CAPÍTULO IV: LAS RESPUESTAS DE LA ADMINISTRACIÓN
2. A nivel regional: El Plan para la Integración Social de las Personas
The introduction of wove papers in eighteenth-century print culture made possible the production of high-quality works across a variety of alternative and diverse fields. For instance, wove paper had not been designed as a drawing paper but, by the end of the eighteenth century, it was widely implemented as such. Blake used wove papers for drawings and paintings throughout the 1780s, selecting Whatman jnr.’s papers in a series of watercolour paintings (which focussed on Joseph and his Brethren) which were
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1785. Thus, while Blake was certainly introduced to Whatman jnr.’s papers during his apprenticeship to Basire, it appears that Blake’s first uses of wove papers in his own works were in watercolour paintings and not in the production of prints. This distinction is important because it reveals that Blake’s selection of wove papers in his illuminated prints was not motivated entirely by the benefits of this paper to printing in relief: because Blake coloured his prints by hand with watercolours, “Illuminating the Manuscript” (Blake Island 465) until at least 1795, an exploration of the relationships between the colouring and materiality of Blake’s prints might help us to understand why Blake adopted wove papers in his illuminated books.
Viscomi argues that Blake applied a selection of home-made watercolours to his prints “sequentially, while still part of a pile of impressions.” He illuminated pages in “an assembly-line manner” (Book 131) by using the same colours and applying the same stylistic features to each sheet. Thus, similar washes of colour appeared in issues which were printed as a part of the same edition: prints such as “The Little Black Boy” from copies B and G of the Songs of Innocence and plate six from copies I and J of Visions of the Daughters of Albion were “more alike than different” (Viscomi Book 131). For the most part, the washes of colour in these prints had an even finish: that is, their colours were not interrupted by brush marks, uneven textures, or pools of pigments. The clarity of this finish can be attributed to the even surface of the wove page. Watercolours which had been executed on laid sheets sometimes suffered because of the depressions which disfigured the surfaces of laid papers. These depressions were caused by the thick wires of the paper maker’s mould, the raised lengths of which disturbed the even distribution of stuff. The use of a laid mould usually resulted in sheets which were thinner at the points were pulp had rested on the raised wires.
The inconveniences of these furrows frustrated artists frequently: in pencil drawings, graphite sometimes failed to penetrate chain lines; similarly, in watercolours, pools of pigment occasionally gathered in these depressions. Thomas Gainsborough’s Travellers on Horseback Approaching a Village with a Spire (c. 1770) and Figures in a Wooden Landscape
(1785) [Fig. 4] demonstrate the problems of using laid papers in both watercolour paintings and in pencil drawings. Gainsborough was so disgruntled by the unintentional disfigurations of laid papers that, while corresponding with James Dodsley—brother and partner of Robert Dodsley, publisher of Baskerville’s Virgil—he requested that the bookseller send him some quires of Whatman jnr.’s wove paper:
I should take it as a particular favour if you would send me half a Dozn. Quire of
the same sort of Paper as the . . . new Bath Guide is printed on, it being what I have long been in search of for making wash’d Drawings upon; I shall be in Town about Xmas & will call to pay you for it. There is so little impression of the Wires, and those so very fine, that the surface is like Vellum.
Unfortunately, Gainsborough’s request was not met by Dodsley.31
Blake avoided the problems encountered by Gainsborough and other contemporary arists by using wove papers in his works. According to Scott Wilcox, “the Whatman innovation of wove paper seemed a godsend” (15) to artists:
Wove paper, with its smooth surface free from the chain and laid lines produced by traditional paper moulds, was ideal for an even wash of watercolour. This was unquestionably a major development for topographical artists working in a combination of fine pen lines and pale washes of colour; but at the same time that wove paper was becoming widely used as an artists’ paper . . . the watercolor
drawing of the topographers was being supplanted by watercolor painting. (8)
Blake’s use of wove papers in watercolour paintings during the 1780s predated the use of wove papers by other contemporary artists such as John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, probably because he had already become familiar with Whatman jnr.’s papers while being trained as a precision draughtsman by Basire. Balston has noted that wove paper “attracted the attention, at any early date, of draughtsmen engaged in precision drawing” and “engineering” (Wove 250). There was “a definite shift among draughtsmen away from laid paper to wove during the last two decades of the 18th C” (Wove 251). It is
likely that Blake’s training as a draughtsman made him aware of wove papers earlier than most. Therefore, when Blake started to produce watercolour paintings for exhibition at the Royal Academy in the 1780s, he returned to the medium that he knew best: namely, Whatman jnr.’s papers, a medium which was perfectly suited to watercolour paintings. Thus, Blake’s method of colouring his illuminated books from c. 1789 to 1785—by watercolour painting—was made possible by his choices of paper.
Blake’s return to using wove papers in copper engravings might have been the result of the growing reputation of these papers in both typographic and illustrated books. Wove sheets had functioned as a symbol of quality in not only material terms but also in literary and artistic terms since the original appearance of this paper in 1757. During the 1760s, wove papers were used exclusively by James Dodsley, Dryden Leach, and Jacob Tonson, each of whom used Whatman jnr.’s papers as a support for their fine typographical works. Other publishers began to use wove papers in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Works such as Richard Shepherd’s The Ground and Credibility of the Christian Religion in a Course of Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (1788) and A Key to the Old Testament and Apocrypha (1790) were “Elegantly printed on a fine wove Paper” (Public Advertiser April 29 1790). Moreover, following the success of Basire’s use of Whatman
31
Scott Wilcox acknowledges that “the ‘furrows’ of which” Gainsborough “complained to Dodsley are evident in the sky of Travellers” and Peter Bower has noted that Figures in a Wooden Landscape (1785) had “a very prominent laid impression from the mould” (“Evolution” 62).
jnr.’s wove papers in his copper-plate engravings in the late 1770s, publishers began to use wove papers in illustrated books. The most important of these, Josiah Boydell’s edition of William Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works (1791-1805), played a decisive role in popularizing the use of wove papers by engravers. Boydell’s folio was published as a part of the Shakespeare Gallery scheme: a project which, according to Morris Eaves, used “the best poet” as the subject matter for “the best painters.” Their works were then “engraved by the nation’s best engravers” and printed on “the best paper” by “the best printers” (57). Blake was not asked to contribute. In any case, the Dramatic Works quickly inspired imitators: the illustrations from Thomas Macklin’s folio edition of the Bible (1790) and Robert Bowyer’s illustrated edition of David Hume’s The History of England
(1792) were both printed on Whatman jnr.’s wove papers. Much like Boydell’s folio, each of these works employed the nation’s best engravers.
Blake’s use of wove paper during the late 1780s and early 1790s was opportune. While Blake’s desire to use wove papers was not inspired by Boydell’s edition of Shakespeare, his use of wove papers in copper-engraved illustrated books might have been provoked by Boydell’s announcement of the impending Shakespeare Gallery. The production and sale of Blake’s illuminated books during the late 1780s and 1790s, then, coincided with the development of a fashion for illustrated books which were printed on wove papers.