. Reynolds, and of his daughter Elizabeth as "Red Riding Hood" (exhibited at the winter exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1876); this portrait of herself Elizabeth engraved in mezzotint at the age of fourteen.

65 Father of the late E.W. Cooke, R.A.

66 Walker engraved the portrait of Raeburn with the special purpose of proving the contrary.

67 John Lucas, the well-known portrait painter and also engraver in mezzotint, was likewise a pupil of Reynolds.

68 The plate of Salisbury Cathedral was engraved at Constable's expense and published in 1837 by Messrs. Hodgson, Graves and Co., for the painter. After his sudden death in the same year it was sold at Foster's, Pall Mall, in 1838, and bought in for eighty guineas, hardly the price of two proofs at the present time.

Through the kindness of Mr. Algernon Graves, the writer has had access to many manuscript notes written by David Lucas.

69 Brother of Samuel Cousins, R.A.

70 Better known in France, where he settled in 1816, he died in the neighbourhood of Paris in 1843, and introduced there the mode of cutting on the end of the grain instead of with the grain as was before the practice.

71 First introduced in 1840, although not in general practice until some years later.

72 On the principle of that which is known as "engine turning," as seen on the back of watch-cases.

73 It is also necessary to point out that no impression damaged from course of time or printed from a worn-out plate can give any idea of the original engraving as a work of art. Other things being equal, proofs are prim facie likely to be the best impressions, but a good print (that is a later impression), if in good condition, is far more valuable than a damaged or rubbed proof, however early the state may be.