The Stone Lithography Story

Aloys Senefelder (1771-1834) invented stone lithography in 1798.  After much experimentation, he achieved the best results using a greasy crayon on Bavarian limestone, and called his new process chemical printing or stone lithography. The stone used in lithographic printing is a very fine-grained, compact limestone, found only in the Jura Mountains of Bavaria.

Stone lithography depends on the mutual repulsion of grease and water. After a design is drawn on the limestone with greasy inks or crayons, the whole surface is dampened. The surface helps to hold the water, while the ink repels it. The surface is then rolled with printing ink that sticks to the greasy drawing, but not to the wet surface of the untouched stone.

Senefelder’s was the first flat surface or plano-graphic printing process. Lithography differs from other printing processes in that the impression is taken from a completely flat surface.

Creating images was a time-consuming, arduous task requiring many skilled craftsmen. It started with a line drawing (basically an outline lacking detail), which was then transferred onto the stone. The artwork on the stone must appear in mirror image of the actual drawing. The artist then would add the needed detail. A print requiring multiple colors would need trace registration marks, which allowed each subsequent drawing (each color required a separate drawing on the stone) to be perfectly aligned with the previous drawing and printing.

This process was initially used for commercial printing, especially for duplicating scripts and book illustrations. Artists realized that this medium was also an excellent way to create multiple images; Delacroix and Goya, among others, mastered the technique. Later, painters such as Picasso, Miro and Chagall embraced lithography to create fine art. Today, hand-printed lithographs are created by artists around the world and are held in high regard as original works of art.

Color printing on stone is called chromolithography. In the 19^th century, chromolithography became the chief means of inexpensively reproducing works of art in color and illustrating books and magazines. Though laborious, stone lithography could produce thousands of elegant images without image degradation. This new technique soon became more popular than steel or copper engravings, which lost image sharpness after only 30-50 prints were pulled.

The first private American organization to sell stone-produced prints was founded by Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888). He and partner, James Ives (1824-1895), became print makers to the American people, and were better known as Currier & Ives.

Stone lithography in America reached its zenith with the work of Louis Prang, who came to Boston from Germany. Prang made lithographs that used as many as 44 separate stones. He also was the first to add embossing and imitation brush strokes; he pioneered a lacquering process for utmost realism and dimension.

Prang’s chromolithographs consisted of intermingled solid blocks of colors placed side by side in small color areas, creating a complete range of hues and tints capable of reproducing the entire color spectrum. This technique, called crayon chromo-lithography, was used to create most labels produced in the 1870s.

Later, stone lithography became even more sophisticated with the use of hand stippling, the process of applying a series of intermingled dots to the image on the stone to produce variant degrees of shading. Each image would have thousands of hand-applied stipple dots when it was finished. This concept, when used with color, produced a highly accurate rendition of the artist’s original image.