Just as authors' holographic manuscripts are the closest physical connection that most book collectors are ever likely to have with deceased authors, so are hand-colored plates the closest physical connection that most book collectors are ever likely to have with deceased book illustrators.
What many book collectors do not realize, however, is that most hand-colored plates were in fact not colored by the illustrators who drew or engraved the printed images, but rather were usually the work of an anonymous watercolorist who, more often than not, was a woman or child working in what was an early assembly-line process. Moreover, hand-colored plates did not cease to be produced just because processes arose that could mechanically add color to printed plates.
As William Reese observes in an article about color-plate books produced for a 1999 exhibition of such books at The Grolier Club, up until the end of the 19th century
color in books represented luxury. Although advances in technology made color plates steadily more accessible to a wider (and increasingly affluent) audience, there was never a time when color was cheap. The big color plate books were extremely costly and only available to the rich. The modest uses of color in gift books and the like were a small taste of the lavish life for the less affluent. Book buyers wanted color and publishers strove to supply it. New methods steadily made color more affordable, primarily by substituting mechanical work for hand finishing, often at the cost of quality. The balance between the cost of production and the potential market largely determined what was published.
Hand-colored plates appear in books as early as the 15th century, as this plate from Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499) makes clear:
Hand-coloring was applied to plates that featured woodcuts and wood engraving (such as those found in Yale's 1492 copy of Gaerde der suntheit, a Low German translation of the 1485 Gart der Gesundheit, the first printed illustrated herbal)...
...to plates that featured copperplate engraving (such as those found in Carl Jablonsky and Johann Herbst's Natursystem aller bekannten in- und ausländischen Insecten, published as 11 volumes of text and 10 volumes of plates, 1783-1804)...
...to plates that featured lithography (such as those found in E. M. Cotton's 1921 title, Illustrations of the Flowering Plants and Ferns of the Falkland Islands, London: L. Reeve & Co.)...
...to plates that featured aquatint (such as those found in Henry Ellis' Journal of the Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China, Comprising a Correct Narrative of the Public Transactions of the Embassy, of the Voyage to and From China, and of the Journey From the Mouth of the Pei-Ho to the Return to Canton..., London: 1817)...
...to plates that featured steel engraving (such as those found in William Henry Bartlett's American Scenery, London: George Virtue, 1838-1840)...
Hand-colored plates feature in any number of books that have long been beloved by book collectors. As the above images suggest, many of the more notable of these are found among titles about travel, architecture, natural history and fashion. Such books are very rare and very expensive when found complete and in anything approaching Fine condition.
As we have noted in several previous posts about book illustration techniques, the reasons for this are twofold: (1) such books were very expensive to produce and thus were produced in limited quantities; (2) those limited quantities have been further reduced over the centuries by book breakers, who removed the plates from these books for resale as individual prints.
But all is not lost. Inexpensive books with hand-colored plates are still available in the marketplace if one knows where to look. Those publishers who sought to bring fine books to the masses--e.g., The Limited Editions Club--often published titles which featured plates that were hand-colored by the very illustrators who created the plates' images:
Many of these titles remain available in the marketplace for not much more than the cost of a few modern hardbacks....
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