Made to be Multiplied

Every sheet in this shop is a reproduction. These eleven are reproductions of things that were already reproductions — pictures made from a matrix, a block or a plate or a negative or a printing roller, and published so that they could travel to people who would never see the thing itself.

Dürer never saw a rhinoceros. He worked from a letter and a sketch, cut a block, and printed an animal that Europe went on believing in for two hundred years. Rembrandt's etching was made to be pulled again and again, and it was: his copperplates were still being printed from in the 1790s, a century after his death. Cellarius engraved the heavens on copper so that the two competing systems of the world could be laid side by side on one table. Audubon sold his flamingo by subscription to people who would never stand in a Florida marsh.

Talbot published The Pencil of Nature in parts, the first book illustrated with photographs, to prove that a picture could make itself and then be issued in numbers; when the salted paper turned out to fade he invented an engraving process so that photographs could be printed in ink instead, and the dandelion seeds here are one of the results. Morris printed his cloth from pear-wood blocks by the yard, on the argument that a good pattern is worth having in many houses rather than in one.

That is the tradition this shop belongs to. In 1849 the Arundel Society began sending chromolithographs to subscribers who would never see Assisi; around 1900 the German picture movement put reproductions on the walls of schools, on the argument that they would train the eye of a generation that would otherwise never see a good picture at all. None of those people were embarrassed. The argument is set out at length in What a Reproduction Was For.

What is not here, and why. Anna Atkins's cyanotypes and Talbot's photograms are contact images: each sheet was laid out and exposed by hand, one at a time, with no matrix in between. They belong to Cyanotype Prints rather than here. The Japanese woodblock prints are multiples in the fullest sense and have a collection of their own. This one is deliberately narrower: a picture cut or etched or engraved into something, and printed from it, so that it could be in more than one place at once.

Every sheet here names the collection that holds the original, its accession number and the file it was printed from. The measurements are in the sheet records.