Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, by Douglas Fordham

Early in Aquatint Worlds, Douglas Fordham quotes Paul Ricoeur’s observation, in 1955, that “the discovery of the plurality of cultures is never a harmless experience”. It suddenly “becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins…where shall we go this weekend – visit the Angkor ruins or take a stroll in the Tivoli of Copenhagen?”

Aquatint travel books (works that included text but in which images were primary) might be expected to induce a similar feeling. Fordham, however, sets out to chart the “loose, yet discernible, set of parameters” that allowed individual books to make sense of the world in a less divagatory manner. William Alexander’s Costume of China (1804), for example, “documented scenes of everyday life in a world of latent commercial potential”, while Samuel Daniell’s African Scenery and Animals (1804-05) “brought a pre-colonial world back to life”.

For much of the period when such books were produced (roughly the 1790s to the 1820s), a large part of Europe was closed to Britons by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and distant places acquired an increased imaginative attraction, especially when associated with trade and empire. Aquatints were defined, implicitly, as particularly suited to the representation of unfamiliar regions because of their capacity for “powerful aesthetic effect”: in the words of one reviewer, “one may almost feel the warmth of an Indian sky”. The method of applying a granular ground to a copper plate, invented in the early 1770s, produced an image that was similar to a watercolour painted on the spot, and was especially useful in depicting atmosphere: it gave prints a tonal range, supplementing and then supplanting etched line. Hand-colouring enhanced the sense of immediacy.

Aquatint Worlds emphasises the use of visual images to represent objects that were still relatively unexplored by scholars or natural historians: as Robert Louis Stevenson later observed, art can work “far ahead of language as well as of science”. Indian architecture, for example, was seen as difficult to date and categorise: in Oriental Scenery, which Fordham notes that Thomas Daniell produced with his nephew William Daniell in 1799-1808, he “persisted in referring to Salsette as a Hindu temple despite the proliferation of carved Buddhas on the walls”.

In defining the aquatint medium in its cultural specificity, Fordham provides some thoughtful analysis of the criticisms that it attracted: “The very deceptiveness of these painting-like prints would ultimately render them suspect, belonging neither to the deferential class of reproductive printmakers nor the expressive class of artist-etchers.” Pictorial travel books could seem uncomfortably close to sensationalist spectacle: Lady Amabel Yorke, in 1798, recognised copies of Alexander’s prints of China in a pantomime in London. The skills of those allotted the “miserable drudgery” of hand-colouring – often women, children and aspiring young artists – were readily disparaged.

Fordham approaches aquatints through a meticulous accumulation of detail – including plenty of apt quotation. The amount of information provided might sometimes seem overwhelming were it not for his lively affection for his material. He offers many engaging comments on the cultural implications of individual images: in Off the Cape: A Man Overboard, he suggests, William Daniell finds “an ideal theme for Britons to wrestle with a larger set of imperial anxieties”.

Chloe Chard is an independent literary historian who is writing a book about travel, laughter and visual culture.

Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, 1770-1820
By Douglas Fordham
Yale University Press, 328pp, £45.00
ISBN 9781913107048
Published 12 November 2019