Purpose and Practice in French Avant-Garde Print-making of the 1880s

Abstract

A study of Impressionist print-making provides us with a different vantage point onto a group of artists with whom we supposedly could not be more familiar. The Impressionist aesthetic is usually linked with notions of 'snap-shot' vision, instantaneity and spontaneity, but how is this compatible with the laborious print-making techniques adopted by Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt and Camile Pissarro in the late 1870s? Their print-making practice seems to run counter to their artistic production in other media, and suggests that we should reconsider our definitions of Impressionism. In terms of the general history of printing, the second half of the nineteenth century is especially important because it is the period during which current standards for the buying, selling and making of artists' prints were first laid down. Pissarro was probably the earliest print-maker to sign, number and annotate his prints-in other words to record literally the difference between a hand-pulled artist's proof and a mass-produced mechanised print. He began doing so in 1879 and it is, of course, no coincidence that the earliest types of photographicallyderived etched images, known as heliogravures, were by then being produced in considerable numbers.