Tonal Techniques: Aquatint

One of the primary methods Goya used to create areas of tone in his prints was dust ground (or dust grain) aquatint. He developed such a command over the technique, he produced several prints including Asta su abuelo (And so was his grandfather) from Los Caprichos solely in aquatint. (See fig. 18).

Various recipes for aquatint were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but generally they included asphaltum and rosin. Rosin is a solid form of resin obtained primarily from conifers. It is produced by heating fresh liquid resin to vapourize the volatile turpentine components. At room temperature it is solid and brittle, but it melts when heated. The components of aquatint were hand-ground with a pestle and mortar, the particle size varying depending on how much it was ground. Goya may have sifted the dust ground through a muslin bag, gently tapping or shaking it, the more closely it was held to the plate, the more concentrated the resulting layer of dust. Examination of his prints indicates he usually applied aquatint after etching had been completed using a hard ground. His work Disparate de bestia (Brute folly) is likely to have been created by firstly etching to denote the elephant, figures and dark surrounds on the plate. (See fig. 19). This would have been done with stopping out varnish on the plate in the oval-shaped area surrounding the elephant that appears white in the print. Once the lines were etched, the hard ground would be removed from the copperplate by rubbing with a rag and cleaning the plate to the point where a slightly greasy film remained on the surface providing a slight tackiness for the aquatint to adhere to.

A more novel and expedient method of applying aquatint Goya may have been familiar with, was to use a hairdresser’s powder machine and timber box as described in J.H. Green’s aquatint treatise:

“Get a deal box, with a lid rather larger than the plate it is to contain, and about six inches deep; at one end , make a circular hole, to receive the small end of a hair-dresser’s powder machine, which you must partially fill with resin, finely pulverized and sifted: the plate being laid with the face upwards in the box, cover it close to keep out the air; apply the machine to the hole, and work it the same manner that a hair-dresser uses it, until the plate is entirely covered.”³⁷

Goya sometimes applied aquatint in liquid form, by mixing the dry ingredients with alcohol and applying this ‘spirit ground’ to the copperplate with a brush.⁴⁰ Whether in powder of liquid form, aquatint was secured to the copperplate by heating which caused the tiny granules to melt, fusing them to the surface. All the areas of the plate covered by the melted ground were subsequently protected when the plate was exposed to the acid, but the little areas between the melted grains were vulnerable, and these were etched to form passages of reticulated pitting, the coarser the grain the larger the pits, and the finer the smaller the pits.³⁸ While the NGV collection does not include any of Goya’s copperplates, it does contain plates produced by other artists such as Lionel Lindsay which are very helpful for understanding aquatinting. (See figs. 21, 22 and 23).

Goya sometimes used different sized grains in the same print. For example, Disparate de miedo (Folly of Fear) has larger white dots randomly dispersed in the sky region that look like stars which were caused by larger granules of aquatint.³⁹ (See fig. 24). Coarsely ground aquatint has also been used in the upper right corner.

When it came time to ink the plate in preparation for printing, each pit would hold ink while the areas that had been protected by the aquatint would not. The ridges around the depressed pits of aquatint are vulnerable to wear as more impressions are pulled from the plate. The background region of Disparate volante (Flying Folly) has a mottled, indistinct appearance rather than a reticulated tonal appearance due to the aquatint becoming worn. (See fig. 25).