Hand-colored prints. (Current and Coming).(exhibit Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts )

Northern Renaissance prints immediately bring to mind Albrecht Durer, whose bard-edged engraved lines and seemingly infinite cross-hatchings give his prints extraordinary depth and tonal qualities. Color seems entirely unnecessary. Not so in Durer's own time. Susan Dackerman, the curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, and her colleague Thomas Primeau, the associate paper conservator, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, have discovered that many prints made during this time were brightly colored by hand. Until now these prints were thought to have been colored long after they were issued--a supposition that Dackerman and Primeau have proved erroneous. Their groundbreaking findings form the basis of a traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue entitled Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts. The show is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 6 through January 5,2003. It then travels to the Saint Louis Art Museum where it may be seen from February 14 to May 18. The show includes more than one hundred works from public and private collections in Europe and the United States. The purposes of the exhibition as Outlined in Dackerman's catalogue essay are: "To overturn several assumptions: that the addition of color to prints was merely a means to remedy technical deficiencies, that the addition of color obliterated the superior printed matrix, and that the addition of color was separate from the printed design."

The art of coloring prints flourished from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth century The exhibition features the work of Durer through twenty-seven pairings of colored and black-and-white prints. The colored examples ...