Are you a member of the Printing Colour Project? Have you recently published on the history of colour printing?  Click here to submit an exhibition or book for this website, or an article or book chapter for the Bibliography (see below).

Books by Members

Click on the book cover to learn more.

Ad Stijnman, ed. Simon Turner
JOHANNES TEYLER
Ouderkerk aan den IJssel: Sound & Vision; Rijksmuseum, 2017

The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450–1700
4 volumes, 1,280 pages, 1,100 colour illustrations
ISBN 9789491539343, 9789491539344, 9491539345
Buy now

Huigen Leeflang and Pieter Roelofs, eds.
HERCULES SEGERS: Painter, Etcher
Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2016

2 vols., 700 pages, full colour
ISBN 9462083460
Coinciding with the exhibitions The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers (Metropolitan Museum of Art) & Hercules Segers ( Rijksmuseum)
Buy now

Contributors: Dionysia Christoforou, Erik Hinterding, Nadine M. Orenstein, Ad Stijnman, Jaap van der Veen, Arie Waller

Ad Stijnman & Elizabeth Savage, eds.
PRINTING COLOUR 1400–1700
Histories, Techniques, Functions & Receptions
Leiden: Brill, 2015

Melanie Grimm, Claudia Kleine-Tebbe, Ad Stijnman
LICHTSPIEL UND FARBENPRACHT
Entwicklungen des Farbdrucks 1500-1800
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011

Wolfenbüttler Hefte 29
ISBN 978-3-447-06457-6
Click here for project details
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Ad Stijnman, with Claudia Kleine-Tebbe
HOCHZEIT VON BILD UND BUCH
Anfänge der Druckgraphik, 1420-1515
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009

Wolfenbütteler Hefte 26
ISBN 9783447061537
Click here for project details
Buy now

 

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Bibliography of Publications on pre-1920 Colour Printing in the West
Ad Stijnman

Click here to download the Bibliography of Western Colour Printing until 1920 (PDF 0.5MB)

This working bibliography represents most monographs and many exhibition catalogues, auction and sales catalogues, dissertations, articles, chapters, and passages that contribute to the early history of Western colour printing up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Excepting Adam von Bartsch’s first catalogue of Italian chiaroscuro woodcuts of 1811, the serious study of historical colour printing techniques began in the late nineteenth century. In 1910, Robert Burch published the first comprehensive survey of colour prints and colour printing from the fifteenth century until his days. It waned in the 1930s and was (slightly) revived from the 1960s, but with a narrow focus on Italian chiaroscuro woodcut. The literature focuses on four themes:

• Letterpress work in the first years of printing by Johann Gutenberg (1390/1400–1468) and his immediate followers Johann Fust and Peter Schöeffer, c.1455–1457
• Illustrations printed by Erhard Ratdolt (1442–1528), especially in the 1480s and 1490s
• Italian chiaroscuro woodcuts, 1516–c.1600
• French colour prints from the later eighteenth century.

Although interest in these themes continued, especially concerning chiaroscuro prints, new and broader research strands in the use of colour in print research began developing in the twenty-first century. Interest in colour on prints more generally was spurred by Susan Dackerman’s exhibition catalogue of hand-painted prints of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which was the first scholarly assessment of the topic, in 2002. In 2011, Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage organised the first forum to discuss the history of colour printing pre-1700, when most such histories began, and the Printing Colour Project took root. As the history of printed colour is growing into an interdisciplinary field of enquiry, the number of publications is increasing quickly, and their scope is broadening.