Andalouse This past Tuesday, our friend L.D. Mitchell at The Private Library, discussed Hand-Colored Plates, paying particular attention to the assembly-line process required to manually color engravings or lithographs. The workers were, more often than not, anonymous women or children. The designers and engraver/lithographers did not color the plates themselves. But these anonymous colorists were not left alone to improvise a palette, each of their own creation; they required a color scheme for reference. And these were not Venus Paradise Coloring Sets with numbers on the plate corresponding to a specific colored pencil. It was left to the original artist/designer or a primary colorist to create models for the workers to use as guides. One such colorist/modeler was Edouard Bouvenne, an artist in his own right yet of whom little is known; he is not found in Benezit (now, thankfully, available in an English edition). But he often provided models for colorists employed by Chez Aubert and Chez Bauger, two of the leading publisher-printmakers in France, 1820-1845. Bouvenne was a "figure of considerable talent who was able to give strong coloration to certain of Daumier's prints" (Fogle, Sabina. Daumier. L'écriture du lithographe. In Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, Volume 7, Issue 2, Autumn 2008). Pétrin Original models for hand-colored plates rarely survived their function; they were heavily used. From time to time, however, vintage hand-coloring models do surface and two ye... [more How Did Hand-Colorists in the Past Know What Colors To Use?]

Vic of Tavistock Books recently acquired a John Steinbeck manuscript. Read more here. [more ABAA Member Vic Zoschak gets a shout-out]