'With ink, a rag, and his two arms': Inking the Matrix in Nineteenth-Century France

This paper considers the practices of Auguste Delâtre and Ludovic Napoléon Lepic, both widely known in mid-nineteenth-century France for their distinctive handling of print matrices. In the 1860s, Delâtre printed moody impressions of works by the Etching Revivalists using his preferred technique of retroussage, an "interpretive" approach to inking that involves pulling ink out of etched lines with a rag and onto the surface of the plate. I examine Delâtre's inking technique and its reception, arguing that his work as a master printer destabilized received hierarchies of style. In particular, I show how it led artists and critics to treat the inking of the matrix as the definitive, creative act in the production of original prints, rather than the plate's inscription. Turning to Lepic and his process of "eau-forte mobile," I argue that Lepic pursued this logic to its end while trying to reverse its consequences. Combining etching and monotype inking, and bypassing the intervening work of a master printer, Lepic self-consciously pushed the expressive potential of ink beyond the evident requirements of the etched composition. Rendering forms with ink directly on the inscribed matrix, Lepic literalized inking as artistic: inking no longer represented an “interpretive” stage in the hands of a printer, but the artist's act of image-making itself. Between these practitioners, the inked matrix gains significance not as an intermediary step in the production of a finished impression, but as the decisive gesture mediating between artistic value and non-artistic craft labor, individual authorship and collaboration.