GILCHRIST & ELECTROTYPE

Image from electrotype
Songs of Experience
London

 This image is from a screen print of a page in Gilchrist's Life of William Blake:

Alexander Gilchrist was a young man trained in the law when he became interested in studying and writing about William Blake. Gilchrist at the age of 32 had already been working on a life of Blake for six years. Born in the year following Blake's death, Gilchrist lived when memories of Blake were available among those with whom he had been acquainted. In a systematic way Gilchrist pursued the task of gathering all the first hand information which was available.

Alexander Gilchrist died in 1860, at the age of 33 from scarlet fever, leaving his biography unfinished. Three years later his wife Anne, with the help of others such Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published the book Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus. Volume II includes 15 plates from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and 22 plates from the Illustrations of the Book of Job.

Karen Mulhallen wrote in Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G.E. Bentley Jr about the way in which Blake's images were put into Gilchrist's Life of Blake:

"Alexander Gilchrist had electrotypes made from Blake's original Copper plates which were subsequently lost."

Printing through the use of electrotype plates was a technology which had been invented sometime around 1838. It was a way of replacing the process of hand engraving of additional plates for printing with a process which was more automated and more accurate.

Electrotyping is a process through which an accurate copy of an original copper plate can be duplicated. A mold of the original plate is made using a pliable material such as wax or latex. The surface of the mold is then coated with a thin layer of fine graphite powder of paint to make it capable of conducting electricity. By attaching wires to the coated mold and to an electric current, then immersing it in an electrolyte, copper ions from the electrolyte are deposited on the mold, duplicating in copper the original plate.

Through using this process, the images which were recorded in Blake's relief engravings on copper were printed in the Gilchrist book.

Blake's original copper plates for the Illustration to the Book of Job are preserved in the British Museum because they remained in the possession of John Linnell and his descendants until they were given to the British Museum in 1919. The Blake plates from which the 15 images for the Songs of Innocence and of Experience which appeared in Gilchrist's Life, and from which the electrotypes were made, were later lost or destroyed. The electrotype plates used to produce the images in Gilchrist's Life in 1863, were destroyed by the publisher Macmillan in 1960's. Before that, however, another set of electrotypes had been made for Geoffrey Keynes. Keynes donated his set to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1955.

The Gilchrist Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus is available through the Internet Archive. The images from Illustrations for the Book of Job and from Songs of Innocence and of Experience are found after Page 358 of Volume II.

Public Address, (E 571) 

"I account it a Public Duty respectfully to address myself to
The Chalcographic Society & to Express to them my opinion the
result of the incessant Practise & Experience of Many Years That
Engraving as an Art is Lost in
England owing to an artfully propagated opinion that Drawing
spoils an Engraver  I request the
Society to inspect my Print of which Drawing is the Foundation &
indeed the Superstructure   it is Drawing on Copper as Painting
ought to be Drawing on Canvas or any other & nothing Else 

I request likewise that the Society
will compare the Prints of Bartollouzzi Woolett Strange &c with
the old English Portraits that is Compare the Modern Art with
the Art as it Existed Previous to the Enterance of Vandyke &
Rubens into this Country
 & I am sure the Result  will be that
the Society must be of my Opinion that Engraving by Losing
Drawing has Lost all Character & all Expression without which
Art is Lost."