Senefelder did not start out to benefit the artist, nor did the business men who took him up and launched his inven tion. The first patents were mostly for printing music and calico. However, artists and their patrons quickly saw the possibilities of lithography as an art. In Germany, royalty patronized Sene f elder; Baron Aretin went into partnership with him (1806) and their printing shop in Munich was shown as one of the sights of the town to the many distinguished strangers who passed through in those Napoleonic days. Less came of royal condescen sion than of the first work of note issued by the Senefelder-Aretin Press (1808) : the reproduction of Diirer's Missal of Maximilian from the copy in the Munich Royal Library, the drawings made by N. Strixner. German artists grew enthusiastic, got to work on stone, less often as original lithographers than as faithful copyists of the Old Masters. Their reproductions were extraordinary, especially when it is remembered that they had no camera to aid them. Strixner, Piloty, Mitterer, Hanfstangl were the most accomplished. Their prints were large, and large portfolios of national and private collections were issued, became immediately popular, and the fashion quickly spread to other countries. Tech nically, artists could scarcely carry lithography further, but no artist of genius or talent can make himself a mere machine, the Old Masters necessarily lost something in their interpretation, and, eventually, photography did away with the artist as copyist.
Already, in 1801, Senefelder had taken out patents in England, where he was personally overshadowed by Philip Andre and Hullmandel, who seemed inclined to appropriate all the credit, and the profit too. Fortunately he was recognized by the Royal Society of Arts as the inventor, a gold medal was bestowed upon him, and artistic lithography—"Polyautography" the English then called it—was encouraged. The interest of artists was roused, and an album of Specimens of Polyautography was published by Andre in 1803, with Benjamin West, Stothard, Barry, Fuseli among the contributors. For some years, however, little was heard of the new invention. Now and then an experiment was made by artists, notably by Blake and Bewick. But Gericault had made his lithographs in London and Bonington his in France before lithography acquired the least popularity, before royal and titled amateurs, Queen Victoria and Count d'Orsay of the num ber, began to amuse themselves with it, before albums of "Views" of architecture and landscape were "on the town." Artists like Prout and Harding went to France to work for Baron Taylor's colossal, never-finished Voyages Pittoresques which no doubt stim ulated the British fancy for such publications as Wilkie's Tour in the East, Lewis's Sketches in Spain and the Orient, Roberts' Holy Land, and many of the huge books so long in vogue. As a rule, the artists did not make the lithographs for these English publications. They simply supplied sketches from their sketch books which professional lithographers reproduced on stone and printed. Under such conditions it is small.wonder that lithography languished as an art, that the artist who practised it for pure love of the medium was the exception. Cattermole's lithotints remain, the few by Cotman, and John Linnell Jr.'s copies, especially one
of Mulready's The Sonnet which the most skilled German never surpassed. By 185o lithography in England was really a Finished Chapter of Illustrative Art, as it was later described by William Simpson, whose India was the last of the big travel books.
Lithography as an art met with the most immediate, the most splendid response in France. There also it received early official recognition and honours, was patronized by amateurs, was for a time the mode in modish drawing-rooms—a fashionable plaything. But in France this period was short. General Baron Lejeune's famous Cossack—result of his visiting Senef elder's Munich shop with the crowd—inaugurated the fashion, and was also, no doubt, the first inspiration of the cheaply got up, cheaply priced albums of military subjects that did so much to popularize the Napoleonic Legend. Good printers multiplied rapidly—Engel mann, Lasteyrie, Delpech, Gihaut, Motte, Lemercier. The Vernets, Charlet and Raffet were quick to see in Napoleon and his armies a motive for their lithographs. Charlet contributed not only to the subject but to the art, experimenting tirelessly, getting amazing effects out of - la maniere noire—"mezzotint applied to stone." Raffet on a few inches of paper could make a romance of war, turn it into beauty, in such prints as Le Revell and Its grognaient mais le suivaient toujours. Other artists used lithography for portraits, none more notably than Achille Deveria, above all in his render ings of R. J. Lemercier, founder of the great printing house, and of Alexandre Dumas, Pere, slim, elegant, with a mop of black hair to betray the colour in his blood. Painters were attracted by the medium and the variety of its resources. There were few who did not give it at least a trial. Gericault went further than a mere trial, his boxers and horses among the best known prints of those early years and, later, the most sought after by collectors. De lacroix mastered the method triumphantly in his Lion de l'Atlas and Tigre Royal, less strikingly in his illustrations for Faust and Hamlet. Isabey's triumph was in his little towns for Baron Taylor, his shipping and harbours for himself. But the list is endless—the prints published sometimes separately, sometimes in magazines and papers. Much of the best work came out in L'Artiste, the most successful of the magazines, or in Philipon's two papers, La Caricature and Le Charivari with Daumier and Gavarni for regular contributors. From the beginning French lithographers had devoted themselves to caricature and fashion plates, records of social life and political satire with as much zest as to war, portraits and "picturesque views," but Daumier and Gavarni excelled them all. Daumier overflowed with fun in providing adventures for Robert Macaire, but he could invent political cartoons so deadly that he was sent to prison for them, and he was tragedy itself, when it came to drawing the murders in the Rue Transnonain. Gavarni lent charm to fashion, grace to grisettes, but Achille Deveria's portraits have not more character than his Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, no doubt modelled on Gigoux's Alfred and Tony Johannot ; nor was Daumier ever more tragic than Gavarni in his horrible Thomas Vireloque.