Transfer of drawings onto copperplates: Hard ground
Goya filled many albums with his drawings, translating the first series of these into intaglio prints with the publication of Los Caprichos in 1799.25 There are several methods for transferring a drawing onto a copperplate matrix, but in most cases, the first stage is preparing the plate with a ground layer.26 A ground is a waxy, acid resistant material that is applied by heating the copperplate so the ground melts and can be spread evenly over the surface. Several types of ground are used for various purposes, hard ground being suited to etching.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most hard ground recipes contained wax (such as beeswax or ‘white’ wax), asphaltum, and resin such as Burgundy pitch (an extrusion from the Norway or European spruce) or gum such as gum mastic. Grounds were laborious to prepare, requiring the gradual amalgamation of the ingredients before bringing to them boil and letting the mixture cool so the resulting mass could be kneaded into balls and wrapped in silk.27 To apply the ground, the copperplate was heated, and the ground placed on the surface, slowly melting so it could be spread evenly over the plate. As J.H. Green instructed in his treatise The Complete Aquatinter, the ground should be spread ‘all over the plate with the dabber…’ which was made ’of cotton, wrapped up tight in lustring, or other silk’.28
If the ground had been applied correctly, it would be ’of a pale golden colour, showing the shine of the copper well through it.’29 The ground was sometimes darkened with smoke to enhance its’ contrast with the gleaming exposed copper lines when the artist was transferring the composition onto the plate.30 (See fig. 6).
Some of Goya’s drawings have blackened platemarks indicating he may have used a hard ground that had been smoked.31 Goya’s preferred method of transferring a chalk drawing onto a copperplate involved dampening the paper, placing the work face down on top of a copperplate and passing them through the printing press.32 Some of the friable chalk media would transfer onto the ground, providing a vague guide for him to the follow with his etching needle. It is not surprising that some of the smoked hardground on the edges of the plate transferred onto the drawing in the process.33
Stephanie Loeb Stepanek (et.al) Goya: Order & Disorder, p. 15.
Ground recipes abound in printing treatises with nearly 40 recipes covering the variables of hard grounds, spirit grounds, dust grounds and mixed spirit grounds. J.H. Green (1810) The Complete Aquatinter, pp.1-9. https://archive.org/details/completeaquatint00gree/page/n5/mode/2up?ref=ol&view=theater, accessed 20 May 2021
J.H. Green, op.cit., p. 1.
J.H. Green op.cit., p17. Dabbers are also referred to as daubers or ink balls.
P.G. Hamerton (1871) The Etcher’s Handbook, p.3.
ibid.
Tomas Harris, op.cit., p 24.
Jesusa Vega op.cit., p. 48 and Tomas Harris, op.cit., p. 39.
This was not the conventional manner of transferring drawings onto the printing matrix. J.H. Green suggests pasting tracing paper onto the verso of the drawing, holding the drawing against a window to use transmitted light to trace the composition. He suggested using black lead pencil to trace the composition onto the tracing paper, remove the tracing paper, dampen it and place it face down on the plate (ground side up) before running the plate through the press. He writes, ‘you will have all the outlines reversed on the ground, appearing the colour of silver’. J.H. Green, op.cit., p 17.