The Design Language of Chromolithography

Chromolithography spread like a wild fire to other nations after it ignited in Boston. By 1860 about 80 chromolithography firms employed 800 people. That figure grew to 700 firms employing over 8 000 people by 1890.

Letterpress printers and admirers of fine typography and printing were appalled that the design of a chromolithographic printing block was done on the artist’s drawing board instead of the compositor’s metal press bed. Chromolithography was free of traditions and lacked the restrictions of a letterpress. For this reason designers could exploit an unlimited palette of bright, vibrant colors and invent any letterform that tickled their fancy. 

The liveliness of this revolutionary printing process stemmed directly from the imaginations of the talented artists who created the original designs and the competent craftsmen who translated these originals onto not only one stone, but up to 20 separate color plates. The colored inks that were applied to these stones were overprinted in perfect registration (being perfectly aligned), reproducing up to thousands of perfect replicas of the original art pieces. 

The poster of the rotary lithography press featured in my previous post showcases this new spontaneity in lettering. The lines of the lettering became elastic, enabling text to read at an angle or in an arc or even overlap images. Gradients started to exist in lettering and backgrounds. Borders and frames were free to curve and notch as they wished. This process allowed for a more illustrative approach to public communications.

Traveling entertainment groups such as circuses and carnivals acquired big and bold posters to announce their arrival. They favored dramatic illustrations with bold, yet simple, lettering that appeared on bright backgrounds and borders. These posters presented the Victorian love for allegory and personification as seen in the figure below. With these shows demanding bolder posters another style of presenting imagery developed and it was called a montage. Now, a montage uses complex three-dimensional ornaments and ribbons as compositional devices to unify the layouts by tying contrasting images together.

Complex montages were used to promote these traveling amusements, literary works and theatrical performances. They engaged viewers. In comparison to the more contemporary posters, these posters were designed for greater viewing time because of the slow-pace life of the 19thcentury as well as the relative lack of competition from other color printing firms.

Krebs Lithographing Company, poster for the 
Cincinnati Industrial Exposition, 1883. 
A buoyant optimism in industrial progress is conveyed.

By the 1850's the letterpress printers attempted to retaliate against their lithographic competition by producing signboards with heroic and ingenious efforts to extend their medium. Through his work, James Reilley designed ingenious ways to increase the pictorial impact of the letterpress poster. In France, a collaboration between letterpress poster houses and lithographic printers occurred when colorful lithographic illustrations were pasted onto large wood-type posters. A poster that displays this collaboration perfectly is the "Cirque d'hiver" (Winter Circus) poster in 1871. A lithographer was commissioned, by the Morris Père et Fils printing firm, to illustrate an acrobatic dance act called The Butterflies (Les Papillons). This amazing act features two young ladies, one black and the other white, being flung through the air. Emile Levy illustrated these performers as two surreal female butterflies. 

Morris Père et Fils (Letterpress Printing firm), Emile Levy
(Lithographer), "Cirque d'hiver" poster 1871.


With the wide spread use of chromolithography the importance of packaging and labels increased. Lithographic printing of tin cans was presenting unnecessary technical difficulties. Non-porous metals simply didn’t absorb the ink. Sheet metal and stone printing surfaces also offered a can full of flexibility challenges. By 1850 transfer-printing methods were being invented. During these processes a reversed image was printed onto thin paper and then transferred onto sheet metal under great pressure. The paper was then soaked off which left the printed images on the tin plate.


Package designs chromolithographed on tin for food and tobacco packages used bright 
flat colors, elaborate lettering, and iconic images to create an emblematic presence for the product

 Robert Barclay, an Englishman, invented offset lithographic printing on tin in 1875. His process started off with an image drawn on a stone and then inked. A nonabsorbent cardboard impression cylinder then picked up this image. From there it’s immediately transferred to a sheet of metal.  On a later stage Barclay started using a rubber-coated cylinder to fix the image to the metal.

By the end of the 19th century the hey days of chromolithography was coming to an end due to the change in public tastes. The development of photoengraving completely replaced the hand made printing stones required for chromolithography. This printing process officially died an honorable death in 1897 when Prang merged his firm with Clark Taber & Company, a printing firm specializing in the new photographic methods of reproducing artwork. Also, the famous lithographic art reproduction firm of Currier and Ives sadly went bankrupt.


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