Featured Antique Art ID

Hello, I came across this beautiful old image at an estate sale. Wonder if anyone can tell me what kind of art this is, age, style, value (if any), etc. I think this must have been removed from a frame. Thank you in advance!

 

looks like a print.....
can u photo the whole item front and back?

 

It's a handpainted copperplate etching (print). Very pretty.

 

I believe it is a type of copperplate print, as @antidiem has said, using an aquatint ground. This way of preparing the plate produces the irregular squiggles you can see in the detail photo. It was probably colored by a process known as "á la poupée" ('with the doll'), where the printer used a bundle of cloth to dab colored inks on selected areas of the plate before printing.

According to Bamber Gascoigne (How to Identify Prints), "á la poupée inking was employed in the genre scenes of pretty milkmaids in cottage farmyards....which were fashionable in the late eighteenth century and which became briefly so valuable in the late nineteenth century that new prints of the same type were produced to meet the demand, using a pastiche eighteenth century style but the genuine á la poupée method of inking."

 

It looks more like a chromolithograph or possibly a stipple to me, aquatints tend to be composed of little hollow circles and I'm not seeing that

 

The effect can vary with the type of resistant material used, and how it was applied. But it would be helpful to see the entire image, the type of paper, and whether there is a plate mark.


Detail from Aquatint. W. H. Pyne. Masonry from Picturesque Groups for the Embellishment of Landscape. (London: M.A. Nattali, 1845). c. 1823. (Printed by J. Hill, 1845). 11 1/2 x 9 1/8" (29.2 x 23.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Richard Benson.
https://printedpicture.artgallery.yale.edu/intaglio-and-planographic-printing

 

Yes, that looks like one, see the little circles?

 

Her clothing is Regency era. Which doesn't mean, of course, that the work is.

Debora

 

I can't tell from these photos. It could be a type of chromo. I had this print:


I don't know the technique, but not intaglio, not aquatint:

 

In the aquatint example I posted, I see a variety of irregular forms, but I am not wedded to the idea.

 

Thank you for the detailed explanation, @2manybooks , I never realized the tint could be dab applied to keep the paper from wrinkling, but indeed. Thanks.
We can see where here eyes and some of her hair appear to have been inked in after the plate was pulled. I would simply call it a hand colored etching.

 

Yes, the most inclusive description. A variety of techniques were often used on the same print.

 

Bamber Gascoigne describes the use of stipple patterns to provide shading on commercial color lithographs (chromolithographs), noting that "The ordinary late nineteenth-century commercial lithograph, sometimes to the eye but certainly through a [magnifying] glass, will seem to have an advanced case of the measles."
These shading tints were first applied to the stone by hand with a pen and lithographic ink. In 1879 Benjamin Day, a New Jersey printer, developed transparent sheets embossed with a variety of tinting patterns which could be inked and pressed onto selected areas of the lithographic stone to produce various types of shading. These semi-mechanical "shading mediums" came to be called Ben Day mediums.

 

Interesting information. It doesn't look like measles to me but, as that description says, a means of providing shading tints.

I don't know if this is the technique used in OP's print, clearer photographs are needed and that image may well be intaglio, but this is another way that dots can occur on a print.

I've tagged that description on to my write-up of the print I had.

 

Wow, that’s a lot of info! Thank you. Here is a picture of the whole print and the cardboard? back that it is attached to...the print appears to be on very thin paper.

 

Thank you, I was wondering about the era of the scene!

 

Here is a close-up pic that may help.

 

Thank you so much. I have added more photos.

 

Thank you so much. I have added more photos.