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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
One of the pleasures of British architecture in the years around 1900 is the quality of the printed illustrations that accompanied it; the stylish pen drawings of Andrew Prentice or Gerald Horsley, the atmospheric pencil of C. E. Mallows or F. L. Griggs, the carefully composed photographic plates of Dockree, Bedford Lemere and many anonymous photographers. True, the letterpress pages of the architectural weeklies are yellowing and dirty now, and the plates in the centre are invariably too tightly bound in, or frayed at the edges; but those plates are remarkable nevertheless for their freedom, crispness, delicacy of tone and sheer size, made possible by the introduction of photolithography in the 1860s, ’70s and ’80s. Late Victorian architectural books also have their excellences, not the least of which is the process known as collotype, used for reproducing halftones and photographs. It was expensive, and therefore never used very widely, but in architectural books of quality, and particularly in those published by B. T. Batsford, it produced spectacular results.
1 The development of reproduction processes for architectural illustration in the second half of the nineteenth century may be usefully summarized here. In periodicals, the vast bulk of illustrations in the 1840S, ‘50s and ‘60s were printed from wood engravings. On 14 December 1868 The Building News published a drawing of G. E. Street’s St Margaret’s Convent, East Grinstead, reproduced by photolithography; that is, the original drawing had been transferred, via a photographic negative and a transfer, to a lithographic plate, and then printed off. This was a development of great importance because it allowed a drawing to be reproduced directly, without the intervention of a woodblock engraver or commercial lithographer; however, photolithography was only slowly taken up and was confined to line drawings until 1881.
On 16 April in that year, The Architect published a photograph of a neo-Celtic cross recently erected at Fence Houses near Durham. This was, as far as I know, the first photograph to be published in a British architectural periodical, and the process was one which was to become well known by its trade name of’Ink-Photo’. A collotype plate was made from the photographic negative and printed onto a grained transfer; the transfer was then laid down on a lithographic plate for printing off the finished sheets. These two processes, in line and tone, were the technical basis for the achievements of late nineteenth century periodical illustration.
Their reign was, however, challenged in the 1890s by the development of’process’ blocks; here the image is transferred, via a photographic negative, to a light-sensitive metal block; the block is then acidetched, leaving the image to be printed standing in relief. Process blocks quickly reached a standard in line and tone near that of photolithography; but their growing popularity in the early twentieth century was due rather to their convenience; having a relief rather than a flat surface they can be printed alongside letterpress.
The illustration of architectural books presents a more complex picture. Wood engraving was useful throughout the period for cheap illustrations; for more expensive work the traditional techniques of engraving on metal, etching and lithography continued to be used. The new developments of the period were chromolithography, from the 1840s onwards, and techniques for reproducing photographs, including collotype, from the 1870s. On books even more than periodicals, the impact of the process block was considerable, displacing virtually all the old processes in the early twentieth century.
A full explanation of all the processes normally used to illustrate architecture in the nineteenth century will be found in Geoffrey Wakeman’s invaluable Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution (Newton Abbot, 1973).
2 I am grateful to Mr Philip Brooke of The Cotswold Collotype Company for explaining the significance of the humidity problem to me.
3 Glaister, G. A., Glaister’s Glossary of the Book (1979), p. 102.Google Scholar
4 Wakeman, op. cit., pp. 111–18.
5 Ibid., pp. 159–63.
6 Ibid., pp. 101–11.
7 Bolitho, Hector (ed.), A Batsford Century (1943), pp. 21…22, 24, 46…47, 108.Google Scholar
8 The Architect 36 (1886), p. 9.
9 See, for instance, Schultz’s, R. W. ‘Design for a town church’ vol. 36, plate 16, and Beresford Pite’s ‘Hebrew Conference Hall, Whitechapel’, vol. 45 Google Scholar, Second Series, plate 325. Outstanding among the contributors to the Society’s plates were the two most artistic of Shaw’s pupils, Reginald Barratt and Edwin George Hardy.
10 Plates 449–51 in the Second Series illustrated Cockerell’s Hanover Chapel in Regent Street, (vol. 47).
11 Bolitho, op. cit., p. 117. The collotype printer for the volume by Belcher and Macartney seems to have been German: the photographic collection of B. T. Batsford Ltd contains a print of the Fish Inn, Broadway, which was illustrated at Plate 91, with the, to me, unintelligible inscription Nicht zu hauchen. I am grateful to Mrs Clare Sunderland for help in exploring this collection.
12 p. [iii].
13 Ibid.
14 Boltiho, op. cit., p. 34.
15 For example, Plate 56, St Giles in the Fields.
16 Print in the photographic collection of B. T. Batsford Ltd.
17 Dawber, E. Guy, Old Cottages and Farmhouses in Kent and Sussex (1900)Google Scholar. Ould, E. A., Old Cottages, Farm Houses and other half timber buildings in Shropshire, Herefordshire and Cheshire (1904)Google Scholar. Dawber, E. Guy, Old Cottages, Farm-Houses, and other stone buildings in the Cotswold District (1905)Google Scholar. Curtis Green, W., Old Cottages and Farmhouses in Surrey (1908)Google Scholar.
18 Bolitho, op. cit., p. 116.
19 Ibid., p. 34.
20 Basil Olivet’s Old Houses and Village Buildings in East Anglia, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, (n.d. [f.1912]) represents a similar development in the quarto books : longish text, chiefly process illustrations, and a few, special collotype plates.
21 Bolitho, op. cit., p. 34.
