People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1896 — ENEFELDER'S DISCOVERY. [ARTICLE]

ENEFELDER'S DISCOVERY.

The Great Value of Lithograph? In the World of Modern Art. The full signifloanoe of Senefelder’s great discovery, just 100 years ago, was not so much that a calcareous stone may be bitten by a weak solution of acid, so that tbe raised portion when greased (the surrounding parts being wet) may print in a press like a wood cnt-r-tbough-with a scraping, not a direot downward, pressure—but it consisted in tbe demonstration, in tbe first place, that prints from its surface may be reduplicated in vast numbers without visible deterioration, and in tbe seoond, and still more important, that eaoh such print is practically an original. Nay, more than this. As M. H. P. Dillon reminds me in a panegyric on his favorite art, tbe greatest merit of this method of preserving and indefinitely multiplying a drawing lies in the escape of the artist from the traduttore traditore—from misrepresentations by engraver or by camera. Indeed, when the artist has made his design upon the stone itself, each impression from it is as much the original as each and every photographic print taken from a negative is an original and not a copy of any other thing. Even when tbe artist has drawn upon transfer paper instead of on tbe stone (proceeding for convenience sake, wbioh, in the opinion of some purists, is held in a measure to invalidate the name of lithography as applied to it, though not thereby reflecting in any degree on tbe beauty of tbo work itself), tbe impressions taken are still originals, inasmnch as the actual work, tbe artist’s own lines and dots, have in dne course been transferred bodily by mechanical pressure to tbe surfaue of the stone, and this,tafter it has been inked and printed from, renders each proof then taken of equal excellence. And the point of it all is this, that nntil the stone is inked and a print taken the artist’s work is not complete; so that every print does really become a genuine original. -M. H. Spielmann in Scribner’s.