In Utagawa Hiroshige’s engravings, it is easy to see his mastery of colour printing technique and understand the future passion of Vincent van Gogh for the artist’s works. The epoch of fine Japanese woodcuts began. In the 18th century, Suzuki Harunobu became an oriental discoverer and master of colour engraving he enriched his technique with a variety of colours and shades, and won hearts with his magical female images from the Eight Parlour Views series. However, the indisputable leadership in the art of woodcut belongs to Japanese artists. The works by the German Hans Holbein the Younger from the Dance of Death series surprise with their carving elegance. His paintings of the Apocalypse series, The Life of Mary and Great Passions are the pinnacle of woodblock printing and unsurpassed masterpieces of graphic art. The largest European master of woodcuts was Albrecht Dürer, who developed a recognizable artistic language with hard expressive lines and knotty curls. In the second half of the 20th century, the technique lost its popularity and was preserved in individual author’s works. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Venetian Hugo da Carpi used a separate printing board for each shade of paint, and now the art history remembers him as the inventor of colour woodcut. In the 15th century, with the development of book printing, the tone woodcut method appeared, when image carrier did not wear out after tens of thousands of prints: the drawing was applied to a cross-section of a tree and the hard material ideally preserved and transmitted tiny details of the carving. Block printing became the first woodcut technique: the artist cut off the line of the drawing on both sides and black strokes “dominated” on the paper. ![]() The method appeared in China and the countries of the Ancient East in the 6th and 7th centuries, a century later it penetrated into Japan, and after five centuries it reached Europe. Then the artist applies paint to the board with a swab or roller, covers the protruding areas with colour, puts a sheet of paper and presses it with a press. ![]() The woodcut artist removes the “white” areas of the image, which should be absent in the print. The wood density and structure, the fiber resistance during cutting determine the line thickness and smoothness. ξύλον - tree, γρᾰ́φω - write) is the oldest type of engraving, a printing technique, in which artists carve their drawing on a wooden board.
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