Princely prints masterpieces in their own right

FOR centuries before the photograph was invented, prints created from wood or metal plates, laboriously carved or seared with acid, were the only way for artists to reproduce their greatest works.

Masterpieces from this old culture of printing, spanning 500 years of European art will be on show at the National Gallery of Scotland this weekend.

The works run from masters such as Drer and Rembrandt, to later Scottish artists such as David Young Cameron or Sir David Wilkie. They represent the cream of a national collection of 30,000 prints and drawings. Many have not been on show for years.

Highlights include Albrecht Drer's Adam and Eve. He was so proud of the extraordinary 1504 engraving that he featured his own name and the date on a sign hanging in the garden of Eden.

Valerie Hunter, the National Galleries' senior curator of prints and drawings, called it the first modern print. Drer would have created it line by line with tiny scratches on a copper plate.

"When this print was in existence there was no Edinburgh, there was no New Town, there must have been just a ridge going up to the castle. This was here before all of us," she said.

"Every little flick, every nuance in there has been done with a tiny little line by Drer, scratching tiny little flicks from the copper plate," she said.

Woodcut prints, lithographs from a drawing on stone, etchings using acid to create a printing plate, or engravings where the artist scratched directly on the metal, were all used to make accessible copies of artworks. They became an art in themselves.

But the old print culture of western Europe has died out in the era of the colour photocopy, one expert noted recently.

"Until relatively recent times, everyone would understand what a print was, and its role," wrote the British Museum curator Antony Griffiths. It was now something "strange and incomprehensible".

"Today people are perhaps not quite clear what print-making was," echoed Ms Hunter. "Up until about the invention of photography it was the only way that artists could get their work circulated."

The National Galleries of Scotland, and other major museums, are increasingly moving to keep alive their vast collections of prints by putting them online.

"E-tours" of collections and exhibitions makes them accessible across the world, not just to those who make an appointment to look through the works in store. The NGS has embraced this "galleries without walls" concept.

The Printmakers Art exhibition, open to the public from tomorrow, curated by Hannah Brocklehurst, includes 30 of the most beautiful and accomplished prints ever made. As well as Drer's Adam and Eve, there is his famous woodcut The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and Rembrandt's tour-de-force etching, The Three Crosses, of Christ on Calvary.

One of the largest plates Rembrandt ever made, it shows the thief crucified with Christ, who has repented, bathed in light. In the shadows is the dark image of a rearing horse, which Ms Hunter believes inspired part of Picasso's famous painting Guernica.

Francisco de Goya's dark and strange A woman and a horse is based on an old Spanish tale in which a man, who has been turned into a horse, falls in love with the woman and abducts her. In the picture the animal hoists the woman up with his teeth. The works are rich in detail. Adam and Eve shows cats racing after mice, the serpent pushing the apple out of Eve's hand.

"To get all the details you really have to look at it through a magnifying glass," said Ms Hunter.

With James Whistler's eerie etching Nocturne, the shadowy, moonlit scene was created by the way the artist wiped the paint across the surface of the plate.

In the 19th century Sir David Wilkie was one of the first Scottish artists to embrace the art of etchings. The Lost Receipt, from 1825, shows a man in a dressing-gown and cap rummaging in the drawers of his bureau, his wife looking over his shoulder and another man waiting, hat in hand.

ARTISTIC LINE-UP

AMONG works by Rembrandt and Durer, other highlights of the prints and etchings in The Printmaker's Art exhibition include Sir David Wilkie's The Lost Receipt, including the copper plate used to make it.

Another Scottish artist is represented by Sir David Young Cameron, whose Ben Lomond from 1923 was one of 520 prints he produced, mostly of landscapes and architecture.

William Hogarth's Gin Lane, from 1750, shows the evils of drink in a London slum in a period when the "gin craze" swept England, offering the working-classes a cheap and readily available spirit.

A poster print by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is one of the Elles series he created showing the daily lives of prostitutes in their homes, washing or dressing. In this 1896 print, a woman is shown unknotting her hair before a full-length mirror.