61. Colour printing

The volume of engravings ‘Fourfold spectacle of wonders’ by Johannes van Call consists of 71 plates, preceded by a title and the dedication to Friedrich August of Saxony, and his portrait. The four parts have their own titles (views along the river Rhine; of Het Loo and other palace gardens; of The Hague; of Amsterdam). Comparison with the other copy in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek shows that the dedication, the portrait and the four sub-titles are missing from the copy discussed here. On the other hand this copy is far more appealing, because it is printed in colour. Engravings from this period, coloured by hand after printing, are by no means rare. But here another technique has been used, invented by Johannes Teyler in 1688, because the colouring of engravings for the whole edition of a book after it had been printed, was time-consuming and expensive. Teyler (1648-after 1697), a man of many parts: philosopher, scholar, military man, artist, and inventor, developed a process for colour printing, which was later on named after him. It started with the copper plate in which the required picture was engraved in the usual way, but instead of inking it in black before starting to print, he used all sorts of colours: blue for sky and water, green for trees, brown for houses, red or blue for roofs, etc. This did not, however, mean the end of colouring by hand, as the Teyler Method involved too many operations and was not very artistic, although a skilful artist could achieve attractive results, as may be learned from the view of The Hague reproduced on the opposite page. It is an engraving by Johannes van Call (1656-1705?), born in Nijmegen, like Teyler, and his pupil for some time. Like the work of another of Teyler's pupils, Mattheus Berckenboom, his work was usually produced in Amsterdam by printers of artworks and maps such as Petrus Schenk or Gerhard Valk. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek copy was acquired in 1993; on the front fly-leaf is the signature of A. Loosjes Pz (1761-1818), the Haarlem poet, author and bookseller. 

Literature

• Johannes Teyler. Nederlandse kleurendruk rond 1700. Nijmegen 1961.