I KTO JEST NA TYLE GENIALNY, ABY TO ZROBIĆ BEZ TRANSLATORA?? :D It is, however, certainly true that nobody can print a plate except the artist who made it, or a clever workman laboring under his direct personal superintendence, and that all printing not done under these conditions is little more than an approximation. An inexperienced etcher francies that he has nothing to do but to send his plate to an established plate-printer, and get a proof as he would of his visiting-card. But artistic etchings and visiting-cards are very different things.” 14 Thus wrote P.G. Hamerton, an ardent and influential critic-connoisseur, typifying the new encouragement and the new morality. Lalanne also advised collaboration. In so doing he defined etching in terms of the variations among proof and thus began evolve new criteria for etching as an art : “An etched impression often deviates from uniformity. Susceptible to the demands of harmony and to individual character in execution, it is variable in its effects and becomes art in certain instances when the artist’s intentions, the artist accepting the worker’s experience.” 15 The aim of collaboration, sincere in its attempts to regenerate a lost sensibility, was to teach the artist to print and make the workman more aware of the requirements of the plate. It also laid down the ideal of unimpeded individuality through technique. 16 The model workman was found in Paris. He was the printer Auguste Delatre (1822-1907), regarded as an inspired technical genius.17 According to Seymour Haden , if Delarte had lived during the seventeenth century, Rembrandt himself would not have pulled his own impressions!18 In his first account of the French etching club, Hamerton , also a keen amateur etcher , was unreservedly enthusiastic about Delatre: “Printers generally dislike etchings, because they can make nothing of theme . The French Etching Club has been peculiarly fortunate in this respect. It happened some years ago that one or two artists who etched, discovered a journeyman printer who printed their works with such taste and judgment that they declared the proof were as much his work as theirs. Such a man was not to be lost sight of , and he soon became known amongst artists. When M. Cadart, the publisher , took up etchings. He loves a good ethings with so much expression.”19 Expression is a key word Hamerton’s account, ant it came to exert a curious dominance through a veil of mystifying ink engulfing the etched line. Delatre set the tone , as it were , with a process he called retroussage resulted in a print with a richer and softer appearance resembling drypoint. 20 13 FIG. 6. Seymour Haden, The Towing Path, 1864 (Harrington 76), drypoint. Museum M. Bullivant, M26429 As a printer Delatre played a dual role , not unconnected to the dubious reputation of the revival in general. He was at once the artist’s guide and the tastemaker amateurs could implicitly trust. The latter included Hamerton : “A great part of the printer’s skill consists in leaving a very thin film of ink unequally over the etched part of the plate…. This tints the surface of the impression , in a way often highly favorable to its beauty.” 21 This expressive veil of beauty , good for virtually one impression seemed to liberate etching from dry rigor , rules , and the relentless jaws of standardization. It touched past and present: it was the royal road back to Rembrandt , and by abundantly displaying light of day , it became Impressionism’ s ultimate engraved equivalent. The inky film also fed printmaking’s ever incipient romanticism:22 it was the muffled cry in the quest for beauty as bafflement. The inky film touched etching’s major stylistic polemic: romantic chiaroscuro versus a modern etching of “ecriture”. Hamerton’s and Lalanne’s advice to etchers distinguished between artificial printing (divers modes d’impression. Ahere plate tone variously used supplements bitten line) and natural printing (epreuves naturelles , impressions which prove the plate, with all tonality achieved through line). This distinction, soon turned into a crisis of principle with ethical proscription forcibly expressed as Hamerton’s enthusiasm for Delatre’s peculiar interpretative mode cooled. The brainchild of professionalism as etching’s ultimate corrective was rejected , not in favor of modernism but of an etching morality.