stipple engraving

stipple engraving. A printmaking technique, a mixture of etching and engraving, in which the design is made up of countless small dots or flecks, producing softly graded tones. It derived from crayon manner, but instead of creating lines to reproduce the appearance of a drawing, the whole plate was covered with dots or flecks to build up varied tonal areas (as in crayon manner, however, stipple prints were often made in shades of red or brown). The basic design was created in etching, a needle being used to dot through the waxy ground; after the plate was bitten in acid, the ground was cleaned off it and the design was strengthed or modified with a burin.

Stipple engraving was evidently first used in 1774 by the English engraver William Ryland (1732–83), who had learnt crayon manner in Paris, and it remained almost entirely confined to England. Francesco Bartolozzi was the most famous exponent of the technique, and John Raphael Smith also used it a good deal. Sometimes it was combined with mezzotint, the other main tonal process of the time. The softness of effect it creates is somewhat similar to that of mezzotint, though with less depth of tone. Stipple yielded more impressions than mezzotint, as the plate did not wear down so quickly. It remained popular into the early years of the 19th century, but was then more or less superseded by lithography.

William Ryland, stipple's inventor, was engraver to George III and made a good deal of money from his work, but he lived extravagantly and he was executed for forging bills of exchange. The young William Blake is said to have foreseen this, turning down an apprenticeship with Ryland because he was repelled by him and remarking that he ‘looks as if he will live to be hanged’.