Lithography: a planographic (flat surface) printing process that makes use of the immiscibility of grease and water

Alois Senefelder, the founder of lithography

Alois Senefelder was a German actor and playwright who invented the printmaking technique of lithography in 1796.

After problems printing his play Mathilde von Altenstein forced Senefelder into debt, he experimented with a novel etching technique using a greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist on a smooth fine-grained stone of Solnhofen limestone. He then discovered that this could be extended to allow printing from the flat surface of the stone alone, the first planographic processin printing.

Senefelder was also able to use the potential of lithography as a medium for art because lithography allowed the artist to draw directly onto the plate with familiar pens.

Alois Senefelder’s contribution ranks alongside William Ged’s invention of stereotyping, Friedrich Koenig’s steam press and Ottmar Mergenthaler’s linotype machine in its innovative effect. His invention made printing more affordable and available to more people, and it was important in art and newspaper printing.

History of Printmaking - Did you know?

Did you know?

• Printmaking originated in China after paper was invented (Circa A.D. 105)
• Stone rubbing predates any form of woodcut
• The earliest known Chinese woodcut containing both text and image is a famous Buddhist scroll of the Diamond Sutra (created around AD 868, currently on view at London’s British Museum)
• The history of Japanese prints is linked with the art history of China and the relief technique invented there
• With the establishment of paper mills throughout Germany, France and Italy in the fifteenth century, the first Western woodcuts were created
• By the mid-16th century, prints were very popular throughout Europe (especially those of, or replicating the work of Albrecht Durer, Lucas van Leyden, Andrea Mantegna, and Marcantonio Raimondi)
• At the turn of the 18th century, when Paris was Europe’s artistic center, artists like Francois Boucher and Jean Honore Frangonard documented court life in drawings and sketches. These works were then transformed into engravings by influential publishers.
• Until the 18th Century, England had not developed great strength in the graphic arts
• From the 1860s to the end of the 19th century, the Japanese print exerted an enormous influence on the art and artists of the time (including those of the West)
• Philadelphia artist Mary Cassat studied and lived in Paris, where she developed expert technique in drypoint, etching and aquatint during the late 19th century
• America’s Ashcan School was the nation’s first art movement to break away from European styles. John Sloan and Edward Hopper’s etchings, along with George Bellows’ lithographs, were the first American prints to document the vitality of urban life through all classes (capturing everything from squalor to grandeur)