A hand-colored print was printed in black ink, then colored by hand, usually with watercolor. Before the 1800s, almost all color on prints and maps was added this way. A color print is different: it gets its color from the press itself.
How prints were colored
Colorists brushed watercolor onto the printed image. The earliest woodcuts were made to be colored, by hand or with stencils. Luxury copies, especially of atlases, sometimes got gold highlights.
Who did the coloring
Publishers often had maps colored in house or hired colorists to do it. Buyers could also hire a colorist, and some collectors colored prints themselves. Color raised the price: a printer could sell the same map plain or colored, and the colored version cost more.
Original and later color
Color added when a print was published is called original color. Color added years later, by an owner or a dealer, is called later color.
Printed in color, finished by hand
Some prints mixed both methods. In à la poupée printing, the printer dabbed 2 or more colors of ink onto 1 plate, and colorists then finished the details by hand. À la poupée means “with the doll,” after the small wad of cloth used to ink the plate. In the mid-1800s, color printing, especially chromolithography, began to replace hand-coloring.
Hand-colored pieces in our collection
Johann Heinrich Sulzer’s book on insects, published in 1776, came with 32 hand-colored copper plates engraved by J. R. Schellenberg. Our Butterflies, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera and Scarabaeus come from it. Our Draco and Ursa Minor comes from Urania’s Mirror, a set of hand-colored constellation cards by Sidney Hall, with holes pricked for the stars. Our Oleander comes from Phytographie médicale, whose stipple engravings were printed in color, then finished by hand. They are in our natural history art, historical art and botanical art collections.
