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Designer and Engraver, the
Nature of Their
Exchange
Nadine Orenstein, Metropolitan
Museum of Art
The relationship between the
designer and the engraver in 16th-
and 17th-century Netherlandish
prints is often taken for granted:
one artist created a design and
handed it to an engraver who would
indent the drawing, transfer it to
a printing plate, and recreate it
as faithfully as possible in print.
Upon closer examination, however,
this relationship seems to have
varied given the parties involved.
Some painters appear to have had a
great interest in the appearance of
the prints created after their
designs while others seem to have
had little. In the catalogue to our
exhibition on Pieter Bruegel the
Elder’s drawings and prints, for
instance, I proposed that the
painter adapted his style of
drawing in small ways to the
engraver he was working with at the
time.
Engravers also participated in
larger or smaller ways in the
production of a print. It may seem
like sacrilege to scholars of
drawings to write the following but
drawings – even by famous artists -
appear to have at times been marked
up by engravers in order to
translate the design into the
graphic language that would help
them engrave the lines and
cross-hatchings of the print. An
important point to note in this
respect is that from the
mid-sixteenth century on, drawings
for prints rarely looked like the
final product. Typically they were
drawn with washes; almost never
with cross-hatching.
This talk will discuss through
several of examples the nature of
the exchange between designers and
engravers; how they worked together
and the variations in this
relationship. If I get up the
courage, I will propose here my
theory that the engravers of Van
Dyck’s Iconography series touched
up the master’s drawings with
washes.
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