How the images of Ceylon were made: a guide to prints

Before photography, an image of Ceylon reached the world only as a print, copied onto metal or stone by hand and pulled off in ink. Prints may be broadly divided into three principal groups.

Relief prints

Woodcuts, metal cuts and wood engravings are relief prints. In a woodcut, a design is left in relief by chiselling or cutting away the surrounding areas of a wooden block. The print is made by applying ink to the raised surface and pressing the block down on to the paper. Woodcuts and wood engravings, the latter capable of very finely detailed lines, are usually printed in black and white. This is the oldest method of printing and was long a popular way of illustrating books.

Intaglio prints

Engravings, etchings, mezzotints and aquatints are intaglio prints. In an engraving, the design is cut directly into a metal plate with a sharp pointed tool called a graver. In etching, the design is drawn with a needle through a thin layer of wax laid over the metal. The plate is then immersed in acid, which bites only where the metal is exposed; it is inked and wiped so that the ink remaining in the incised or bitten lines is forced out on to the paper under pressure.

From the 1820s and 1830s, steel plates increasingly replaced the softer copper. As de Silva notes, the greater hardness of steel allowed much longer print runs and finer, more consistent lines, which is why so many of the illustrated Ceylon books of the mid-century are steel engravings rather than copper-plate work.

In mezzotint, the metal plate is first roughened all over with a curved, serrated tool called a rocker. Each pit holds ink, producing an even, velvety black; the surface is then burnished down in varying degrees to reduce the ink held and achieve the required lightness of tone. Characteristically the engraver works from dark to light, so that the design emerges from the black ground. The process is used chiefly for the reproduction of portraits.

In aquatint, powdered resin is sprinkled on to a metal plate and fixed by heating. When the plate is etched, the acid bites around the tiny resinous particles; on printing, usually in two or at most three colours, a fine, crazed effect is obtained. Gradations of tone are achieved by varying the density of the resin.

Lithographs

The design is drawn on stone, or more commonly a zinc plate, with a greasy crayon. The surface is dampened with water, which settles only in the undrawn areas, the grease repelling it elsewhere. The plate is then rolled with greasy printing ink, which adheres only to the drawing while the water repels it from the rest of the surface; a separate plate is required for each colour. The ink is transferred by laying the paper face down on the stone and rubbing its back. Lithography superseded aquatint around the 1840s. Unlike relief or intaglio prints, lithographs bear no plate impression.

That last point is worth holding on to, because it is the one test a collector can apply without any equipment at all. An intaglio plate is pressed into damp paper hard enough to leave an indented rectangle a little larger than the image, and that impression survives on the sheet. Where the mark is absent, the sheet is not an intaglio print.

Hand-colouring

Many early prints of Ceylon were printed in monochrome, or in a limited range of colours, and then finished by hand in watercolour. As de Silva records, this colouring was often carried out by teams working to an approved pattern print, so that impressions of the same view might vary considerably in their tints. A distinction should therefore be drawn between a print coloured by hand after printing and one printed in colours from the plate itself.

The distinction runs through the Ceylon material. The aquatints after Samuel Daniell and the sepia lithographs after Charles O’Brien were coloured by hand, while the aquatints after Henry Salt were printed in colours from the plate. James Stephanoff is found in grey aquatint, and the plates after John Deschamps were lithographed and then coloured by hand.

Two impressions of the same view, both genuine and both of the period, may therefore differ considerably in their colouring and in what they are worth. Where colour was applied by hand, it is the quality of that hand, and the condition in which the colour has survived, that separates one sheet from another.

This summary of printing techniques draws on R.K. de Silva, Early Prints of Ceylon (1985), the definitive guide to the English topographical views of the island.