Printing Colour 1700 - 1830: Histories, Techniques, Functions, and Receptions

Printing Colour 1700-1830 offers a broad-ranging examination of the rich period of invention, experimentation and creativity surrounding colour printing in Europe between two critically important developments, four-colour separation printing around 1710, and chromolithography around 1830. Its 28 field-defining contributions by 23 leading experts expand the corpus beyond rare fine art impressions to include many millions of colour-printed images and objects. The chapters unveil the explosive growth in the production and marketing of colour prints at this pivotal moment. They address the numerous scientific and technological advances that fed the burgeoning popularity for such diverse colour-printed consumer goods as clothing, textiles, wallpapers, and ceramics. They recontextualise the rise in colour-printed paper currencies, book endpapers and typography, and ephemera, including lottery tickets and advertisements. This landmark volume launches colour printing of the long 18th century as an interdisciplinary field of study, opening new avenues for research across historical and scientific fields.

Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Harvard University, Elizabeth Savage, University of London

Dr Elizabeth Savage FSA FRHistS is Senior Lecturer in Book History and Communications, School of Advanced Study, and Head of Academic Research Engagement, Senate House Library, University of London. In 2020-22, she was an Honorary Fellow at Centre for the Study of the Book, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University. In 2022-23, she was a Fellow at Linda Hall Library. Her research into pre-industrial European printing techniques, especially for colour, has won awards including the Schulman and Bullard Article Prize. Her latest book is Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum, and she co-edited Printing Colour 1400-1700. She regularly curates and contributes to exhibitions about print heritage, for example at the British Museum and Musée du Louvre. She teaches at London Rare Books School.

Dr Margaret Morgan Grasselli worked for forty years at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, thirty as Curator of Old Master Drawings. Having retired in 2020, she then served as Visiting Lecturer in the department of History of Art and Architecture of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University (2020-2022) and Visiting Senior Scholar for Drawings at the Harvard Art Museums (2020-2023). An expert on French drawings, she is also an authority on French colour prints of the 18th century. She organised the 2003 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Colorful Impressions: The Printing Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France, and was the editor and primary author of the accompanying catalogue.