Stop The Press: It’s A Print!

Much of the art you find thrifting is reproduction, usually inexpensive prints of works from museums or art work over 70 years (when it is considered in the public domain). Sometimes, however, you can find fantastic pieces of original art. This artwork is from the 1750s (I kid you not) and is essentially the “museum reproduction” of its day. I was practically vibrating when I came across it, and snatched it up for a few dollars.

What people refer to as a “print” today can mean many things. Most of the works you find at thrift stores are printed by machine, and if you look at one closely with a magnifying glass, you can see the “Ben Day dots”. As defined by MOMA, these are: “An inexpensive mechanical printing method developed in the late 19th century … [using] small colored dots (typically cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) that are variously spaced and combined to create shading and colors in images.” This process is what your home printer does when you print a colored image, and how most art reproductions are created. And note that a “giclée print” is basically a fancy ink jet reproduction.

Then there is the actual process called “print making”. While the art created is also called a “print”, these are works created by an artist using a number of different “print making” techniques. The oldest styles are Woodcut, Engraving (also known as intaglio) and Etching. More contemporary styles are Aquatint, Monotype, Lithography and Screen-printing.

This work was done by Gilles-Antoine Demarteau (1722-1776) and it is an engraving print. He was a well-known engraver working in Paris in the mid 1700s. The majority of his work depicts famous artworks by Francois Boucher (1703-1770), and this “Woman and Child Before a Fireplace” is one. In fact, the original artwork by Boucher is now only known through these etchings, as is common in art history when art is lost or damaged. Prior to photography, the only way artists could “see” artwork from afar was to have a printed version, much like we would pick up at an art exhibit.  But at the time, creating a “printed version” took the skills of a different artist.

This print is over 250 years old and predates the American Revolution! And I found it at a thrift shop for only a few dollars, already framed in archival material. The topic is, of course, one I love from my Dutch art history – a woman and child in a domestic setting. How lucky am I?! It has pride of place in our living room.