While browsing the web the other day I came across some trading cards from the early twentieth century. Jeff Burks of Lost Art Press shows his collection of 18 of the 84 trade cards printed for the French chocolatier, Guérin Boutron. Trade cards are the precursors to baseball and other trading cards and became popular in all manner of products during the late nineteenth century. These are part of a series of 84 cards demonstrating Les Instruments de Travail or tools of work. The series includes woodworking, tailoring, blacksmithing and many more besides. The cards that interested me were those featuring sculpture. I suspect there may be more than these four, but vast as the internet is, I have yet to discover them.
I found them interesting from both an historical and a practical perspective. Although it does not surprise me to see the hammer and chisel, I had no idea they used hand saws to cut blocks of marble. Nor did I know they used jacks to lift them, although it makes sense. The bow powered drill is similar to the Passer drill, a tool Ive seen in woodworking and seems the logical way to make smaller holes in the marble like those you see in the curly hair of classic statues. This glimpse into nineteenth century tools does make me appreciate the tool options available today.
The cards were printed using a process called chromolithography, invented in the nineteenth century. Wikipedia describes the process thus:
The process of chromolithography is chemical, because an image is applied to a stone or zinc plate with a grease-based crayon. (Limestone and zinc are two commonly used materials in the production of chromolithographs.) After the image is drawn onto stone, the stone is gummed with gum arabic solution and weak nitric acid, and then inked with oil-based paints and passed through a printing press along with a sheet of paper to transfer the image to the paper. Colours may be added to the print by drawing the area to receive the colour on a different stone, and printing the new colour onto the paper. Each colour in the image must be separately drawn onto a new stone or plate and applied to the paper one at a time. It was not unusual for twenty to twenty-five stones to be used on a single image. Each sheet of paper will therefore pass through the printing press as many times as there are colours in the final print. In order that each colour is placed in the right position in each print, each stone or plate must be precisely ‘registered,’ or lined up, on the paper using a system of register marks.