Lente 1811 - 1867

Julien-Léopold Boilly made this print, “Lente”, using etching and aquatint. Here, the graphic arts come into their own. Boilly has taken etching, a linear medium, and combined it with aquatint to produce an image with a complex, painterly range of tones. Look closely, and you’ll see the incredibly fine matrix of marks that comprise the image, all achieved by laborious handwork. You can see that there are some tonal shifts and fading. That’s because aquatint, though capable of beautiful effects, isn’t the most stable of processes. Boilly likely would have been assisted by a professional printer in realizing this image, an example of collaboration across the fields of design, craft, and visual art. In the end, it is the very nature of printmaking – its dependence on skilled labor, and its capacity for dissemination – that gives this work its unique historical significance.