Learning the art of printmaking

Goya’s earliest known prints are reproductive etchings after Diego Velázquez. (See fig. 1). This project resulted in the production of sixteen prints and enabled him to explore the potential of aquatint, drypoint, roulette and burnishing.⁹ As his printmaking career developed, and he began creating original compositions, he invited his friend Ceán Bermúdez to examine proofs in progress and provide feedback.¹⁰ He also exchanged ideas with Leandro Fernández de Moratín that later materialized in his Los Caprichos series.¹¹

In 1792, Goya became seriously unwell and was taken to Càdiz to recuperate under the care of his friend and patron Sebastián Martínez who had an extensive print collection and library that included art treatises.¹² It is likely Goya was familiar with Abraham Bosse’s Treatise on the ways of engraving on copper, published in 1645, which was revised by Manuel de Rueda and published in Madrid in 1761 under the title Instrucción para gravar en cobre.¹³ (See figs. 2, 6, 7, 16 and 42).

Publications such as this provided artists with detailed instruction for making materials such as ink, etching grounds, stopping out varnishes and mordants such as aquafortis (commonly referred to as acid, it was a mixture of acid and water used for etching). Printing treatises also described techniques such as how to hold and sharpen the various tools, how long to leave the copperplate in the acid to achieve certain effects and how to apply grounds including the dust ground to produce aquatints. The technique of aquatint was popularised when two printmaking treatises were published in France in the late Seventeenth Century.¹⁴ The treatise Découverte du procédé de graver au lavis, published by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince in 1780, was particularly influential and in the years after its’ publication, several French printmakers, including Philibert-Louis Debucourt, were perfecting the art of aquatint. (See fig. 3).

To supplement the theoretical knowledge gleaned from treatises, Goya was given practical instruction by associates such as Bartolomé Sureda who, on returning from London in the mid 1790s, showed Goya the latest advancements in aquatint being developed by the publisher Rudolf Ackermann.¹⁵ He also had contact with court painters Juan Gálvez (who, by 1798 was described as a proficient aquatinter) and Fernando Brambila – both were producing aquatints in Zaragoza to document the atrocities suffered in this frontier city during the Peninsular War.¹⁶