Friday 24 September 2010

Aubrey Beardsley

I was wondering do many people know the difference between sheet fed gravure printing and platinum printing nowadays?

The image directly below is a gravure reproduction of a platinotype. I think Laurence Aberhart is the only local camera artist to experiment much with platinum printing. It is so archaic and difficult to produce.


The additional image below is of a platinum platinotype. See how much warmer it is. Gravure is known for its ability to render black as dark as the tone named surmey.

The portrait was made by Frederick Evans in 1894. His sitter is Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), the most gifted English illustrator of his generation. This is the epitome of fin-de-siecle aesthetic portraiture, he is posed so carefully and the studio's natural light is falling directly from above. One never sees close-up portraits like this in 2010. (Courtesy of a private collection).


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