Why do prints come up in pairs and sets?

Publishers issued them that way, and the habit shows in the titles: 169 say pair, 84 say four, 29 say six. Sets run larger still. Sets of eight and twelve recur, and one Regency lot runs to 27 hand-tinted sheets. Vanity Fair plates are sold as singles, as double-page sheets, and bound together in fours, sixes, nines, tens and twelves.

What is a Vanity Fair Spy print?

A caricature portrait printed as a chromolithograph, from stone rather than from a plate. Thirty-three titles carry the Vanity Fair name. They appear singly and in multiples, which is why the same subject can turn up on its own one week and as part of a set of ten the next.

Are Japanese woodblocks part of this category?

Yes. Forty-nine titles say Japanese and 36 say woodblock, with 22 combining the two, and most sit in the 19th-century dated band. Subjects include bijin figures, warriors, triptychs and botanicals. A triptych of the Gods of Fortune and two sets of botanical plates are among them.

How reliable are the dates given?

Take the title date over the field date. A handful of plates carry a hard printed year, 1745, 1794, 1811, 1843 among them, and those are the firmest dating in the category. Elsewhere the field holds a band rather than a year. The dated range runs 1700 to 1960, with decade buckets covering the 20th-century material, and a few field dates sit oddly against their titles.

What are reverse glass prints and crystoleums?

Both put the image on glass rather than leaving it on paper. A reverse glass print is transferred and then painted from behind; a crystoleum is mounted to glass, backed and coloured to look like a painting. Together they account for 36 titles, concentrated in the Georgian and Victorian bands, with royal portraits at the upper end.

A sporting caricaturist whose name appears in 61 titles, about four in every hundred, making him the single most repeated name in the category. The work spans a wide range. Printed Christmas and greetings cards sit at the modest end, original watercolours at the very top.

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Antique Prints

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Impressions on paper, framed or loose, made to hang on a wall: engravings, mezzotints, etchings, lithographs and woodblocks, sold singly and, very often, in pairs and sets.