THE EARLIEST EUROPEAN WOODCUTS appeared about 1400, at about the same time that paper became cheaply available. Such prints were commonly single sheets depicting biblical scenes intended for inexpensive sale at religious shrines. Most consisted of single-colour (usually black) impressions onto which coloured paints were brushed or stencilled by hand.
The earliest known multicolour woodcut was produced in 1482 by Erhard Ratdolt (1462-1523), who mastered the skills necessary for printing separately inked blocks in accurate alignment. By 1510, Lucas Cranach (1472-1553) had begun to produce high-quality chiaroscuro woodcuts, consisting of a key outline block with additional blocks for highlighted and shadowed areas, printed on tinted paper. A similar technique, but omitting printed outlines, was introduced independently by Ugo da Carpi (c. 1480-1525) and perfected by Hendrik Goltzius (1558-1617), notably in the depiction of landscape.

In Japan, an alternative approach to colour woodcut was invented by Suzuki Harunobu (1725-70) and employed by Kitagawa Hokusai (1760-1849). In England, a method of obtaining subtly coloured wood engravings, by combining up to 20 separately inked blocks, was patented by George Baxter (1804-67) in 1835.

Though copperplate engraving did not lend itself easily to the production of multicolour prints, a method of full-colour picture reproduction by mezzotint, utilising the red, yellow, and blue primary colours, was patented in 1719 by Jacob Le Blon (1667-1741). The same principle was transferred to the medium of lithography by Godefroy Engelmann (1788-1839) in 1837, and subsequently combined with new photographic processes to form the basis of modern trichromatic half-tone printing, introduced by Frederic Ives (1856-1937) in the USA in the 1880s.

The first important artistic application of chromolithography was by Thomas Boys (1803-74) in a publication dated 1839. With the invention of lithography (1798), the printer was for the first time able to combine freely painted gesture with large, unbroken areas of colour. This freedom was exploited by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), who, with Edvard Munch (1863-1944), produced the most artistically outstanding multicolour prints of the nineteenth century.

In the twentieth century, a method of stencil colour printing known as ëpochoirí was employed for example by Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979). It was directly superseded by the extensive development of screen printing (serigraphy), employed in the 1960s by numerous Pop Artists, notably Andy Warhol (1930-86). Contemporary developments employ derivatives of the Jetgraph (1985) and produce impressions composed of tiny jets of trichromatic inks released in response to signals conveyed from images composed on a digital computer screen.

RO